13 Jan
2014
13 Jan
'14
7:56 p.m.
On 13 January 2014 19:30, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
Even with more advantageous pricing vis US v UK, I
still waited a year
until the first A1000 price drop. In particular, I waited until the
local dealer would/could sell just the CPU alone instead of a
CPU/analog RGB monitor bundle. ISTR I payed $850 for the CPU itself
(then upgraded it many times over with a Spirit Inboard (1.5MB,
purchased w/512K), a WEDGE (8-bit ISA interface+Western Digital WX-1 +
ST225), a Rejuvinator, and eventually a Starboard (2MB) and Stardrive
SCSI to replace the Inboard and WEDGE - probably over $2000 spread out
over 4 years.
Not that I can actually identify almost any of those add-ons, I'm sure
that's still a system that would have had me drooling 25y ago. :?)
In terms of market penetration though, I agree that
the A500 and its
lower price point was what drove the Amiga to its peak.
[Nod]
There was another factor with the delays & waiting for sensible
pricing, though... Rival products.
The Amiga and ST were roughly contemporaneous. The Amiga was
undoubtedly the superior machine, but the ST was much more usable with
a single floppy drive and 512kB of RAM, a hair faster and "good
enough" for a lot of people.
As for me, it was about 1989 or 1990 before there was any chance of me
affording such a machine - and by then, I could get a used Acorn
Archimedes. I wasn't a gamer so I didn't care about the Miggy's
graphics - at heart, its strength were moving graphics and genlock,
stuff I didn't care about. I'm also not a musician so I didn't care
about its sound abilities either. The ST would have been more than
good enough for me in either department.
But by the time I could afford to spend ?800 on a computer, I could
get a RISC workstation with a 20MB hard disk for that money. No fancy
animated graphics facilities but a very good display chip, also
capable of 4096 colours; decent sound; a multitasking GUI-based OS in
ROM... and about 4x faster than a 68000, IIRC. Oh, and as a (very
amateur) BASIC programmer, it also had the best BASIC interpreter in
the world at the time. The BASIC didn't multitask (like the QL's,
actually) but then again as my main interest was fractals, I didn't
want that to multitask - I just wanted the maximum possible speed.
Looking back, RISC OS seems very limited today. OK, not as limited as
TOS/GEM ;?) but quite rudimentary compared to Amiga OS, I guess.
But it was something small enough and manageable enough for a kid to
understand and master. That's certainly not true of Linux (or Windows
or Mac OS X) today.
And RISC OS is still around, still in active development (just about),
and can be used on a modern network (just) and to access the Internet
and WWW (just). The same is true of the Amiga OS, of course, while
TOS/GEM is to all intents and purposes long-dead.
Saying that, TOS/GEM is FOSS now and I was playing with this quite
impressive Live CD recently:
http://aranym.org/livecd.html
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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