🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1itkq7INNb1l@life.ai.mit.edu> dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:
>In article <1993Jan11.205852.13486@bsu-ucs> 01mbmccabe@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu writes:
>>Second of all, I'll ask you not to be my finance advisor.  I'm a
>>quite-typical college student with no spare money.
>
>Again: don't buy the Ferrari if you can't buy the wiper blades.  So
>you've overinvested in your hardware and now you can't buy any
>software.  Is there any other way to slice it?  BTW, you're not saying
>anything unfamiliar to an Atari developer when you talk about not
>having money.

Overinvested in hardware, Dave?  I hardly think this holds for most current
owners of ST/STe machines.  Four years ago I bought my 520STFM for less than
$400.  What kind of MS-DOS clone could I have gotten for $400?

I will of course agree that the price/performance ratio has been lost by
Atari lately, when it comes to comparisons with MS-DOS machines, but I don't
think it's an utter waste of money to buy Atari computers -- there are still
plenty of things you can do very well with them, and the software just
keeps getting better.  If you need me to enumerate those I'd be happy to,
but anyone who's been keeping up with Atari software lately knows there are
some very good products out there.

Would I like to have better graphics and a faster computer?  Of course, anyone
would.  That's the main reason I'm going to get a Falcon030 -- it represents a
newer, better version of a computer I've used for years.  Contrary to what
Dave has been saying, I don't think the Atari OS is seriously "flawed" or
unworkable for programmers/developers.  I would agree that Atari should
get their act together as far as marketing/support goes, but to me this isn't
the primary reason why I buy a computer.  I know how to use a lot of
different systems (MS-DOS, UNIX, Mac, etc.) and the one I like the most is
still my Atari.  We've been through all this before -- if you know what 
your computer can and can't do, and you're satisfied with that, then that's
great.  For me, the Falcon030 represents a viable choice for my next
computer, and I have no plans on switching to anything else (well, except 
maybe a TT  :-).

>
>Dave Baggett
>--
>dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory           
>ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
>dmb@ai.mit.edu *** Compu$erve: 76440,2671 *** GEnie: ADVENTIONS

Regards,

-- 
Ben Gilbert				e-mail : bgilbert@cs.washington.edu
Department of Computer Science
University of Washington