Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!cunixf.cc.columbia.edu!cunixa.cc.columbia.edu!cmm1 From: cmm1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Christopher M Mauritz) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: The TT is finally there! Keywords: TT Message-ID: <1990Oct1.142505.30917@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Date: 1 Oct 90 14:25:05 GMT References: <283@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> <1990Sep30.175318.17716@chx400.switch.ch> Sender: news@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (The Daily News) Organization: Columbia University Lines: 66 In article <1990Sep30.175318.17716@chx400.switch.ch> poole@chx400.switch.ch (Simon Poole) writes: >In article mboen@nixdorf.de (Martin Boening) writes: >...... >>>Also: SLC's can be had for less than $3.5k - shop around. Bluntly, no Actually, about a week ago I asked a friend at MIT to check the price for me (Columbia has no program for students to buy Suns) and he told me the student rate was ~$3250. Add in about $1K for a 300meg SCSI hard disk and VIOLA, a nice little "roll your own" unix system with an industry standard OS (SunOS 4.1). > >Actually, whoever wrote the original article wasn't that far off, with >academic rebate you can get a SLC for about ~$4000 in Switzerland and >an IPC with 200MB disk for about ~$9000. As far as I know there is no >similar rebate for Atari's here. (Not that I think it's a fair >comparison anyway, you get a lot more for your money when you go out >and buy a Sun.) I must agree. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would buy any Atari product over a comparable (in this case better) Sun product given reasonably close prices (within $1-2K). > >Anyway the main problem with the TT (except Atari per se) is price: >it's nearly twice as expensive as what I payed a long time ago (can >it be five years? how time flys) for my ST520. If you ask around, most Well, I'm not sure how fair it is to compare prices of a 5 year old 68000 system and a new 68030 system. That might be a bit of a stretch. >age group a lot of european Atari hackers are in, I have a lot of problems >imagining them forking out this kind of money), businesses and academic >institutions. While I can't speak for the couple of businesses that use >Atari's in Switzerland, I do know that they don't have any chance of >selling any substantial ammounts into the academic market (at least not >at the current price). Again, I think you are right. I personally don't see a market for this machine (unless it was pretty cheap) anywhere (US or Europe). Anyone who wants a decent unix environment is going to buy from more respected manufacturers at prices not much above Atari's. As far as it being marketed as a "turboST", that would work just fine given appropriate pricing. >[BTW does anbody know why Atari actually decided to release the TT? >Sinking ST sales?] I would be curious to know why also. Maybe they thought that they would have had more market penetration by now? The TT would make a lot more sense if Atari had another million or so STs out there. >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Simon Poole > poole@verw.switch.ch / poole@chx400.switch.ch / mcsun!chx400!poole >------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cheers, Chris ------------------------------+--------------------------- Chris Mauritz |D{r det finns en |l, finns cmm1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu |det en plan! (c)All rights reserved. | Send flames to /dev/null | ------------------------------+---------------------------