Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!mtunx!whuts!homxb!houxa!shah1
From: shah1@houxa.UUCP (J.SHAH)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: My Amiga has a retarded brother...
Message-ID: <2859@houxa.UUCP>
Date: 25 Apr 88 17:24:47 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel
Lines: 41
Summary: VIC-20, Amiga

> 
>   Well now that this has been moved OUT of .tech I can add my favorite sick
>  suggestion:
> 
>   Get about 10 more and line them up across your street. They make great 
>  speed bumps :-)
> 
>   Uh oh.... Here comes the
> 
>   OW! Let go!  I dont like this fancy white coat!
> 
>   Help! Jane stop this crazy thing....
> 
Sounds like a very unkind remark about a CBM computer from CA
employee. I was in the Trenton Computer Fest yesterday and I saw 
people buying old VIC-20s with cassette drives and game cartidges
for $20 or so. One of the buyers was inquiring about a possible
memory upgrade for his newly acquired vic-20. 

The vic-20 is no Amiga but you could still find uses for it. How 
about using it for learning 6502 assembler or even Basic? 

My children's first computer was a C-64 and it still beats Amiga
in terms of popularity in my household. The kids do not want to
use it(Amiga) because it does not have a printer driver for my not so
unpopular printer. And the Amiga has not so good peripheral support.
For example, autoboot is normal stuff in the IBM and APPLE domain
and we always hear about the need for 1.3 to support it. There are
few very basic stuff that a computer in 1988 has to support i.e. 
autobooting harddisks and a large number of printers and the Amiga
does not support these very well. The technical gibberish about autoboot,
1.3, Chipram, kickstart makes the Amiga appear as a hackers computer
not a machine that any novice user can deal with.
As an Amiga user I feel CA peoples' time is better spent on these questions
not in badmouthing a piece of computing history: the VIC-20.

Shah Jahan
AT&T Bell Laboratories
HOlmdel, NJ 07733