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From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: IBM vs AMIGA cost
Message-ID: <10129@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 12 Mar 90 22:59:34 GMT
References: <5527@ur-cc.UUCP> <4251@vaxwaller.UUCP> <4422@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <4254@vaxwaller.UUCP>
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 39

In article <4254@vaxwaller.UUCP> richc@vaxwaller.UUCP (Rich Commins) writes:
>In article <4422@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>, barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) writes:

>> 	Faster than WHICH Amiga??  Certainly an 80386 with coprocessor
>> is faster than a stock 68000 Amiga!  But I doubt it is "5 times faster"

>No I'm comparing this to my AMIGA 1000. [...] Four years ago a dollar was worth more!

Imagine that!  And back in '79, I payed $1200 for a 16K Exidy Sorcerer
system that gave me a 60x30 character display and stored its programs on
cassette tapes at 1200 Baud.  Way back in '79, a dollar was worth even
more than in '84 or '90.  But computer technology changes far faster than
just about anything.  Whatever you buy today, if you can even upgrade it
to what's available in five years, you'll be lucky.  If you can upgrade it
for less than it would cost to throw out your hardware and start over
from scratch, you'll be real lucky.  If you can still use your software
(which soon eats up more of your money than the hardware, unless you
write all your own) on the new or upgraded machine while taking full
advantage of the new configuration, you should really thank whomever made
such an amazing thing possible.

>A comparable AMIGA system today would include an accelerator board,
>flicker fixer and a 65 meg HD and would cost around $7000.00, and 
>would still only have a screen resolution of 640x400,16 color.

As pointed out, a new Amiga system with all that won't cost $7,000.
The end result won't give you VGA graphics; then again, your 16MHz
PClone has a bad expansion bus and slow, CPU driven hard disk.  You'd
spend more upgrading an A1000 to today's standards, but then again,
you'd spend alot upgrading any 1985 computer to 1990 standards.  And
at least with the upgraded A1000, all those boxes of software on 
your shelf still run, maybe even all at once.

>Rich Commins   (415)939-2400				          \  /\

-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Systems Engineering) "The Crew That Never Rests"
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                    Too much of everything is just enough