WHE46@ccvax.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett) (09/26/90)
I have gotten a number of personal replies to my message about the
competitiveness of the A2000. Some of them said that, although they
agreed that the A2000 isn't as competitive as it used to be, it
doesn't need to be revised because the A3000/16 is available with
many of the features I described, and more.
After a little more thought, I can see that using an '020 in a
totally new system would be harder to do than simply using one of
the A3000 models. With this in consideration, I guess what would
be better would be a scaled-down version of the A3000 with the
power supply moved externally, and with the hard drive, the back-
plane board, 68881, and the 1M of fast RAM removed. The sockets
for the 1M of RAM and the 68881 should be included, though, for
upgradeability. The resulting system could be put into a super
slimline case and sold as the cheapest, most powerful 32-bit
system around.
Such a system would have it's applications. Packaged with
networking software, it would make a great super-cheap diskless
workstation.
Perhaps Commodore is working on this. I've heard rumors about
a system Commodore is working on called the 'little monster'.
Perhaps this is it.
-MB-