Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Okay, so tell us about this Archimedes computer...
From: jwil1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (TMOTA)
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 00:29:07 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

gtoal@gem.stack.urc.tue.nl (Graham Toal) writes:

>It doesn't take DOS cards - no cheap $40 modems for the arc, or

Well I'd rather have a good modem than a cheap one. For about $300 US you
can get a damn good 14.4k bps modem nowadays - I doubt you'd find them
*much* cheaper than that on a PC board - the only real price difference
(at least for reasonable-performance modems which use the Rockwell chipset)
is due to not putting a case around it and perhaps also a power transformer.

I don't believe that if there are any cheap PC cards that are comparable
to more expensive external modems, that they are cheaper-enough to
justify their most likely quality/performance/software/firmware deficiencies.

>any other peripheral that's become cheap from mega-bulk manufacturing;

Well.. that's going a bit far - IDE drives are cheap for exactly this reason,
and we have no problems plugging *them* into Arcs. What I think you mean
are "PC-only-compatible" peripherals, which narrows the field considerably.

Though we still have to pay through the nose for the interface boards for
these peripherals, just because of low volume... ;-(

>nor does it have the PC's bidirectional centronix port for cheap

Well, the A5000 and A4 (and all the new machines I expect) have a truly
bidirectional parallel port (as opposed to the old "printer port" which
was unidirectional parallel). I expect this is much the same as the PC's
bidirectional parallel port.

>scanners or machine to machine file transfer.  And the only way I can
>interface our Archie to our Novell network is by running a kludgy
>NFS server (SOSS) on a spare DOS box.  Unless I buy NFS for Novell :-(

Unless you buy the software to do it... sounds like exactly what you'd have
to do on a PC to me...

>Being able to plug in a PC keyboard, which I didn't know about till
>you said, is a definite step forward.  I'd say an interface to a PC
>backplane should be the next urgent step so we can start paying
>a quarter of the current prices for peripherals.

That's a little unfair: we pay about 3 times the price for a SCSI interface
than PC buyers would have to, but once we have that board, we can get exactly
the same hard drives, scanners, etc. that they can, for exactly the same
price.
And to the best of my knowledge things like Laser Direct are comparable
in cost to PC equivalents (and we had them years before they did).

For the few peripherals that have to be specifically made for the Arc
(podules for interfacing to SCSI/IDE devices, MID podules, etc) we have to
pay for the lower volume, but this isn't too bad really (IMHO)...
We have the advantage of a better OS ;-)

(Especially for people like myself who wouldn't be able to afford the
peripherals we would like even if we had a cheap taiwanese PC clone... ;-(
-- 
_________________  "I'd like to answer this question in two ways:
  /____ _ _/_ __       First in my normal voice, and then
 // / //_//_ /_/       in a silly, high-pitched whine." (Monty Python)