Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-lcc!ptsfa!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Great big huge floppy disk?
Message-ID: <1610@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Sat, 3-Jan-87 04:35:54 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1610
Posted: Sat Jan  3 04:35:54 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Jan-87 09:38:23 EST
References: <346@csustan.UUCP> <5396@ukma.ms.uky.csnet> <1172@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 24

In article <1172@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>, grr@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (George Robbins) writes:
> >Yeah.  Why do Amiga compatable hard disk drives cost THREE TIMES AS MUCH
> >as the same capacity IBM PC drives (with controller).
> Mostly because there are more PC compatible drive sets sold, by a factor of
> 30-300 thousand.  There are many vendors of controller boards and chip sets,
> both domestic and asian.  The market is very competitive and the controllers,
> and more so the drives are sold at a very small profit margin.
> 
> The people selling Amiga drives are trying to find a way to get some return on
> their investment on initial quantites of a few hundred units...

The question is, why didn't the Amiga designers build it so you could
plug in all those cheap IBM compatible hard disk drives?  Like by including a
standard disk controller chip on the motherboard?  (The chips, connectors
and all that would be cheap, since they are commercial parts used in 
all the IBM clones.)  At least they could have done a SCSI port like Mac Plus.

I suspect the answer is:  because they thought they were building
a "rock-shooter" (game machine) rather than a real computer.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   gnu@ingres.berkeley.edu
  I forsee a day when there are two kinds of C compilers: standard ones and 
  useful ones ... just like Pascal and Fortran.  Are we making progress yet?
	-- ASC:GUTHERY%slb-test.csnet