cheung@vu-vlsi.UUCP (10/29/87)
Like the typical Commodore fanatic the emergence of the A2000 was a threat to my "state-of-the-art" A1000. Immediately I thought about getting CSAs +$1000 tower. Then I looked at the A2000 but sighed in despair as the price shot up close to $2000. Well I finally settled upon a philosophy that I will use when the A3000 and A4000 come about. It essentially amounts to analyzing how much you are spending and what percentage of that money will start going to work for you immediately. My situation was I had scrubbed up $1500 to be put to expanding a lowly 512K one drive machine into a more ergonomic computer. I needed extra memory, I needed a hard drive, and then a open door to expand to my hearts desire if necessary. I immediately ruled out products like Starboard and Insider since they seemed to be closed ended quick fixes. Then I looked at Byte by Byte expansion boxes and the CSA boxes. There certainly left that open door to heavy duty expansion. The CSA box would be a waste of $1500 since I would be buying a box and thats about all and my A1000 wouldn't be better off. The PAL Jr. was darn attractive, although kind of expensive, since it had everything I wanted in one neat no hassle package. I might have settled with the PAL Jr. until I saw ASDG's products and saw that maybe I could squeeze a bit more out of $1500. I heard of their planned high end products the 2000 and 1 box and the SDP board. Sounded impressive but I wanted something now, but didn't want to get something close ended. Once I heard about the ASDG no cost upgrade policy my mind was made up. No matter what low end product I purchased from them it was like buying the 2000 and 1 box now with only a small percentage down payment. If and when I need more slots I will send in extra payments any unused slots I don't pay for. So what I settled upon was the $0 mini rack C with the $599 2 Meg board and now await the emergence of the SDP board (I hope to get that and a 20 Meg drive for $1000). This thinking I would add was at the time when the A2000 was still $1995 to everyone. Now with this $1050 A2000 do I regret my path of expansion. Absolutely not. If I spent $1500 on an A2000 I'd be pretty much back to square one. I'd have a standard computer with color monitor 1 meg of memory and an A1000 collecting dust without a monitor. If I wanted monitors on both computers then of course another $250 or so bites the dust. Now I'd have $250 left over for an extra Meg, an SDP board and a 20 meg Hard disk, fat chance. So I'd end up waiting another year scrapping up another $1500. In the meantime money spent on one of the computers is going to waste, unless I end up using two computers at the same time and I don't have what I want. What I mean by waste is that money could be earning interest in a bank account. Those of you thinking about upgrading from an A1000 to A2000 only for the sake of not being "obsolete" or making sure of compatability with future products would be wasting their money. If you intend to buy the A2000 and keep it with most or all it slots unpopulated for some time until you can further afford to do so then just think of each unoccupied slot as dollar bills collecting dust. Now if you got money and are getting the A2000 loaded with the bridgeboard, some hard disks, extra memory and floppy drives then your getting your money's worth. Currently my plan is to stick with expanding my A1000 to have the SDP and a 20 Meg SCSI drive. The SDP will leave the door open to a future of SCSI laser printers, CD drives, and networks to connect to future amigas. Maybe when the A3000 A4000 and A5000 come out the A1000 will be just a fancy terminal connected in a network to higher powered amigas. An amiga in every room of the house possibly together operating like a main frame. Currently I'm not impressed at all with the A2000 even if it will access 2 Meg of Chip Ram in the future. Buy the time I get more money to further exand my Amiga (camera?, VCR, high powered software) maybe the A3000 will roll out with 1024x1024 graphics and 4096 colors of 256000 colors, then I'll get the A3000 and whatch the A2000 users whine and complain about there obsolescence. Wilson Cheung All grammatical and spelling errors you encounter are sophisticated Optical illusions-- please please don't be fooled.