From: kholland@hydra.unm.edu (Kiernan Holland)
Subject: Re: DIR
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 92 07:23:01 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <1992Aug13.024150.4423@usl.edu> das9674@usl.edu (Stephenson Daniel A) writes:
>In article <1992Aug13.021424.21609@newshost.unh.edu> ggg@kepler.unh.edu (Gregory G Greene) writes:
>>>>As for cpu power, the 486-50 beats it by quite a few marks.  A 040-25 only
>>>>has the performance of a 486-33 cpu.  But if you compare a 040-33, well
>>>>that may be another story.  
>>>
>>>heh heh, but the day you show me that 040-33 Amiga, I'll haul up 
>>>an Intel 80486DX2-66Mhz machine.. :) :) :)
>>>
>>>(They really do exist, you know)

It is not the speed that counts, but what you can do with it. 
Most PC users like yourself buy a 486-50 then go waste all your 
CPU time on Wordperfect or a BBS program. Whata waste.

Only PC users are dumb enough to have such a money-wasting hobby
as a BBS. Tell me what else you can do that is really useful. 
Oh, you can play wolfenstien 3-D at 4 times the pace. 
Or you can view GIF's, neat. *NOT*

>>>
>>
>>	Not to mention the fact that the 040 Amiga is selling for $5100.
On the towercase 3000 with 200 meg HD and 5 megs of ram sells for that 
much. You were smarter, you'd look at the market. 

I probably know more about PC's than you know about Amiga's. 

I have an Amiga 3000, which i bought for 2300 dollars. 
If you add the price of a Progressive Peripherals '040 
board,  you get $3800. Besides, I would get a 25mhz synchronous
bus and faster claculations instantly. you would still need a 
faster bus, faster rams, and a 256K CPU cache. Amiga 3000's even 
support two types of RAM's which none of the PC's have but 
need. One is called Static-Column RAM. RAM's can either be added 
in ZIPP or DIP form. ZIP-SCRAM are suppost to have thier 
own burst mode in addition to the burst mode that is enabled 
on the 68030. I heard that the ZIP-SCRAM's can reach access rates
of 40ns using this burst mode. That is fast enough for a 25mhz 
68040 to work with RAM without slowing down. 


>>    I'll bet you will be able to get a loaded 486DX2-66 for a lot less
>>    then that.
>
>Verily, Gregory!  Gosh, we TKKCers are right on mark *again*.  ;-)
>
>>							G.Greene
>--
>*Dan Stephenson   das9674@usl.edu 
>*"It reminds me of something Cally said. 'He who trusts cannot be
>*betrayed, only mistaken.' It was a saying of her people.... Cally is
>*dead. So are most of her people." -Avon, from _Rescue_ (Blakes 7)

Ya you can get a 486 for a lot less, but there is a lot of 
things to keep in mind. 486 systems are usually ISA based, unless 
you can go for a local bus (which isn't 
even standardized) or EISA (which has very few cards made specifically
for it, as compared to ISA). The increased sales of 486's should make the 
PC's look a lot better to other users, but in reality there are a 
lot of drawbacks of PC's. For one, who can you trust??  How many 
companies have your bought from that just did not deliver a 
working computer system? How long did you wait to get your system?
How much money did you shell-out in addition to the system cost? 
If you bought a local bus system, who do you depend on to get 
windows drivers and expansion cards for your local bus? 
How much extra stuff did you have to buy? How long did it take for you 
to set up your system? Did everything come just the way the company 
said it would? Where was your motherboard made? How many cards 
have been ruined just becuase of the motherboard, if any?


My brother owns a 486-33 Tower Case model, he bought it for 3000 dollars 
1.5 years ago and just recently he needed to replace his motherboard. 
Our school got 6 Gateways last may, so far 3 of them have had 
semi-sever problems. My Amiga 3000's monitor has been replaced 2 times, 
but the system itself has never had the motherboard, or any part 
in relation with the internals, replaced. 

When a friend of mine bought a Zeos 486, he expected it to deliver 
in 6 weeks, however it took three months, by that time 
he didn't have any current use for the system
;it arrived to late. 

It took me 2 weeks 
to get my Amiga 3000 when I ordered on student deal. 
 
Then there is operating systems. OS/2 will probably be the OS 
of choice later, but for now Windows 3.1 is the choice. 
Even on a 486 Windows is as slow as a turtle. But what choice do 
you have?? If you use text-based applications like LOTUS 1-2-3, 
you can only work in 80x25 modes which is hardly good enough for 
some people's tastes, like mine. Even if you use Windows to expand your
dimensions, some DOS programs will not work in the software that 
support MSDOS from Windows. 

You know how Microsoft makes so much money? Revisions!  

While I was on warantee I got my Amigados revisions for FREE! 
That included OS 2.0 revisions and extra software. 

And did MSDOS 5.0 set the world on fire? Ha ha ha ha, ya right.
Only silly PC users can get excited about shit. 

Then you have the part about programming. ALl your compilers 
are likely to take up 10-40 megs of hard drive space, full-fledged
if you choose. These same compilers may be badly coded and may need 
all that storage for the many poorly written functions written 
to make you programs fast, or slow if you want to be realitic.

Then you have Shareware/PD. How many PC libraries do you know that 
are consistent? Is there anything like the Fred Fish library?
Do you know of several FTP places that carry these libraries?
Do these PD libaries come on compact disc for under 60 bucks?
How protective are PC PD-programmers? How many really care about your 
registration?  How many would deliberately 
imbed a virus in your registered software?
Can anyone get access to these libraries easily? 

The Fred Fish library is probably the only fully-organized library 
that is accessible to just about any Amiga user. I know of several FTP
places off-hand that carry the entire Fred Fish library. 
One is Wuarchive.wustl.edu, another is ux1.cso.uiuc.edu. 
This isn't 10 or 50 disks, but 700. There is even a program 
devoted to doing cross-searches of the entire database to find 
programs that meet your needs (called Aquarium). But the Fred Fish 
library is not the only one. There is cucug, amicus, ab20.larc.nasa.gov
(now entirely on CD), and several magazine-based libraries.
A pal of mine said that there is probably not very 
many PC libraries (organized ones) becuase the PC SW/PD developers
are very defensive and will not let their stuff to be distributed
commercially unless there is cash up-front. Most Amiga software 
developers just say "I will let Fred Fish carry my stuff, only!"

Then there is graphics boards. Whenever it comes to graphics 
boards on the PC's, you can really never be sure if your software 
will work with the board. Usually, you'll upgrade to windows and 
search all over hell to find a windows driver for your card.
You might even have to buy the driver extra from the company you got 
your card from. Then there is the question of resolution. 
If your monitor is 640x480 and your card is 1024x768, there is no way you 
can display 1024x768, it is physically impossible. On top of that 
your card must support those resolutions, and must have enough ram to 
use those modes.                 

Then there is speed. Architecture makes the motherboard, as I 
always say. If your motherboard is a piece of crap, don't expect 
to even get 50% of your CPU's speed. If your software doesn't use the 
CPU's 32-bit capabilities, then your CPU is hardly working its best.
With all that you have a limitation on your expansion busses 
speed. A ISA expansion bus only goes 8mhz. If your 486 goes 33mhz, you 
silly ol' graphics board will be slower than any typical Amiga 
3000 graphics boards. Maybe not in vector graphics, but actuall 
animations and things that require intense memory moving, will 
seem like a ultra slow Amiga 1000. In addition, the 3000's 
CPU's synchronous to the (expansion)BUS, while ISA is always 8mhz.  

If I added a 68040 to my Amiga 3000, my bus would jump to 25mhz.
This means that if I had a external graphics card like Firecracker 24
or IV24, I would get a 150% increase in animation speeds. 
Hard drives and other cards would work as fast as they can.
On a PC, this i hardly a reality, unless you have EISA or Local Bus.
As of now, the Local Bus systems only have graphics and hard drive 
expansion, and only one/two slots. An Amiga 3000 has four 32-bit slots.

Then lets talk about memory. You can have memory in sync with your 68040,
or memory on the motherboard or memory in your slots. While you can 
only have 2 megs of CHIP, and 16 megs of ZIP SCRAM or ZIP PAGE memory, 
you can have as much ram as you will ever need on the 68040 board. 
Some ram boards even use 32megabyte SIMMS. 

Then you have integration. Well for the Amiga, you can talk Arexx 
to anything that is Arexx compatible (most everything). 
For instance, a modeling program by the name of VERTEX has 
an Arexx port that will let you send data externally 
(from an Arexx program or another program). If you are a scientist, 
or a programmer, or both, this means that you can write programs 
to make objects in 3D from formulas or data you have made. 
Other programs like RexxTracker will let you play sountracker/MED
modules from Arexx as well. Some graphics software has Arexx ports. 
Even image processing programs like TADPRO have Arexx ports. 
If you are a good enough C programmer, you could probably create a 
graphical database using a barebones Arexx-compatible database 
program and a shaeware image displayer (Arexx compatible as well).
Even add animations, graphics and whatever else you can think of.

Then you have consistency. Have you ever been able to keep 
your interfaces straight? Do you get tired of looking at 
text based user interfaces? Don't you wish everything ran on 
Windows? Do you wish everything ran on MSDOS? Do you wish 
your dos commands to be consistent with each other? 
Amigados 2.0 is consistent and predictable. Though you don't 
get very many colors, the speed is fast and the interface 
is almost as good as Xwindows. In some ways Amigados 
2.0 blows Xwindows away. 

Next there is audio. You have your soundblaster pro with 20 voices of 
4-op DX7 FM squeek, 1 voice 8-bit DAC, and supposedly a fully-functional
MIDI interface. Have you ever used the synth to play music? Can 
you whip up a tune in 1 minute from startup? Can you play 
music into your MIDI interface while having the SB-Pro playyour other 
MIDI keyboards? Did you ever think that for 100 dollars more you could 
have bought a 32-voice MT-32 with better sound-synthesis??? 
I have a ECE midi interace and one MT-32. Both of which can be purchased
for under 400 bucks. If you are aching for a piece of composition software, 
DMCS from EA is now selling for 15 dollars and works better than 
any compostion program I have seen for the PC's (in that price range ;-)).
I even transcribed a 8 stave 40+ measure of the song PAMELA from TOTO, 
using all of my MT-32's voices. Sounded like a CD! Took a lot of time, 
but hey I did it. 

That's more than I can say for my brother, who still has my CZ-101 
and who cannot afford a Soundblaster Pro. Its a shame. 

Then there is modems. Well any modem you have that is external, 
I have too. I mean, I can use it too, since our serial ports are 
pretty much the same. Same goes for hard drives. 

Then you 
can talk about those 1.7 meg HD floppies that CBM installed to a 
few recent Amiga 3000's (HDFixer in the Fred Fish library will 
fix the newest kickstart [Amiga's idea of BIOS] to support 1.7 meg 
floppies). 

Ok, how about viruses? 
Well i can tell you that I haven't had a virus in 2 years, 
and I don't even run Virus Killing software upon startup. 
Compare this to your typical MAC, afterwhich the Amiga is stereotyped by PC 
users. I bet all of you have had at least 3 viruses, while I have had only one!
Call me lucky? Well, I also have a 400 disk library of floppies that 
I collected over the past year. Most of these are European software. 
I dare you use this much Euro-software. Shall I mention the 
word "Michealangelo". (Evil Grin) That's what I'll do, write MSDOS 
viruses for a living. He he he he. What the hell would I care?
I know it is no joking matter. But just think, most doctors use 
MSDOS and MAC computers. Just imagine how many medical records were lost!
Oh how much AIDS patient's records were tweaked by some MAC/MSDOS worm-virus. 
Safety is the question.

I could go on talking about things such as the graphics boards 
that can draw 100 million pixels a second and the '030 acceleration boards
for the Amiga 500 that sell for 500 dollars and run at about 40mhz, 
but I will not. Just keep this in mind, the 486 is just a sped up 
386 with some extra cache instructions. The 040 is a whole different CPU that 
has some RISC architecture and many more features than a 486 (also faster).
By the way, I bought my Amiga 3000 for 2300. A 68040 just costs me an 
extra 1500 dollars, which I have, but I have set my mind on buying a 
386 for my mother, who must use PC's for her work. 

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy