K538915@CZHRZU1A.BITNET (01/25/88)
Date: 25 January 1988, 01:38:27 GMT
From: Simon Poole 056/26 87 43 K538915 at CZHRZU1A
To: INFO-ATARI16 at SCORE.STANFORD
I must admit I was wrong: the Atari PC-1 does exist, despite me claiming
that it was just vaporware. In fact I spent an hour or so playing around
with one last week (BTW the Atari Laser has been available here for about
two months (on the other hand I don't know anybody here who has actually
seen a Mega ST2, the only thing they sell here is the ST4)).
What I like about the Atari PC:
- good color graphics (which just rubs in the point that Atari
hasn't improved the graphics quality of the ST series over
the last 3 years)
- comes with mouse and bundled software (GEM Paint & Write)
- has enough documentation (a rough guess, more than 500 pages
which is naturally another sore point with ST owners, when
I got my ST the only thing I got was 80 pages of mostly useless
docs, there wasn't even a Basic manual in those days) for non-
programming purposes.
- is very cheap (costs something like 4 times the price of PC-Ditto)
- quite a good keyboard (better than the one on a ST4, which costs
nearly 4000.-SFr. compared to the 1000.-SFr. fot the PC-1)
- has a very nice monchrome monitor, which compares very nicely
to the horrible SM125 that is being sold with the ST's now (I'll
never give my SM124 away!)
What I don't like:
- slow (what do you expect from a 8088)
- pretty useless, the amount of things you can do with a slotless,
single 360kB drive, 512kB machine are VERY limited (one thing
you can do is run Turbo Pascal 3.0, I'don't know if you can get
a useful TP 4.0 configuration on one floppy), in fact using
the bundled software is a real pain since you have to swap disks
to return to GEM Desktop after you've exited an application (and
to start the application aswell).
Simon
Bitnet: K538915@CZHRZU1A
UUCP: ...mcvax!cernvax!poole
PS: Apropos blitter upgrade: I somehow have the feeling a lot of
people didn't understand what Neil Harris was saying, when
he mentioned that the blitter will be made available in a DIL
package for 520 and 1040 owners, which means: we'll give you
the chip, but then it's up to you to piggyback it on to your
68'000. (In fact Mr. Stumpf from Atari Germany said exactly
that according to some magazine)