elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM (Eric Lee Green) (04/10/91)
From article <1991Apr9.004657.26302@marlin.jcu.edu.au>, by cpca@marlin.jcu.edu.au (Colin Adams): > In Australia, for about $3500, all you can get is a 2000 with multisync, 50 > megs HD, and 3 megs RAM. You can run slllowwwww productivity without flicker, ..... > have a real os too). The point of all this is.... the 2000 needs a serious > upgrade it is far too slow/poor graphics for anyone to consider it who doesn't > have a special need for an Amiga (like I did). Unfortunately, because of exchange rate variations, I can't tell whether you're being ripped by the Australian sales company or not. $3500 in U.S. dollars would get you a 25mhz Amiga 3000 with monitor. A 2000HD would set you back around, hmm... $2200 or so? You're right, though, about the same as what a comparably equipped 386SX machine would cost, and you can run Unix on that 386SX (though quite slowly... remember that all PC hard drive controllers are CPU-driven except for the pricey bus-mastering ones, due to the slow speed of the built-in DMA controller, and Unix is very disk-intensive). Of course, you'd have to first add 4 mb of RAM and about 200mb of hard drive space to that 386sx to run Unix, which would add about, hmm, $700 to the price, but that's no big deal. On the other hand, with the Amiga 3000T soon to be out as the top-of-the-line lots-of-slots machine, the current Amiga 2000 is starting to look pretty dated. The market slot it originally filled, as top-end machine with lots of slots, has passed it by. Maybe it's time to put the old lady out to pasture and come out with a slim-lined Amiga 2000 Lite, less slots, no MS-DOS, no 5 1/4" bay, wimpier power supply for all of this, and definitely NOT a meter (yard) wide. Put Amber on-board and the video slot in-line with a Zorro slot like on the 3000, and you have a good intermediate step between the top-of-the-line machines and the Amiga 500. Design the board so that it could easily be rack-mounted (i.e., no outputs on the side, and not ten feet deep or wide!), and it would be perfect for TV studios, musicians, and other folks that like to rack-mount their equipment. Their current problem is that the 500 is clumsy and the current 2000 just too plain big. Yet the 3000 is overkill for most MIDI work or things like, e.g., cable TV channel guides (one place I've seen a lot of Amigas at work... sometimes with hilarious effects, I saw one place use a different kind of wipe for each slide in their slideshow!). -- Eric Lee Green (318) 984-1820 P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 elg@elgamy.RAIDERNET.COM uunet!mjbtn!raider!elgamy!elg Looking for a job... tips, leads appreciated... inquire within...