Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!cme-durer!brickman
From: brickman@cme-durer.ARPA (Jonathan E. Brickman)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Amiga or PC-AT ?
Message-ID: <554@gort.cme-durer.ARPA>
Date: 2 Aug 88 21:14:30 GMT
References: <1820006@hpuamsa.UUCP>
Reply-To: brickman@rosie (Jonathan E. Brickman)
Organization: The National Bureau of Standards
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In article <1820006@hpuamsa.UUCP> marco@hpuamsa.UUCP (Marco
Lesmeister) writes:
>I am thinking of buying an AT-clone with some graphics card in it,
>or maybe a commodore amiga would suit me just fine, but then I could
>not make use of the mountain of DOS applications currently available.
>
>So, what should I do, should I buy a cheap AT with an expensive
>monitor and an expensive graphics card (which one should I buy?), or
>should I buy an amiga with the disadvantage that I can't expand the
>graphics capabillities.
>
>So to all you PC and amiga fans out there, I ask you which solution
>is better?

I suspect the answer hinges on just exactly how much $$$ you've got
available.  I would ordinarily vote heavily against the Amiga, because
of three things:
(1) Awkward and rigid color mapping arrangement.
(2) Very limited software availability.
(3) Unreliable operating system.

However, seeing that an Amiga would end up costing quite a bit less for
similar capability, you might want to consider it.  Please bear in mind,
though, that if you were to go with an AT with a VGA, you would be buying
a _very_ well-supported machine with a very polished and multiply-compatible
graphics card running two popular operating systems (PC-DOS and OS/2, with
probable future X-Windows on larger machines).  Whereas if you were
to buy and Amiga, you are buying outdated hardware (68000 at low speed --
almost nothing uses those things anymore), a cheaply built and unexpandable
graphics capability (uses interlaced graphics -- hard on the eyes at
max resolution), an operating system which crashes roughly three times as
frequently as PC-DOS 2.0 (3.3 is much better yet) with corresponding loss
of data, work, temper, and possibly disk data, and very limited
expandability (limited simply because very few companies build the stuff).

If I were you I would go for one of the newest 80386CX chips (CX I think --
I'm talking about a new version of the 80386 chip put out by Intel which
is 1/4 the cost at half the speed, but all the compatibility).  That way
you get all the future expandability and compatibility which exists short of
a pure IBM PS/2 or Sun 386i (a beautiful, extremely fast, but rather
expensive Unix->Windows->PC-DOS machine; runs faster than the Compaq
Deskpro, and that in PC-DOS running OVER Unix!  $10,000 up), at minimum
price.
||Jonathan E. Brickman