From: ucacmsu@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Stephen R Usher)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Is Falcon worth buying????
Date: 9 Sep 92 09:32:34 GMT
Organization: Bloomsbury Computing Consortium, London

Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
In article <1992Sep8.230955.15392@zooid.guild.org> kovarski@zooid.guild.org (Mark Kovarski) writes:
>
>Nice arguments you brought up. Some interesting points you had there.
>
>4000,- DM is a big chunk of money for a 486/33 MHz considering the average
>earning rates in germany (at least in west-germany). However, the regular
>packages (Falcon030 with/without HD) do not include a monitor so I would
>imagine that a complete Falcon030 with HD, Monitor, 4 Meg RAM is over
>2000,- DM. Still a rather big price to pay and big corporations, even in
>europe where Atari Corp. makes most of its money, will not buy it since
>they can't provide the service that IBM, Compaq, Digital can.

True, about the support, but the Falcon can use cheap monitors as well as
standard VGA monitors. Even VGA monitors are getting down to the low cost
level.

>I have to disagree with you TOTALLY with MultiTOS and OS/2 2.0 being similar.

I agree, they are totally dis-similar.

>If anyone will "borrow" any ideas, it will be Atari from IBM's OS/2 2.0 but
>you have to realise that you can't just borrow from IBM.

Who said that anyone (especially Atari) will borrow from OS/2 2.0?

>YOu have to pay
>BIG bucks in order to use their patents. Microsoft pays IBM 20-25 Million US
>dollar in order to have the rights to use IBM patents. Will MultiTOS become
>as nice as OS/2 2.0? NO, it will never be.
>The early beta versions of 
>MultiTOS were slow, unreliable and unstable. Nothing much has really changed.

If this is true, then I'd like to know what Atari did to MiNT to do this.
MiNT only has a 10% CPU overhead at worst. Not many multi-tasking OS's can
do that well.

>IBM's OS/2 2.0 software devision employees 300 programmers while Atari has
>only 3 (maybe a few more, they don't like to give this information away ;-)).

In software production the rule is often that software quality is inversely
proportional to the number of software engineers involved :-). This is
especially true for IBM (I know someone who worked there!).

>You can't say anything about OS/2 2.0 unless you sit down in front of a PC
>and see it do its wonders. Forget about other OSs, OS/2 will be the way of
>the future. Unless Unix Labs come up with their "Destiny OS", IBM is on the
>road of victory. So far I have heard some of the new MultiTOS options and
>they seemed to be borrowed from other GUIs.

OS/2 is currently Intel only. Intel processors are showing their (great)
age, they will soon(-ish) pass into history.

>
>True, the Tramiels are after money. Believe me, they need it BADLY. Will the
>Falcon030 save them? No. Why? Like you said, it's the nineties and not the
>eighties. ;-)

Can't deny that, the '90s aren't the 80s, but who said they were?

The main problems with the Falcon are those of any non mainstream micro:-

(1) Image.
	Many people still believe (at least in business):-

		If it's not IBM compatible then it's not a computer.

(2) Support.
	Support companies won't support a product with a small user base,
hence users (business) won't buy them, hence a small user base. In Britain
even Apple have this problem, they solve it by having their own support
organisations.

(3) Cost.
	Because of the lack of demand due to the above, the cost of the
systems is relatively high as they can't be offset by volume. This is also
recursive as people generally buy the machine with the lowest running cost.

>
>There is some truth to the matter that the computer only counts but seriously,
>all decisions are made by the Tramiels. Everything from production to what
>Atari emplyees can say. 

As the Borg in ST:TNG would say... "The Tramiels are irrelevent(sp?)"

>
>Mark Kovarski
>E-Mail: kovarski@zooid.guild.org

Steve
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