From: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Organization: The Man With Ten Cats
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 16:49:44 GMT
Reply-To: rmk@rmkhome.UUCP (Rick Kelly)
Keywords: UNIX

In article <1992Oct5.000454.21639@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> feoh@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Chris Patti) writes:
>In article <PRDyRB1w164w@kryton.UUCP> system@kryton.UUCP (Scott Beckstead) writes:
>>talley@ashleigh.Kodak.COM (Brian K. Talley) writes:
>>
>>> In article <12945@ecs.soton.ac.uk> nwp90@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Nick Phillips) writ
>>> 
>>> [original posting deleted]
>>> 
>>>
>>> I saw the same thing happen to the Commodore Amiga.  When it was released, it
>>> was ahead of it's time.  It had superior graphics, sound and I/O slave proces
>>> sors that allowed it to run considerably faster in typical applications than
>>> just about anything else available (in the personal computer market).  It als
>>> had (has) an operating system vastly superior to MS-DOS. Due to Commodore's
>>> unbelievably inept and incompetant marketing department, the Amiga has slippe
>>> and many now consider it dead.  It certainly isn't - there's still a huge fol
>>> lowing - but it's not as "alive" as it could/should be.
>>>
>>
>>Being an amiga owner I have to agree here.  Not dead merely sleeping.
>>
>
>Indeed. The amiga *WAS* a fantastic , state of the art machine that was blowing
>people away with mind blowing graphics and sound when "Multimedia" wasn't even
>a word many PC owners knew.. But those advantages have long since past. I'm
>posting this from the same Amiga 2000 I've had for about 4 years, before that
>I had a 1000.  One would think that I'd go out and get a 3000 right? wrong..
>
>The pricing is hideously bloated, C='s marketing is so bad it's almost funny,
>and to top it all off I'd have to get my machine halfway across the state to 
>get it serviced. 

Sounds like you've been living in a hole.

The current price for an Amiga 3000 with 25 mhz 68030, 2 megs of ram, and
a 50 meg drive is $1495 US.  This also includes the Scala multi-media
authoring package.

And the A4000 is out.  This machine has a 25 mhz 68040 on a daughter card.
There will probably be an A1200 with a 68020 that uses the same mother board.
There is a new AGA graphics chipset that has 8 bit graphics, and AmigaDOS 4.0.

>*and* on top of all of it, I'm a Unix professional and really want to run Unix
>at home.. The *only* way I can run Unix on an amiga is to buy machine with an
>'030+MMU or faster, a HUGE hard drive, TONS of ram, and a rather pricy add-on
>graphics extender if I want to run color Xwindows.  Put this all together and
>you've got a price that has made a few SPARC owners cringe when I mentioned it.

The current state of Amiga SVR4 2.1 is that has been unbundled from the A3000.
It has always had the ability to run on the 2500/20 or the 2500/30.

On the used market, you can change an A2000 into an A2500/20 for about $300.
The Commodore 68030 card for the A2000 is stocked by my local dealer for
$795.

>I still like the amiga, and will probably keep my little A2000 as a games
>machine,etc in the hope that someday someone at C= wakes up and smells the 
>economy.

They have.

-- 

Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.UUCP	unixland!rmkhome!rmk	rmk@frog.UUCP