jtn@potomac.ads.com (John T. Nelson) (01/25/90)
Well, I finally did it. After long deliberation and hand-wringing I finally purchased a home computer. After 13 years of searching for the ULTIMATE home machine I finally made a decision (gee sounds like Deep Thought at the end of 7 1/2 million years of thinking about the ultimate question)! Did he pick door #1 (the Atari ST) or door #2 (the NeXT) or door #3 (Mr. Macintosh)? Drum roll... the envelope please... why it's door #3, the Macintosh IIcx with 5 megabytes of memory and a 300 megabyte disk drive (thunderous applause)! I started out thinking that the NeXT computer would be the machine for me. Indeed it IS a sexy machine. It runs Unix (Mach). It has a DSP chip AND sound and music kits for musicians (a heavily weighted factor). The problem with the NeXT coputer is that there simply isn't any software out there for it. I also wanted to wait until all of the bugs were ironed out of the thing. Also, the cost of a NeXT from Businessland is $10,000! Much too expensive for me! I don't qualify for the educational discount because I'm not a full-fledged student yet. Then there's the Atari MEGA 4. Powerful and INEXPENSIVE. Plug in the Gadgets by Small GCR plug-in card with Mac ROMS and you can run just about anything compatible with a Mac Plus on the Atari. Ooooooooo.... Problem is that this machine is no where near as powerful as the 68030 based Macs and if you're going to run Mac software... might as well buy a Mac. Also the Atari/GCR compbination won't drive a Mac high-res colour display. Then there's the Mac. Lots of software for it and the IIcx has a 68030 processor chip and 6882 floating point co-processor. True the bus runs slowly and the chip is only clocked at 16 Mhz but that's okay. The Mac IIcx runs A/UX (stop snickering) and there are plenty of music notation/sequencer/editing/librarian packages out there. Also it has high-res 640x480 and even 1000x800 pixel 32-bit colour. Lots of neato peripherals are available too... like Lightning Scan and modems and MIDI interfaces (the Atari has BUILT-IN MIDI ports though). There is also a LOT of commecial and public domain support for the Macs! And it runs SimCity. I decided on the II because I definately want the 68030 chip + PMMU. The IIx is overkill (I don't need all 6 slots) and the II ci has too many problems from what I've been hearing over the net. Besides I wanted a 24-bit colour board and the II ci's built-in colour would have gone to waste. All the reviews I read said the standard Apple RGB high-res monitor was the best thing around so I got one of those and a Rasterops 264 board which will let me get my feet wet with 24-bit colour on my small Apple monitor. All the big-screen 24-bit systems are ridiculously expensive. Recent postings indicate that I should have gone with the SuperMac Colour 24 board, becase it supports hardware pan and zoom and an external accelerator will be available to greatly speed up 24 bit operations... that's okay though. Obsolescence is to be expected. The IIcx will probably be bear-obsolete before the year is out anyway. So... I'm going to have just great fun bashing my head against the wall trying to program this thing (Macintoshes are not noted for their ease of programming) but that's okay. It should be a productive machine and a FUN machine! And now... to devising the ULTIMATE Conrail Locomotive patch!