| An Amiga, even a bare minimum system, will cost you over a thousand
dollars.
You should be able to get an Atari 520ST with printer and monochrome
monitor for under a thousand.
This being a hallowed place for Amiga-dom, we are obviously a bit
biased.
Actually, your best bet might be a Blue Chip PC clone from Caldors,
for around $600 without printer. Or a Commodore 64 system would
be good for light word processing and spreadsheet use.
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| Re: .0
You are asking for too much for $700. If you remove the printer from
the system, then for can get a fairly nice computer and monitor for
about $700.
An Amiga 1000 with monitor and 512k can be had for about $1100 from
several mail order houses. I recently saw an add for an Amiga 1000
that placed the price of such a system in the $1000 range.
How important is a detachable keyboard? The Amiga 1000 has one. The
Atari STs do not. The new Amiga 500 doesn't have one either.
Do do not mention color. The monochrome STs are good buys. A monochrome
system is cheaper than the same system with color.
If you don't mind the lack of a detachable keyboard, in 3 or 4 months
you may be able to put together a Amiga 500 system for about $700 to $800.
(Since the 500 is a newly announced product, the price and delivery date
is still in flux.)
Neither the Amiga or the ST has a "standard" cable to the monitor when
using RGB output. The Amiga requires a special cable to be used with
a non-Amiga monitor. The ST sometimes requires some electronics. The
Amiga does have standard composite output for plugging in to a VCR or
television. This is also a feature of the 520 ST, but not the 1040 ST.
I am not sure about the Amiga 500.
The RS-232 cable for the Amiga is a 9 pin, straight through, male connectors
on both ends cable. Almost any shopping mall sales these. I don't know
much about the parallel connector of the Amiga.
About the keywords you mentioned:
"Blitter" is a word popularized by bit mapped graphics people. It is a
small processor that moves large strings of bits around very fast. A
blitter is to graphic operations as a floating point accelerator is to
number crunching. The Amiga has extended the idea of a blitter by
endowing the blitter with the capability of taking multiple bitstrings as
input and performing a boolean operation on them to yield a resulting
bitstring. All models of the Amiga come with a blitter. The blitter may
be an option on STs later this year (the ST blitter is over a year late
and has suffered more set backs lately). It is unknown whether the ST
blitter will have all the features of the Amiga blitter. The Amiga is
the only computer in the under $3000 price range that has a blitter.
"MIDI" is Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is a standard that
allows you to program a computer in the musical instruments and control
them. The main requirement for MIDI is that the computer be able to
be able to work with serial data at a very funny baud rate. The Amiga
can do this, but requires an adapter for some reason that I am fuzzy on.
The STs come with a MIDI jack, and so are more MIDI ready.
"Interlaced" video output is used by the Amiga to double the number of
scan lines displayed on the monitor for super high res. Normally, the
Amiga puts out 200 scan lines. The Amiga can put out 400 scan lines in
interlaced mode by writing the even numbered scan lines out and then
backing up and writing out the odd numbered scan lines. However, the
video screen will appear to flicker because the set of scan lines written
during the last pass over the screen has a chance to dim slightly while
the new set of scan lines is output. Some people find they can work
with interlace on and not be disturbed by the flicker. I am not one
of those people: it gives me a headache. Interlace can be used for
some nice graphical effects, but I can not use it for text. An expensive
long persistence phosphor monitor can reduce or eliminate the flicker.
"SCSI," also sometimes written (and always pronounced) as "scuzzy,"
stands for Small Computer mumble Interface. It is a standard interface
to disk and other hardware. It is not IBM compatible, although IBM pcs
could use it if they wanted and had a SCSI interface installed. The
Macintosh has helped popularized SCSI, since it comes with a SCSI port.
SCSI drivers are starting to appear for the Amiga.
Unfortunately, comparisons based on clock speed are not fair to the Amiga.
Its processor runs about the same speed and a Mac or ST, but the Amiga
has a lot of hardware assist to offload work from the 68000. For example,
scrolling a page of text is a significant amount of work for a Mac or
ST, but is done by the blitter, not the 68000, on the Amiga.
So, a monochrome ST is on the low end of your budget, and a Amiga 500 is
one the high end. I think the Amiga 500 is a much better deal: it's
expandable; it has official programmer documentation; it has more
sophisticated hardware; and, it has multitasking. It has the same
capabilities and special chips as the Amiga 1000 in a cost reduced
package.
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| re: .0 word processing, spreadsheets, vt100 emulation....
those can be done on most any pc, even 8-biters. Its one of those
price vs quality/hassle tradeoffs. The Amiga and ST toss in a
few extra hardware/software features to make life more fun.
I've heard the ST keyboard can be detached from the system unit
by a 4 wire cable, but the FCC might not like that :-)
Should be able to do the same thing to the Amiga 500 when it comes
out.
Suggestions:
try the keyboards - i liked the layout of the ST keyboard, but couldn't
stand the feel and rattling of the keys. The new Amigas and the
new "Mega" STs have new keyboards, each claiming an "improved" feel
to the keyboard. I like the A1000's just fine, feels like a VT100
to me.
Get the computer, then look for the printer. Little things like
having a printer driver that lets you use the fancy features of
the letter quality printer can affect the choice of printer.
Be aware that there are lots more buzzwords about "letter quality"
printers, compare actual print samples.
-dave
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| I would like to thank everyone who responded to my question. I've begun to
uderstand that PC costs can add up with monitors going for $150 +, and line
quality printers starting at $250.
Working for DEC with a VT100 at home I don't think I'll buy one for the
foreseeable future but here's what I gleaned from reading the notes.
Comments welcome
Atari PC's
CPU With With Proc Clock Mem Drive Det Other
Only Mono Color Key
Mon Mon
520ST $ 300 M6800 520 (1) 3.5"" N 640x400
1040ST $ 799 $ 999 M6800 1M " N "
MegaST $1000 M6800 1M
PC $ 499 $ 699 I8086 4.7/8 512 5.25 Y below
Atari PC std features
Graphics: EGA, CGA, Hercules, IBM Monochrome
Resolution: 640 X 350
Communications: Serial and Parallel ports
Other: Mouse
Comodore
CPU With With Proc Clock Mem Drive Det Other
Only Mono Color Key
Mon Mon
10 $ 999 512K (1) 360K below
20 $1199 640K (2) 360K "
A 500 $ 599 512K (1) 3.5"" N
A1000 $1100 Y
A2000 $1500 1M (1) 3.5""
10/20 same machine with different memory and floppies
Graphics: CGA, Hercules, Plantronics
Communications: Serial and Parallel ports
[Posted to AtariST and Amiga]
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