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From: kawakami@ocf.berkeley.edu (John Kawakami)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: RE: Possible GCR sale...  What is the real value of a Spectre GCR
Summary: I'm only considering a sale, not actually selling yet.
Message-ID: <42482@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 27 Jun 91 00:08:15 GMT
Sender: nobody@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: usa
Organization: :noitazinagrO
Lines: 47

I recently posted a short message asking if $300 is too much for a GCR.
It seems that it is actually not much to charge.  However, I have to
apologize to everyone who offered to buy it, as I am still just thinking
about selling it.  If I decide to sell it, I will hold an auction later
in the summer.

*************************************************************************

Things to think about re the Spectre GCR.

* Mac ROMS are very expensive now.  $250+ now.  This means fewer sales 
  for the Spectre which means that GBS must focus on other products to
  produce revenue.

* System 7.0 does not work on Spectre now.  It probably will eventually,
  knowing the way Dave Small works his magic.  But the new System will
  probably not be as compatible as 6.0.3 is for a while.

* On the plus side, a Spectre on a TT or SST030 is a cheap alternative
  to a Mac II.

* If you have a full blown mono ST system with a memory upgrade and a
  hard drive with free space, this is a cheap way to become a Mac.  If
  you need to get a hard drive or a ram upgrade kit, the price of "going
  mac" gets expensive fast (GCR needs 1 meg and a floppy, but 2 megs and
  ten megs of hard disk are closer to a usable minimum configuration.)
  The Mac Classic under the educational discount is under $1000 (I'm not
  sure how much) and it has full compatiblilty as well as giving you
  another CPU to hack on (sometimes it's very handy to have two machines).

* There is no SuperDrive for the GCR.  On the other hand, all disk accesses
  are faster than most macs' disk accesses.

# The GCR is usually very good to me.  It rarely ever crashes (under System
  6.0.5) and has let me run Microsoft Word 4.0, which seems to be a popular
  standard around campus.  I also did some programming work on it.  It 
  is a useful tool.  However, it is not as disk compatible as Dave Small
  would have you believe: it failed on the two drives I was using.  One was
  a late model TEAC, the other was an NEC (which is popular with 3rd party
  disk makers for some reason).  The TEAC never worked right, the NEC was
  hacked/fixed with instructions by Small.  It is supposed to do Mac disks
  correctly with other 3rd party disk drives.  

************************************************************************

John Kawakami                  kawakami@ocf.berkeley.edu
                               ucbvax!ocf.berkeley.edu!kawakami