Author: fatrakoon (host62-7-34-119.btinternet.com)
Date: 10-13-2001 22:30
I dont think that people should judge the machines ( ST ) too much, neither should they judge the Falcon too harshly either!
Let us not forget, that when they came out, they were pretty bloody powerful.
The ACSI port has been mentioned, but remember that when the ST came out, even PC's only had the same thing, the old MFM / RLL drives I mean, and Macs had no HD at all!
Yes, Amigas did have Hard disks, but they were in the same boat as us in that you could not just buy a SCSI drive and chuck it in could you ( or could you? )
ST's could use 4MB of RAM, and you surely must remember Bill Gates word of wisdom at the time "640k Should be more than enough for anybody".
As I said about the Falcon too. when it came out, what was there in the PC market?
386 processors that what, and I have yet to see a 386 beat a Falcon for power, oh yes, I have a 66mhz 386 in the cluster somewhere, but what the hell can that do that is better than the Falcon? I cannot think of anything that I really care about!
The falcon even beats most 486's too, so I think you are being a tad harsh on the Falcon.
Dont get me wrong though, there is an endless list of things they could have done oh-so easily on any of their range to improve the machines.
In the end though, atari went down the pan because of one main thing
Us, the users
Like It or not, the biggest problem is ourselves.
WE were all to stingy to upgrade our bits wernt we?
Look at how long it took for many users with single sides drives to actually get a double sided one! thats how it starts - the Magazines had to made dual formatted disks for ages, just for those moaners, and it cost us.
The same with the software, everyone moaned when software wanted 1MB to run instead of 512k, thats how it all started, and now look at the atari!
admittedly, the prices were, and still are, the biggest problem of all!!!
I can build up a 1.4Ghz AMD PC for the price of an Atari ST, and in fact, while I was saving up for my TT's memory expander ( Without any memory by the way ) I actually built up several PC's while I was saving without touching the saving money!!!
Hang on, I have moved onto a different rant now, I will stop there.
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