From: dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: a blurb
Date: 11 Jan 93 14:41:34 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.ai.mit.edu

In article <1993Jan11.015110.13461@bsu-ucs> 01mbmccabe@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu writes:
>>>And doesn't NEED a Hard Drive to run!!  
>> 
>> Big deal.  Get a hard drive anyway.  They're cheap.
>
>Say bud...if they're so cheap, why donl;t you mail me the money order for a new
>one?  I don't happen to have the cash, nor, I would bet, do a lot of other
>people.  I may guess this may be even more so in a smaller, foreign country. 
>I'll keep my eye on the mail and continue to run my software from the RAMdisk
>so I won't be holding my breath.

Beggars can't be choosers.  If you have no money, you really can't
afford to decide between computers, now, can you?  That's my point.
The only previous reason to buy a new Atari system was "Power without
the Price."  (Snicker.)  These days, of course, as we all know from
having paid careful attention to the mail order prices for clones
posted here over the past two months, clones are the cheapest machines
available.  Therefore, for people in your situation, the choice is
clear.

>> That's a GOOD one.  $50 is *real* tough to manage for an OS, yeah.
>
>Up the amount of the money order, please.

If you can't afford to buy any software at all, then you shouldn't have
bought the computer in the first place.  Do you simply pirate all the
software you want?  Buying a $1000 machine and then saying you don't
have $50 for a software pacakge is like buying a Ferrari but then not
being able to cough up money for wiper blades.

>> Right, and consequently you have to pay $75 to upgrade the OS.  That
>> is, every 3 years when they fix the pending 100 bugs in TOS.
>
>I'm still using  very old version of TOS (1.2 I think) and have no plans for
>spending money to upgrade it.  BTW, I see you suddenly got a little tight with
>the purse-strings....hmm.

It's not the money, it's the inconvenience, mainly.  If you still use
TOS 1.2, watch out for bugs.  Since I use(d) my Atari for serious
programming that taxed the machine, I was forced to upgrade to 1.4.
I had to go to a dealer and buy the chipset (once they got them in).
Isn't compeltely obvious that it wouldn't have been much easier and
cheaper to provide OS updates on disk?

(BTW, just because I say you should be able to afford wiper blades
for you Ferrari doesn't mean I advocate spending 10 times as much
as is required for the wiper blades!)

>What's the point to trying to get a PC put together the right way to do what
>I want it to do, for less cost than my MEGA ST4?  Too bad more people didn't
>find out about ST's when I did.  There'd probably be less people hell-bent on
>a hard drive/the latest-greatest 'x86 PC/super-workhorse/more-than-they-
>need/1000.  And I have no qualms with GEM.

Well, you're satisfied with mediocrity then.  Once you have a hard
drive and a faster machine, you'll never believe you WASTED so much
time waiting for things to happen.  Computers are STILL not fast enough
so that everything I want to do is instantaneous; therefore, I will
always be trying to get faster machines.  Time spent waiting for a
compile, unarchive, etc. is time WASTED, especialy under GEM where you
can only run one process at once.  At least under Unix or OS/2 you can
edit a docuemnt or fix more bugs in your program while you're waiting.

>Oh well, you and the Jones' have fun competing with each other.  I'm gonna see
>if I can get something done here.

Again, I hope you're happy being less productive than you could be.
I'm not.

>P.S.  Why are the only people who actively promote the clones _I know_, the
>ones who are able to hook up with _pirate copies_ of the hard-drive munching,
>processing-time gobbling software they rave about?

You know the wrong people?

>I reckon a large number of people would sing a different song if they
>_had_ to play by the rules.  Not to mention they wouldn't be able to
>afford to fill those bulging hard-drives their shiney new system
>sports.

The main thing I spend time with nowadays on my PC is TADS 2, which is
shareware and registered, thank you.  (And yes, I did buy my copy of
Microsoft C, which was $139, and Ultima Underworld, which was $50.)

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
ADVENTIONS: interactive fiction (text adventures) for the 90's!
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