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From: farren@hoptoad.uucp (Mike Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Great big huge floppy disk?
Message-ID: <1619@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Mon, 5-Jan-87 02:15:25 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1619
Posted: Mon Jan  5 02:15:25 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Jan-87 06:43:53 EST
References: <346@csustan.UUCP> <5396@ukma.ms.uky.csnet> <1172@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> <1610@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: farren@hoptoad.UUCP (Mike Farren)
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 28

In article <1610@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>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.

There's probably a bit of truth in that - after all, the Amiga DID start out
as a game machine.  However, I think that the bigger reason is simply that
at the time the machine was designed, there were no "cheap IBM compatible
hard disk drives" - a 10M drive cost approx. $1K.  The development of a
very large market was what got the drives for IBMs down to a reasonable price
in the first place.  Also, the idea of using IBM compatible controllers
falls down when you consider that all of them are designed to the IBM I/O
bus, which I would HATE to see in a 68000 machine.  As far as SCSI, it's
worth noting that Amiga hard drives are approaching SCSI drives pricing
pretty rapidly.



-- 
----------------
                 "... if the church put in half the time on covetousness
Mike Farren      that it does on lust, this would be a better world ..."
hoptoad!farren       Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"