INFO-ATARI16 Digest         Sun,  5 Nov 89       Volume 89 : Issue 608
 
Today's Topics:
           >RE> Atrocious Atari Dealer (Zephyr/Microworld)
                      Fast Mandelbrot Generator
                            Fractal Magic
                  Hard Drive RLL info... Good Deal?
                        Prolog 10, Common LISP
                       TT's VME-slots (3 msgs)
                    TT Unix, X Windows and slots.
                        Want a fast Atari ST.
                     WordPerfect for the Atari ST
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 89 16:31 CST
From: jeff beer <UUCJEFF%ECNCDC.BITNET@UICVM.uic.edu>
Subject: >RE> Atrocious Atari Dealer (Zephyr/Microworld)
 
>
>Once home, I was filing the receipt away when I noticed that the total on
>the receipt and the total on the charge slip didn't match...  Upon closer
>inspection, I discovered that I couldn't decipher the receipt at all!
>
I would protest this with your credit card company, showing the original
receipt being different than the charge ticket.  It is obvious Microworld is
a shady outfit, and you should use all avenues to put persure on them.
 
I will definitely stay away from Zephyr.
 
Jeff
 
------------------------------
 
Date: Sun,  5 Nov 89  22:02:13 EDT
From: BAILEYS%FSU.BITNET@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Fast Mandelbrot Generator
 
This is mainly addressed to M.S. Powell, author of the fast Mandelbrot
Generator available at archive-server%panarthea@sun.com, but I would
certainly like to hear anyone's suggestions.
 
Sir, I have downloaded your program, and I love it!  It is incredibly fast,
which makes working with it much more fun.  I am trying to create a stand-
alone demo of Mandelbrot tendancies, something like a slide show of various
zooms into the set.  I wish to use your Mandelbrot Generator to get the
images (I like the color-cycling mode), and so I obtained DEGASNAP from
the aforementioned archive-server.  It takes input in the form <ctrl>+<alt>+
<keys a-z> to create a DEGAS file DEGAS_x.PIX (x=letter, X=resolution).
Unfortunatelly, the two applications do not like each other, the Degas
dumper does not work within your program.  I am not familiar with M68000
Assembler, and would not even know where to start to make these two things
work (or for that matter, where to add such a routine to your code).  Would
it be possible to give me some hints?  Or perhaps update your code to inclue
a screen-save function?  It might be possible to rig your code so that theTSR De
Ram could see the keys.  I do not mind doing the work
myself (with your permission, of course), but I am not sure I could!
 
Bob Marley
 
FSU Comp Sci
 
P.S.  I also tried a DEGAS screen saver called DUMPIT, and it did not
      work either.
 
 
------------------------------
 
Date: Sun,  5 Nov 89  22:00:30 EDT
From: BAILEYS%FSU.BITNET@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU
Subject: Fractal Magic
 
I have two questions:
 
    1.  Does anyone out there have Fractal Magic?  I have read that the
        ST version is superb, but this was before the comercial release.
 
    2.  I used to read this digest via bitnet, but now I subscribe to the
        comp.sys.atari.st newsgroup.  Unfortunatelly, my university will
        not post messages to newsgroups (on that machine).  Is Info-atari16
        and comp.sys.atari.st the one and same?  If so, will this post
        show up on comp.sys.atari.st also?
 
Bob Marley
 
FSU Comp Sci
 
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 5 Nov 89 10:40:40 GMT
From:
 cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxa.cso.uiuc.edu!uxf.cs
o.uiuc.edu!rjk752@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Hard Drive RLL info... Good Deal?
 
        I have a 50meg ICD Fast drive with a Host adapter.  ICD has a nice
hard drive utilities package with cache that makes it the fastest hard drive
I've used.  In response to your question, I'm very happy with it so far.
        Your dealer may have been talking about an imbedded SCSI controller
vs. a separate SCSI controller and drive.  The imbedded SCSI's are faster,
cheaper, and slightly more dependable.  The separate SCSI's have the advantage
of being able to drive other hard drive mechanisms later on when they are
added tyour expandable case.  With imbedded controllers, each add on
drive has to have an imbedded controller also.  40ms access time is very
good for a drive that isn't imbedded though, so I'm not sure if this is what
he means.
        I got my hard drive from Joppa, and it was about $700.  List
price for the FA.50.ST is $899.  The 30meg lists for $800.  All in all,
you seem to be getting a good deal from the distance I'm standing at.
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 6 Nov 89 02:54:00 GMT
From: silver!jkain@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
Subject: Prolog 10, Common LISP
 
/* ---------- "Prolog 10, Common LISP" ---------- */
I address this especially to continental European ST users:
 
Auf Deutschland gibt es ein Prolog 10 oder ein Common LISP?
Ich kenne Cambridge LISP und MProlog, aber sie sind nicht, wass ich
suche.
 
Es tut mir Leid, dass mein Deutsch nicht so gut sei, aber weil soviel
ST Gebraucher Deutsch sind, glaubte ich, dass sie hier English immer
lesen nicht mussen woellten.
 
Danke,
 
     David Megginson, Centre for Medieval Studies, Toronto
/* End of text from silver:comp.sys.atari.st */
 
Well isn't *this* a fine how-do-you-do?  Even if we live in the U.S.
perhaps we would like to know what you're saying.
 
Sabe Vd. que digo?   Yo espero que Vd. no comprende que digo aqui y tambien
te pongas muy paranoioso :-)
 
Ciao.
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 5 Nov 89 17:16:48 GMT
From: cbmvax!atha!rwa@rutgers.edu  (Ross Alexander)
Subject: TT's VME-slots
 
gl8f@astsun8.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
>A VME slot isn't like a PC-BUS slot. It's faster and more expensive. You
>put quite different things in them.
 
The buss is faster, agreed.  But no law says that the _cards_ have to be
faster.  A modem, for instance, is inherently slow, so insert a few dozen
wait states - who cares?  Take your time about asserting VPA :-)
 
>By the way, I'm typing this on a Sun 3/80. It has room for SIMM memory,
>a SCSI port, and serial ports. It's a little less expandable than the
>TT/P....
>> [Richard Covert] But the TT Plastic
>> is just another closed, limited support, game machine to me.
>Much like the Sun 3/80, eh? Wow, great games.
 
You neglect to mention the ethernet connector on the back of the 3/80,
which excuses a multitude of sins.  You also neglect to mention the
slots in your server.  This is being written on a DEC VS2000, an even
more restricted machine than a 3/80 - but I use the peripherals in a
heavily-slotted 3/160 and 11/785 all the time, transparently, over the
ethernet.  So IMHO, the vs2000 doesn't need the slots; it needs
servers ;-).  Servers are just what the average home user of a TT/<n>
doesn't have access to.
 
BTW, the Sun has one other thing not available to the TT user: a
_real_ OS.  SysV doesn't cut it, and I can't really get too excited
about any version of TOS/GEM.  Along with a real OS, one gets a very
nice environment for developement, or just getting work done.  SunOS
4.x is a bit of a pig, tho - I'll take 3.5 any day ;~).
 
        Ross
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 5 Nov 89 17:02:12 GMT
From: cbmvax!atha!rwa@rutgers.edu  (Ross Alexander)
Subject: TT's VME-slots
 
koreth@panarthea.ebay.sun.com (Steven Grimm) writes:
>An IBM-PC card bus is not a VME bus.
 
Agreed.
 
>VME cards are much more expensive to make.
 
Why?  The connectors?  OK, but the connectors represent perhaps only 10%
of the manufacturing costs of an "interesting" card.  The rest of the
technology is identical.
 
>An internal VME modem card would end up costing over a thousand
>dollars, I'd guess.
 
Don't think anyone plans to get rich selling them @ that price!
There would be no market.
 
>And as someone else touched on, you won't have to wait for TT-specific
>VME cards.  VME is a standard that's been around for years, and you can
>already buy lots of VME products, from D/A converters to memory to high-
>speed I/O controllers to video cards to multiple serial-port boards to...
>But they don't come cheap, unfortunately.
 
I agree completely about that.  But consider why: VME is currently an
industrial specialist market.  If it became a consumer/business
market, the usual economies of scale and competitive market forces
would drive the prices down to affordable ranges in a pretty
deterministic fashion.  It might take a year or three, but it would
happen, at least for the most popular boards (which would be modems,
clever video hacks, memory, ethernet, high performance disk
controllers, probably some other things that haven't been invented
yet...).  The market just isn't big enough right now, and it's
fragmented because these cards are going into a large number of
dissimilar software environments.  Given a unified market, things
would start to snowball (I sincerely wish).
 
        Ross
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 6 Nov 89 00:39:41 GMT
From:
 cs.utexas.edu!samsung!aplcen!haven!uvaarpa!hudson!astsun8.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl
8f@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu  (Greg Lindahl)
Subject: TT's VME-slots
 
In article <1215@atha.AthabascaU.CA> rwa@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Ross Alexander)
 writes:
>gl8f@astsun8.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
>>A VME slot isn't like a PC-BUS slot. It's faster and more expensive. You
>>put quite different things in them.
>
>The buss is faster, agreed.  But no law says that the _cards_ have to be
>faster.  A modem, for instance, is inherently slow, so insert a few dozen
>wait states - who cares?  Take your time about asserting VPA :-)
 
You're missing the overall argument. VME slots and PC slots both cost
extra money. One of the strategies Atari has always used is that you
should NOT sell the customer a slot he won't use, because that's
wasted money. Ever wonder why the first "open" Mac had lots of slots,
but yet most "open" Mac's sold today only have a few? It's because Joe
Average User doesn't need many slots because MOST expansions don't
require one.
 
Modem? Plug it into a serial port. Memory? Plug it into the
motherboard.  Video comes standard. Hard disk on SCSI. This is what
Joe Average User needs.
 
Ethernet is the last thing. The TT/P doesn't come with this standard
(?), so you can either put it on SCSI (as in the various Mac versions,
which someone has running on the ST already?) or use your one slot for
that. The TT/P does come with serial networking, which might be fast
enough for Joe Average.
 
>>> [Richard Covert] But the TT Plastic
>>> is just another closed, limited support, game machine to me.
>>Much like the Sun 3/80, eh? Wow, great games.
>
>You neglect to mention the ethernet connector on the back of the 3/80,
>which excuses a multitude of sins.
 
You miss the point again. Richard claims that a "serious business system"
must have zillions of slots. The counterargument is that most workstations
don't need slots, if you have Ethernet and SIMMs and SCSI. The TT/P has
this, with an ethernet card. And you can use the TT/X or whatever it's
called as your fileserver.
 
You don't need zillions of slots on all computers. And Richard still
won't be able to find a fast modem to plug into a slot anytime soon.
 
;-)
 
> Servers are just what the average home user of a TT/<n>
>doesn't have access to.
 
Right, and a HOME USER with a TT/P doesn't need the things you plug into
lots of slots. Why should a HOME USER then waste money on slots they won't
use?
 
------
Greg Lindahl
gl8f@virginia.edu                                             I'm not the NRA.
 
------------------------------
 
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 89 14:57:24 EST
From: Martin Stein <ATT3B%UCONNVM.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: TT Unix, X Windows and slots.
 
If the TT/X will run Unix (SysV or BSD), then it will run X-
Windows. X-Windows are public domain and there are enough
people out there able to port X-Windows.
 
If there are slots (>1) they will be used. The ST has no slots
and the ST Hardware "hackers" found thousands of ways of getting
something into the small plastic keyboard/cpu box.
 
The biggest problem, however, of the TT is the price. I really don't
care about the CPU (intel or motorola) as long as the machine runs Unix,
because i don't do any assembly language programming anyway (You don't
want to do this under Unix - no portability, no fun). So the TT will have
a hard stand against '386 Unix machines, which are down to about $4000 *now*.
In the newest Byte are adds for ?$5000 '486 machines! And that price will
get lower, too. With the $5000 announcement for the german TT/X, the price
is a little bit too high already now. And the TT/X will probably avail-
able early '91.
 
AND there are some programs for MSDOS machines, that the Atari boxes do
not have. There is no real Scheme for the Atari and others i'd like
to see.
 
 
Martin Stein
 
att3b@uconnvm.bitnet
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 4 Nov 89 19:54:56 GMT
From: eru!luth!sunic!Urd!newsuser@bloom-beacon.mit.edu  (Ralph Haglund)
Subject: Want a fast Atari ST.
 
Expires:
Sender:
Reply-To:
Followup-To:
Distribution: all
Organization: Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden
Keywords:
 
I have seen a number of 16MHz cards mentioned. Has there been any
comparison among them? I know about the German accelerator card, but
that one has no space for math chip. Is there any well functioning card
with 8 or more kbytes of cache memory and math chip? I have heard about
Turbo16 - place for math chip? Price/where can I order it if so?
I am also slightly mystified that it should go faster with 100ns ROMs.
I thought it was 16MHz only for CPU and cache memory, going down to 8 MHz
externally. How does that work???
 
|-------------------------------------------------------------|
|  Want to talk to me? Try:                                   |
|  QRALPH@SELDC51  ||  QRALPH@SELDC52  ||  qralph@dna.lth.se  |
|  My name? In official Sweden it is: 4.901.185.654 (secret)  |
|  Anywhere else: Ralph Haglund                               |
|  Disclaimer: If it works, it's out of date.                 |
|_____________________________________________________________|
 
------------------------------
 
Date: 5 Nov 89 18:50:27 GMT
From: attcan!utgpu!watmath!watdragon!lion!djjouellette@uunet.uu.net  (Daniel JJ
 Ouellette)
Subject: WordPerfect for the Atari ST
 
Just a short question.
 
This summer I phoned W.P. to ask them if version 5 is out for the ST.
The person in custumer support (Atari section) said that they had no
plans on releasing it.
 
Is this the "new" version of W.P. everyone keeps talking about, and if
so, what do they want for it?
 
thanks, Danny
 
.dpt
 
ps ignore garbage at bottem of screen, .sig is on fritz
 
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End of INFO-ATARI16 Digest V89 Issue #608
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