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From: apratt@atari.UUCP (Allan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: TT disk, memory upgrades (was Re: TT sales)
Message-ID: <2815@atari.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jan 91 19:46:16 GMT
References: <15164@milton.u.washington.edu> <38525@cup.portal.com>   <1991Jan28.041902.8408@math.lsa.umich.edu> <38569@cup.portal.com>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Atari Corp., Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 41

The thread so far...

>>>If you already have a Quantum 80 or Syquest 44, you have to throw it in the
>>>trash, or sell it in "Trading Times"...  forget using it in a TT...

>>Don't be ridiculous. The TT has external SCSI; you can hook up other
>>drives without any trouble.

>BUT...  if you already own a Quantum 80, you CAN'T use it as your
>primary drive...

Horsefeathers!  What do you mean by "primary?"  SCSI device 0?  You can set
the SCSI device number of the internal drive to 1 and your external drive
to 0 and that's that.  Internal?  You can unscrew Atari's drive from the TT
(and toss it, if you like) and put your Quantum there.

I don't know if all this about "Atari won't sell a TT without a hard disk"
is true, but even if it is, you have to look at things from Atari's
perspective.  Only a TINY minority of potential TT purchasers have hard
drives of their own, and the cost of manufacturing and stocking another
flavor of TT for these few people could be more than the cost of the hard
disk (at our high-volume price) in the first place!  You could end up
paying MORE for your diskless TT!

This is another example of people ragging on Atari from a position of
woeful ignorance.  Somebody reports a rumor or speculation based on next to
no data, and somebody else says, "In that case Atari is stupid/doesn't care
about customers/deserves to go under."  It gets tiresome.

Another part of the discussion about configurations of TT's that could use
some hard data is memory: you can't buy a 2MB TT and some SIMMs and get an
8MB TT out of it.  The ST RAM of a TT doesn't use SIMMs, and the TT RAM
uses SIMMs, but you can only get the daughter board and memory controller
from Atari.  The RAM is the primary cost, of course, but the custom chip is
also expensive.  It would probably not pay to buy the board and controller
from us with empty sockets and then buy your own RAM.  It is certainly not
the case that you can buy just RAM and upgrade your TT.

============================================
Opinions expressed above do not necessarily	-- Allan Pratt, Atari Corp.
reflect those of Atari Corp. or anyone else.	  ...ames!atari!apratt