🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2807@reed.UUCP> rosalia@reed.UUCP (Mark Galassi) writes:
>>When is the PC industry gonna "Grow up" and adopt even minimal standards?
>>Does IBM have to do everything??!!!
>
>Don't praise IBM.
Who's praising IBM???

>Maybe their new RISC machine
>will finally be a good product, but that is not an attempt to establish
>standards.
I haven't heard much good about the RISC machine. Who cares, this is Atari
group anyway right? :-).

What I am upset about is the appearant contempt for even minimal standards
between Atari, Commodore, and Apple.  This appears to be changing,
Apple is putting SCSI on the Mac, Commodore is considering adopting NAPLPS
as a file storage/transfer format.  What is Atari doing???

The sooner some simple standards for peripherals, software, and data formats
are adopted, the better.  In most other Consumer Electronics industries,
standards have made it possible for each company to capitalize on their
particular strengths.

Atari makes some good computers, but on the 800 line, only Atari
peripherals can be used.  Even a "generic" modem required the 850
interface box.

To be fair, the main reason I like the Atari 520-ST is because they
DID attempt to put some very good standards in their machine.  DRI
wrote the operating system (better than CP/M68K), they built in
the RS-232 and Centronics (with adapter cable) interface, and
used a well vectored OS rather than leaving people to go poking
and jumping into strange ROM vectors.  Good job Atari!!!:-)

What has me concerned is the "Upgrade Path" for this and future
machines.  Another concern is that I might get tied to Atari's
trade-off choices.  If Atari comes out with a fully supported
SCSI interface, we'll have the choice of over 100 mass storage
devices, including removable, winchester, and tape drives.  Maybe
the SCSI command set isn't complete enough to be truly generic
yet?

I can't say I'm thrilled at the prospect of buying a 520 only
to discover that the 1040 makes the 520 obsolete, or that the
TT series will make the ST series obsolete.  In the Byte interview
the guy said that upgrading the 1040 to 4 meg would be "Trivial".
Yes it will be trivial to add the extra two pins to the design
and manufacture process, but don't expect to be able to simply
plug in 1 meg chips and have 2 or 4 meg.  Expect to have to
buy a NEW MACHINE :-(.  Don't expect software vendors to stick
to 512K either, unless Atari starts making concurrency available,
along with a real MMU, the applications will grow to fit the
available memory.  In other words, unless you upgrade, your
520 may be obsolete in another 6 months.  According to some
reports, the ST is really only the TERMINAL for their "Real"
"Personal Mini" TT computer.  Is that another $1000?

Notice the CPU is soldered in?  Ever tried de-soldering a 64 pin
chip?  Notice the RAM is also soldered in?  Notice there is no header
for a Piggy-Back RAM board?  I would hope that these were oversights
rather than deliberate choices.  All of these choices together might
have added $100 to the purchase price.  It would have been worth it
considering the alternative is either a lot of manual "hot wiring" or
buying a new computer every six months.  Even adding a few address
lines to the DMA ports would have helped.

I've said before, I like the Atari, but I'd like to make sure that
"Cheap Computer" doesn't mean "Disposable Computer".  What plans
are in the works NOW that will keep this from happening?  I would
definately like to see a socket compatible MMU, and a 68010 upgrade
path.  Also, higher resolution (1024X1024?) if the 70HZ is to be
justified.

Disclaimer: All opinions subject to change without notice.