AIPS@BRANDEIS.BITNET (Greg Lindahl [chimps@brandeis.bitnet]) (10/12/87)
i just got back from the NorthEast Atarifest, held in the Worchester Centrum (pronounce it wooo-ster). i'm sure that several others will post comments to the net; however, i can't resist getting my 2 cents in. i met neil harris. for those of you who are wondering, he is not a 10 foot tall ogre who really works for commodore and announces products in advance to damage atari's reputation. rather, he resembles the brandeis dean of students -- you know, the guy who orders student arrests during protests. i also saw lots of alleged products, like the mega ST (2 and 4 meg), the laser printer, the pc klone, and the 1200-baud modem. the Mege ST 2 and 4 were being sold by at least one dealer on the floor; the one Atari had was hooked up to the laser printer and had a blitter. i played with the blitter off and on with the desktop and 1st word (would atari have software from other companies on their hard disk? of course not) and noticed a definate speed increase. for operations like drawing an expanding box on the desktop, the speed increase was about a factor of 2. this isn't a very good application for a blitter anyway. in 1st word, scrolling the screen down a little was fast, as most of the screen could just be blitted to a new location. printing text, however, wasn't that much faster probably because 1st word has clipping turned on or something. i also was in flash! and noticed a vast increase in text printing speed when you bring up the dial directory. however, i wish that i could have tested the blitter with my favorite programs -- like uniterm doing tektronix graphics. i suspect that uniterm could leave a dec vt340 in the dust. the mega was running gdos version *1.8* -- i didn't know that they had released anything above 1.1... it also autobooted off the hard drive and had the atari 40-folder fix installed, but that's old news. the laser printer was shown printing gem metafiles. the guy watching over it didn't know if a TeX driver was available; he didn't know what TeX was. hey, atari, where do you find these guys? i also ran into vance chin of berkeley microsystems, who told me that he was thinking about selling 60 meg 40ms drives if anyone is interested. i am considering getting one when i get os9, because it seems that most competing hard drives have *very slow* access times. what i really want is a sun workstation that fits in a shoe-box and costs 5 dollars. the atari pc was shown running gem write, and had an amber monitor. it was put out for the general public to play with, so one would presume that it in fact does function. then again, maybe it has a commodore PC10 motherboard inside ;-) hybrid arts had an 8 machine network running midi-maze. rumor had it that the best players were the atari employees, but i never saw them playing. i played twice and was mauled by hordes of joystick-wielding teeny-bopper atari st fans. could this be why atari put a midi interface into the st? data pacific was selling the "translator one", a disk-drive sized box that sits between your st and floppy drive and handles st or mac disks. their literature states that they have been adding features from the 128k and 256k roms to their program; maybe someday they'll rewrite the 64k roms and do away with the need to obtain the roms at all? if someone could legally duplicate the functions of the apple roms (like phoenix and the ibm bios) they could make a lot of money selling that software to potential mac clone makers... if they didn't get sued by apple. now for the bad news: landon dyer is leaving atari. i hope that others at atari will be willing to spend as much time as landon has on the net supporting atari machines. landon's comments in the past have been very helpful. neil, i hope that you do bring out that line of technological jewelry based around defective blitter chips. i think that it could be as successful as coleco cabbage patch dolls. and you could retail them in the department stores! ----- disclaimer: i have no association with any of the companies listed above except that i once bought a computer from atari. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Lindahl | bitnet: chimps@brandeis.bitnet brandeis radio astronomy group (BRAG) | ci$: [76515,1122] --------------------------------------| us snail: box 2522 brandeis university "OK, if stupidity isn't an impeachable| waltham mass (usa) 02254-9110 offense, then what is?" | telco: (617) 899-5884