Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!eos!ames!amdahl!pacbell!lll-tis!oodis01!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wes
From: wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: NeXT announcement (was Re: Atari Workstation)
Summary: You're comparing apples and oranges again!
Message-ID: <245@obie.UUCP>
Date: 2 Nov 88 04:59:55 GMT
References: <1449@wayback.UUCP> <6528@pyr.gatech.EDU> <10019@cup.portal.com> <3f4a3cf4.14e07@gtephx.UUCP>
Organization: the Well of Souls
Lines: 55

In some posting, Chuck McManis said:
> The rumors of the '030 box are amusing, but unless they bought out
> SCO or something they will have a darn difficult time supporting it.
> Contemplating NeXT and Atari competing is downright humorous. But to
> be completely serious, Steve Jobs has no intention of selling his machines
> to university *students* which is what Atari would like to do, rather he
> sells them to the faculty. 

In article <3f4a3cf4.14e07@gtephx.UUCP>, covertr@gtephx.UUCP (Richard E. Covert) writes:
| I second Chuck's comments!! I worked at AT&T and helped design the AT&T 3B2
| and 3B5 computers (running UNIX of course). and the man power that went into
| those two computers is totally beyond any thing that Atari is capable of.

Well, now, don't sell old Uncle Jack and gang short.  If you read
Cringely's column closely, you will immediately determine that the specs
he quotes for the '030 (AWS??) have two serious flaws: not enough
memory, and not enough disk space.  These SHOULD both be easy to remedy
if the computer is designed intelligently, which is possible.  SIMM
sockets for RAM and a useable SCSI port on the back of the machine
aren't that hard to stick in the box.  It just takes money to make it
run.

Think of the difference in cost if the NeXT came with 1 Mb RAM instead
of 8, and without the optical disk.  You've just bagged $3,500 to $4,000
of the system cost right there!  Then you take off Steve Job's name, and
you're down to >>> $2000 <<< right?

| In fact, those 5 year old computers still have more horsepower then anything
| Atari is likely to produce. I worked for a year on the hardware and software
| of the  3B2 and can't believe that Atari will be better then Jobs.

A 3B2?  Get real!  A MicroVAX II (w/Ultrix) blows the 3B2 out of the
water, and the MV2 ain't no speed demon.  AT&T should stick to building
phone switching equipment, but then of course, they have GTE do that for
them now, don't they :-)   (BTW, I'm a fellow GTE* employee!)

| Oh well, maybe I will be wrong, because an Atari computer might be cheaper (in
| all meanings of that word) then the NeXT computer.

Yup, I'm sure it will.  But then again, how many of us have $6,500 to go
plunk down on a computer today?  On the other hand, how many of us can
scrape up $2,000, realizing we will need to add more memory, more disk
space, etc to be really pleased with the performance.  It makes
decisions for Christmas, birthdays, etc. real easy.  "My birthday?  Buy
however many 256K SIMMs you can afford!" or "Gee, a 100 Mb SCSI disk
would sure look nice under the tree this year!" or "Pop, I'm taking
operating systems and software engineering both this quarter!  I REALLY
need a tape drive to back up all this stuff!" :-) :-)

* GTE = Good Time Electronics, of course!
-- 
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell

"How come he didn't put `I think' at the end of it?" - James P. Hogan