Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!hao!gatech!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
From: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: New User Seeks the Straight Dope on the A500
Message-ID: <349@sas.UUCP>
Date: 22 Feb 88 18:57:17 GMT
References: <1326@edison.GE.COM> <5224@well.UUCP> <364@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Reply-To: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Organization: SAS Institute Inc Cary, NC
Lines: 25
Keywords: Disk drives, Memory Expansions, PD software and prices

I've got an A1000 which I've had for over a year.  I still have one floppy
and no hard disk (although I'm working on that).  After a couple of months
I got 2.5 meg (2 meg of expansion ram).  Even the 512k-one floppy is quite
usable for things like C development (with Lattice).  You have to work a
bit to get things configured, but it quite definately can be done.  With
an entire meg, it should be a breeze (or quite usable anyway).  Of course,
you have to give up things like line and spot demos and the Amiga talking,
but I doubt anybody uses those after the first week anyway.

With 2.5 meg, it is quite fine.  Of course, power outages are a pain, 
since it takes me about a half-hour to restore everything to its former
state if I had, say, TeX and vt100 and PreView (for TeX) and AEdit all
going when I crashed, but it can be done.

BTW, I've got a little program called `OneSwap' that copies floppies with a
single swap if you have sufficient ram.  This makes life with one floppy a
lot more livable.  I haven't seen any others floating around to do this.  It
is purely CLI and not all that smart (it just says no-can-do if there is not
not sufficient memory left; that's what *I* wanted it to do, and *I* wrote
it).  But please e-mail me if you are interested; if there is enough interest
I will look into posting it.
-- 
                                                         --Brian.
(Brian T. Schellenberger)				 ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts

DISCLAIMER:  Whereas Brian Schellenberger (hereinafter "the party of the first