"chaz_heritage.WGC1RX"@XEROX.COM (12/15/89)
In his Mon, 11 Dec 89 17:28:50 the Masked Rat Fink writes: >I don't know whether you non-British folks have heard of the BBC Micro manufactured by Acorn (of Archimedies fame!) but this came supplied with one of the best manuals that I have ever seen for a micro computer. It had loads of system information....<[remainder of testimonial deleted] This eight-bit computer was (and still is, God help us) one of the worst deals ever. It cost(s) roughly twice as much as any sensible competition, and achieved its position because its 'manufacturers', Acorn* (whose CEO was not above brawling in bars with the likes of 'Sir' Clive Sinclair) persuaded the BBC and the UK Government to grant them a licence to print money by standardising the machine for the state education system (in which, incidentally, since it is both obsolete and fundamentally incompatible with everything, it has retarded British computer education by an amount that can only be guessed at). >My point is that if that much information can be supplied for a machine that was in its day what the ST is now, why was no technical information supplied with the ST?< Technical publications, particularly for computers, cost a lot of money. You paid double what your BBC Micro was worth to get them. You paid what your ST hardware was worth without them, and didn't get them. You want blood with it, or what? If you want posh manuals for your 68000 WIMP-enivronment machine, you should perhaps have bought a Mac, the outrageous price of which presumably includes them (plus Steve 'Big' Jobs' coke money). Alternatively, buy books like 'The Second Manual for the Atari ST' which are a great deal cheaper than most computer books and provide a lot of useful information. The Abacus publications (which I don't have myself) also look pretty good. My guess is that you could provide yourself with most of what you need for less than what you would have had to pay Atari to do it for you. Regards, Chaz (Computer Technical Author, among my other crimes) * Acorn do not in fact manufacture this machine, or the (equally bad value) Archimedes; they have it done for them. This is another English irregular verb: *I* make mutually profitatble OEM contracts; *YOU* do badge-engineering; *THEY* can't manufacture their own product....
exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) (12/18/89)
In article <891215-054835-6506@Xerox> "chaz_heritage.WGC1RX"@XEROX.COM writes: >useful information. The Abacus publications (which I don't have myself) >also look pretty good. The first editions of most of the Abacus books (the ones I got, sigh) were fairly riddled with errors (which, rumours had it, reflected errors in the Atari 'developers' kit -- since a number of the earlier 3rd-party books contained the same or similar mistakes I find this believeable.) They are (at least almost) all now in 2nd or 3rd revisions, so may be better. I presently swear by Katherine Peel's 'The Concise Atari ST 68000 Programmer's Reference Guide' (but get a 2nd or later revision, first didn't include any sort of index) and the 3-volume series by 'Compute' (on AES, VDI, and TOS respectively). -- Paul Smee, Univ of Bristol Comp Centre, Bristol BS8 1TW, Tel +44 272 303132 Smee@bristol.ac.uk :-) (..!uunet!ukc!gdr.bath.ac.uk!exspes if you MUST)