Message-ID: <3725@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Apr-84 22:32:35 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.3725
Posted: Wed Apr  4 22:32:35 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Apr-84 22:32:35 EST
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 26

I was wondering if anyone had any more news/rumors about the expansion
capabilities of the XL line.  In this month's (April) COMPUTE!, Bill Wilkinson
writes in his Insight:ATARI column about a supposed April Fool's joke.
He writes about an intelligent peripheral interface (card cage) 
which could support high-speed modems, parallel printer
interfaces, music synthesizers, parallel disk drives (which would run app.
10 times faster than the current serial ones), and even a winchester hard
disk drive.  He claims that this system would be second in expansion
capability only to the Apple II systems.  Has anyone heard anything about this
expansion interface?  As a side note, if one bought one of the current serial
disk drives, is it possible to take advantage of the increased speed of the
parallel port, or is the "serialness" an inherent property of these disk
drives?
Replies to the net would probably be most beneficial.


Jerry Zarycky
USENET:
{cornell,uw-beaver,linus,ihnp4,allegra,decvax,floyd}!utcsrgv!drz
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ARPA:	drz%Toronto@CSNet-Relay

P.S.
	Has anyone seen Robotron:2084, Pengo, or Donkey Kong Jr. for the
Atari home computers yet???

Message-ID: <1604@tekig1.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Apr-84 22:20:20 EST
Article-I.D.: tekig1.1604
Posted: Thu Apr  5 22:20:20 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Apr-84 05:35:35 EST
Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR
Lines: 14

X
     Isnt this the same guy who described the Cobol cartridge to plug into
the atari, last april issue?  The whole thing was a joke, and I think the
very last line of the article said so.  The basic situation is that using
the 19.2k baud provides a serious upper limit on the I/O rates.  This is not
as bad as might be expected, as most micros are obtaining about 5k baud even
when using a parallel interface, if you dont believe it, time downloading
about 20k bytes into the box and see what happens.  The floppy firmware is
just not tuned for the real speed that the controller can support.  There was
consideration of a parallel interface to the atari line, but looking at the
advantages, the idea was shelved.  (This was an independent hw outfit.)
To upgrade the current drives would require ripping out the disk controller
card in each drive and replacing it, not a cheap option.
Don Taylor