lauren@RAND-UNIX.ARPA (07/24/85)
Interestingly, computer industry financial analysts were apparently not impressed. Some claim the unit is overpriced given the soft market for such machines, and expressed doubts about its ability to make a strong impression in either the home or business markets. Of course, they may be totally wrong--but there's no denying that sales of personal-type computers are relatively sluggish, and that there seems to be a significant "psychological block" to the purchase of machines costing more than $600-$700 among the "general public" (which explains why "cheap" machines like the Commodore 64 have sold fairly well). Only time will tell whether any particular entry will be successful of course. --Lauren--
hr@uicsl.UUCP (07/29/85)
"[Some] expressed doubts about [the Amiga's] ability
to make a strong impression in either the home or business markets."
The Amiga was shown on the last day of the Siggraph exhibition. When
I got there around 11:00am, there was a mob. When I went back after 2:00pm,
there was a mob. A security officer threatened to close the booth if
Commodore didn't keep the onlookers contained. (Too many people in too
small a space for the fire marshals.) Had Commodore come ready to take
orders, they would have easily paid for the trip. While hundreds,
even thousands, of graphics hackers will be fighting to get one, I
wonder if they can sell millions. I think the Atari ST will be perceived
to be in the same class, but for a lot less money.
Summary: (subject to brain fog, jet lag, old age, etc.)
For $1295 you get 256kb (expandable to 512kb), dual button mouse,
800kb 3 1/2" disk drive and BASIC. The operating system is multitasking.
User interface is via either icons or command lines (ex. "run df1:ball").
Tecmar either has or will have an external one megabyte expansion board,
and a hard disk.
An image digitizer is coming as is a genloc device.
Languages claimed to be running:
ISO Pascal
Multitasking LOGO
Cambridge Lisp
Lattice C
Soon:
Borland Pascal
The poor guy at the booth said they had an IBM emulator and that at the
New York demo they had been running Lotus 123.
The current issue of BYTE has a 'product preview'.
Should be readily available by October.
I REALLY want one.
harold ravlin
{ihnp4,pur-ee}!uiucdcs!uicsl!hrpeter@baylor.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (07/31/85)
> Interestingly, computer industry financial analysts were apparently > not impressed. Some claim the unit is overpriced given the soft > market for such machines, and expressed doubts about its ability > to make a strong impression in either the home or business markets. The problem I heard is that once you get it up to speed (512K, monitor, etc) it costs $300 more than a Fat Mac. Of course it DOES more than $300 more than one too, but who knows that? They're really going to have to push this machine's special capabilities & hope the software that takes advantage of that comes out quickly... Has any magazine got a similar article on the 520? -- Peter. PS: if it ain't multitasking, it ain't freindly! I hope the Amiga succeeds. Unfortunately I have to see about the next generation of the da Silva family before I can do anything for the next generation of the C= family. -- Peter da Silva (the mad Australian) UUCP: ...!shell!neuro1!{hyd-ptd,baylor,datafac}!peter MCI: PDASILVA; CIS: 70216,1076
ROKICKI@SU-SCORE.ARPA (Tomas Rokicki) (09/01/85)
Questions about the Amiga: 1. Can it use a 68010 with minor changes to a few stack offsets in the operatins system? 2. What is the pixel rate for fill and vector operations? 3. Is the 1.5 Megabyte `hole' for future 1-Megabit chips on board? How soon can we expect to see the required 256K X 4 bit chips? And can the on-board coprocessors access this extra memory? 4. I'm also interested in the timing for off-board memory accesses; I assume this memory only has to run half as fast as the on-board memory. 5. Any 40+ Megabyte hard drives coming out for the machine? Needless to say, I want one. Badly. -tom (rokicki@su-score.arpa) -------
scott@scirtp.UUCP (Scott Crenshaw) (09/05/85)
> > Questions about the Amiga: > 1. Can it use a 68010 with minor changes to a few stack offsets in > the operatins system? > 2. What is the pixel rate for fill and vector operations? > 3. Is the 1.5 Megabyte `hole' for future 1-Megabit chips on board? > How soon can we expect to see the required 256K X 4 bit chips? And can the > on-board coprocessors access this extra memory? > 4. I'm also interested in the timing for off-board memory accesses; > I assume this memory only has to run half as fast as the on-board memory. > 5. Any 40+ Megabyte hard drives coming out for the machine? > Needless to say, I want one. Badly. > -tom (rokicki@su-score.arpa) This is REALLY of general interest -- *please* post answers to the net. Thanks, -- Scott Crenshaw {akgua,decvax}!mcnc!rti-sel!scirtp SCI Systems , Inc. Research Triangle Park, NC The views represented may or may not be those of my employer.
gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) (09/09/85)
(Further discussion redirected to net.micro.amiga.) In article <1146@brl-tgr.ARPA>, ROKICKI@SU-SCORE.ARPA (Tomas Rokicki) asks: > 1. Can it use a 68010 with minor changes to a few stack offsets in > the operating system? Probably, unless they were sloppy with the timing on the BERR input to the 68000. Why would you want to? It's a little faster, but not much, unless you are doing a lot of 1-instruction loops -- and they have custom chips for that kind of stuff. > 3. Is the 1.5 Megabyte `hole' for future 1-Megabit chips on board? > How soon can we expect to see the required 256K X 4 bit chips? And can the > on-board coprocessors access this extra memory? Last time I heard, their custom chips don't have enough address bits to access more memory than it comes with. A big design botch, as far as I'm concerned. Megabit chips are definitely on the way, but they probably won't be real useful in today's Amiga. > 4. I'm also interested in the timing for off-board memory accesses; > I assume this memory only has to run half as fast as the on-board memory. Why would you assume something like that?
grant@hp-pcd.UUCP (grant) (09/14/85)
{}
>... external memory can run half speed ...
It's easy to assume this if you look at the busing architecture in BYTE.
The custom chips are positioned on a separate 19-bit address bus, which
can only address 512KB. The external RAM is to be added in a separate 7+
MB chunk according to the memory map.
The conclusion I draw is that the base machine has the 68000 encroach upon
the memory actually allotted to the custom chips. The custom chips cannot
access more than the 1/2 Meg internal RAM (internally expanded that is).
This means that the external ram completely belongs to the 68000. Note
that this also means that the internal disk DMA is only good to the
internal RAM; the 68000 has to move it outside. This last point could be
wrong--I can't find my BYTE right now to check.
Grant Garner hp-pcd!grant