You know, everytime I have to setup a computer other than an Apple, I'm reminded of just how lame every other computer is. So I pull an Amiga 1000 off the shelf and proceed to set it up since I'm making no progress with the 500 and time is being lost. It still doesn't work with any of the video cables I have, but I was able to get a cable splitter to connect the composite output to the inputs on the back of the display. Now I have color. But, now I have no boot disk. The disk that booted on the 500 won't boot on the 1000. I have a Workbench v1.2 disk that works on the 500 and the 2000, but not the 1000. What a joke. You know, there's probably a really good reason why Commodore and Atari are gone but Apple is still around. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Deano Calver wrote: So Commodore thought they could be successful at defying convention by giving the stripped down model a higher model number? They certainly were insane, weren't they? -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

One other thing the Amiga featured from Day One was multitasking, even on the base 256k model. Apple didn't offer that until way later. Plus, the built-in sound chips were way beyond anything Apple was offering at the time. Remembering reading a cool article back in the day -- Microsoft had a press conference about something, and Gates was spouting off about multitasking. He said that there was no way to multitask in anything under 8mb of ram. A reporter in the back raised his hand and asked if Bill was aware that his own AmigaBasic would multitask on a 256k Amiga 1000..... Gates pretended he didn't hear and moved to the next question. Paul Braun Cygnus Productions nerdware(a)ctgonline.org "Enjoy every sandwich." -- Warren Zevon "At Microsoft, Quality is Job, oh, I dunno, maybe 7 or 8?"

On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 11:04:56PM -0400, der Mouse wrote: The 11/750 shipped with 512KB standard (2 x 256KB boards), with a max of 2MB (8 memory slots). Over the years, two different memory controller upgrades were available - one that let you use 8 x 1MB boards, and another that allowed 4MB boards, but you were limited to 14MB total, probably due to memory space conflicts with I/O. But VMS 3.x will run in 2MB for certain... not sure about VMS 4.0. I would expect VMS 1.0 would run in 512K, but I've never used it (though I do have the paper manuals at home, in storage). Not sure what you would have had in the lab in 1980, but it was probably an 11/780. That's one of the few models I haven't worked with, so I'll leave it to others to comment on its memory. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 12-Jun-2004 03:50 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -74.9 F (-59.4 C) Windchill -118.4 F (-83.59 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 15.5 kts Grid 045 Barometer 680.3 mb (10615. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

modes. Well, sort of the same.. (hmmm... not really but anyway...) Ohio Scientific C4P: Full 8K BASIC in ROM Power it up, start typing in a prog or load one from cassette. Ohio Scientific C4P-MF (mini-Floppy, cost much more): Surely, it's just a C4P with the addition of a floppy controller and drive? No (and stop calling me Shirley). The C4P-MF has a substantially different CPU board with NO 8K BASIC in ROM. Only a bootstrap in a 1K ROM. Find a C4P-MF? Nice doorstop unless you can get boot disks.

On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 10:47:56PM +0100, Deano Calver wrote: And many of us dropped a few bucks for a newer Denise. However, you usually _could_ put an A500 expansion on an A1000... I stuck with my A1000 as a daily machine until I got an A3000, but by then, I'd put 3.5MB of FAST RAM on/in it, a SCSI port, a Rejuvinator, (1MB of CHIP and ROM Kickstart), plus a ROM switcher so I could choose between 3 versions of the OS, if I really needed to. And at the time, the A1000 was on the UUCP maps as kumiss.uucp (check out deja.com for references)... I was using it to pick up mail and a seriously reduced netnews feed in 1987, at first on a pair of ST-225s hooked up through an ISA MFM HDC - a 20MB news spool! I don't recall too many Macs being directly connected to Usenet in 1987... -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 11-Jun-2004 02:40 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -90.8 F (-68.3 C) Windchill -136.1 F (-93.40 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 13.2 kts Grid 058 Barometer 674.3 mb (10840. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

It was thus said that the Great Deano Calver once stated: Seeing how you could program the blitter to massage the data into the proper format for the disk drives ... yes, I would say the blitters are more configurable on the Amiga than anything else. -spc (And Exec is the *cleanest* design for an OS I've seen, save for QNX)

Fred> So Commodore thought they could be successful at defying Fred> convention by giving the later model a lower model number Fred> The Ford model A came after the model T And the 11/730 came after the 11/750 which came after the 11/780. The 11/05 came after the 11/20, and the 11/04 came later than that... paul

Sorry intended to go private On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Fred Cisin wrote:

Ethan Dicks <dickset(a)amanda.spole.gov> wrote: That would be me. I tried to find the incentive to upgrade from an A1000 to an A2000, but as I'd already put a Starboard with 2MB and SCSI on the thing and couldn't use it on the A2000 (or the A500 with its flipped-twice SOTS connector) it really didn't look like a good deal: the stock A2000 wasn't that much more oomphy than the A1000 except that it had a reasonable expansion bus inside the box and provision for upgrading the processor. Later (1991 or so) there was the A3000 upgrade, where you could get a discount of a few hundred bucks for your A1000 serial number. That almost looked like a good deal. Except that at HT Electronics, the staff was more interested in selling me an A1000 serial number than in selling me the A3000 upgrade -- the guy lost interest and wandered off when I said that I had an A1000 serial number by way of owning an A1000. That was what really told me, "You fool! The Amiga is DEAD!" -Frank McConnell

Sellam, The A1000 had that kickstart image on flyppy because it was rushed to market, and the BIOS core wasn't compeletely finished. IT was decided to do this, and send floppy disks with the updates as they became available. The A1000 only worked with the Kickstart/Workbench 1.x until the ROM chips were made standard with the later machines. Some hackers have put in a 512k WOM and loaded in a 2.04 image off of floppy, or just made a board with a socket and a ROM. The phono connector should have been in color on the A1000, only it and the AGA Amigas had composite video ouput with NTSC color encoding. The A500/2000/3000 had a jack but only in monochrome, no color information at all. Another great bugaboo was the serial and parallel ports on the A1000 were opposite sex to the PC standard. This was fixed on later models. The Amiga was just enough different to be a pain in the butt to the normal PC thinking technician, and that helped Commodore loose the market. Lack of vendor support was another burr in the saddle. AT first ahead of the technology curve, they slipped behind in the 90's and management milked Commodore of its operationg capital. But once you learn some of the quirks and traits of the Amiga OS, you find a great system for the learning challenged. There is a reason they called the kernal Intuition. Gary Hildebrand ST. Joseph, MO

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Lyle Bickley wrote: I know. That was just heat o' the moment bitching. I'm still pissed about the poor hardware interconnectability between models, but then that was Commodore. Otherwise, I got it running (finally) and the Atari 1040ST was considerably less obnoxious. Well then you'll be able to enjoy the one crap game I was able to find in my library ("Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Preistess") tonight at the shindig. I was surprised to find I had such a dearth of Amiga and Atari ST software. I thought I had a lot so either they're still tucked away in boxes or I need to start collecting Amiga and Atari ST software. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]