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From: grunau_b@husc4.harvard.edu (justin grunau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: GDOS distribution
Message-ID: <703@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Nov-86 12:35:03 EST
Article-I.D.: husc6.703
Posted: Fri Nov 28 12:35:03 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Nov-86 20:28:44 EST
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Reply-To: grunau_b@husc4.UUCP (justin grunau)
Organization: Harvard Science Center
Lines: 33


Yes (in reply to Vicarious Oyster), your points are all well-taken.  I am
not trying to be selfish, here.  I recognize that Atari is selling the
machine dirt-cheap, and that they have to recoup their R&D costs as well as
their current manufacturing costs.  I was thinking about cheap mail-order
manufacturers the other day:  for instance, PC's Limited sells (at the top
of their line), a fully-decked out fully AT compatible for $1800, where
fully-decked out means 8MHz, 1MB RAM, 1.25M floppy, 20M hard disk, ports,
clock/calendar w/ battery backup, hercules-compatible monitor interface,
and monochrome monitor.  For a monochrome ST with 20M hard disk, one would
pay $1800 retail, $1450 typical mail-order discount ($800 mono. ST, $650
Supra or Atari 20M).  So we are talking comparable prices.  Yet PC's limited
provides very high-quality service, including FREE monthly ROM upgrades.
Of course, one ends up with a boring (though admittedly powerful) AT.  I
realized, however, that the difference is that PC's Limited is capitalizing
on IBM's R&D, whereas Atari (even though they did the smart thing and went
with GEM) had to shell out a lot of capital to design the ST in the first
place, and are still (I hope!) spending bucks to debug the OS.

So let no one (esp. Atari) imagine I am trying to be unfair to their side
of the story.  I would be happy if they sold GDOS at a reasonable fee, and
the debugged ROMs (free of blitter) at a nominal fee.

For right NOW, I would be happy if I could get some **official** information
from Atari on whether there are even going to BE fixes to the 40-folder
limit, non-booting from HD (at least allow an AUTO folder on the HD, like
you currently allow the .ACC files to be read from drive C:), and whether
either GDOS will be available to non-developers or that we can really be
registered as developers w/o their compiler.


									JJMG
							Harvard  Linguistics