From: casler@nbc1.ge.com (Jim Casler)
Subject: Re: HELP--AMIGA OR IBM PC CLONE?
Summary: Amiga might be what you want  
Reply-To: casler@nbc1.UUCP (Jim Casler)
Organization: National Broadcasting Company, Inc., New York
Distribution: na
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 93 14:05:10 GMT

In article <1992Dec31.123632.1@stsci.edu> speck@stsci.edu writes:
>
>
>for me, so now the battle is between a PC clone and an Amiga.  I do a lot
>of writing and word processing, a little games playing, a lot of raw number
>crunching, and I'm now getting into (dabbling only) image processing and
>ray-traced computer art.

There are a couple of decent word processors for the Amiga, as well as
games. I'm not sure what you mean by "number  crunching," though. There
are a couple of spreadsheets for the Amiga, and some accounting packages.
On the whole, though, the PC has a wider field  here. When you get into 
image processing and ray-tracing, however, the Amiga has a wide array
of programs. There are also packages to do other types of 3D rendering.

>I want a big hard drive (say at least 120 MB), a HD floppy drive, an onboard
>modem, a mouse, a keyboard, a nice monitor (at least 14", but if I had the

Hard drive, no problem. HD floppy is available on some models of newer
Amigas ( 3000's ). There are onboard modems available, but you might
consider an external one, if only for the fact that it  doesn't care
what you plug it into.

>money I'd like a larger one), and a powerful CPU.  I know IBM PC's fairly

68030 or 68040 powerful enough? :^)

>1) How would, say, an Amiga with a 68040 compare in raw number crunching power
>   to the same speed (MHz) 486 DX system?

Pretty well. 

>2) Can Amigas take things like 20" monitors with video cards that permit very
>   large graphics modes (like 1200-or-so pixels square)?

Yup.  

>3) How easy is the Amiga to program yourself?  Are there REALLY GOOD
>   optimizing compilers available at reasonable cost, such as FORTRAN,
>   C, and BASIC?

You can get SAS C for the Amiga. Good ANSI C compiler. There are a 
couple of BASIC compilers available.  There is a FORTRAN, too, but it's
not cheap. On the other hand, the OS comes bundled with a very nice
version of Rexx, which contains IPC. There  are plenty of goodies
to hang on it so that you can do all the nifty graphic OS things,
if you want. You can use it to allow other programs to pass data to each 
other.

>4) I've seen the wonderful graphics screens that Amigas can generate.  How
>   expensive are grahics packages to really use the Amiga to its advantage?
>   They are quite expensive for IBM clones (really GOOD software).

You'll  prbably be pleasantly surprised at the prices of most of the
Amiga graphics packages.

>5) One BIG pain I've had with PC programming is in FORTRAN and BASIC, where
>   the amount of memory I can use is limited.  For example, the FORTRAN I
>   have only lets you access 640K of memory!  Even if you had 20 MB!  How
>   does this work with an Amiga, i.e., if you have 10MB of RAM, can you
>   trivially use all 10MB at once (minus the memory used for the operating
>   system, of course) for declaring arrays, etc?  This is very important to
>   me.

No problem. The Amiga was never hobbled with the  640K memory limit
imposed by MSDOS. You can use all the memory you can cram into the
machine.
						Jim
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy