Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!mupsy!liv-cs!sqrkl From: sqrkl@csvax.liv.ac.uk Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Byte is rubbish - the Archimedes sure ain't ! Message-ID: <2398@csvax.liv.ac.uk> Date: 3 Jun 88 10:06:23 GMT Lines: 40 Organisation: Computer Science CSVAX (VAX1), Liverpool University I think all Amiga (or any other innovative machine) owners should stop buying Byte now !!!! I stopped in about October 1987, because it was clear that Byte was licking up to IBM PCs and clones in the extreme. There's still a little on the Macintosh (that's only because it's the number 2 business machine in the USA, not because it's revolutionary, God forbid) and virtually nothing about what's happening here in the UK - which appears to be a lot more exciting than OS/2 or UN*X or yet another boring spreadsheet review. Witness the Acorn Archimedes. A 4 MIPS (30% faster than a crummy Compaq Deskpro 386 or a Mac II) RISC processor machine with an admittedly single- tasking OS (mult-tasking promised in about a year), an interpreted BASIC which looks like Pascal and runs FASTER than compiled Macintosh Turbo Pascal ! And you can buy the base model for about 800 pounds sterling (1500 dollars). Available now : ANSI C, Fortran, Pascal, Prolog, Lisp, Assembler (built into the BASIC), BASIC (this is superb, honest), MSDOS emulator (.8 speed of PC), Zarch (better than ANY Amiga game), hard disk that is the fastest I've ever seen, supports up to a 1024 * 1024 res if you attach a hi-res mono monitor, 8-channel stereo sound, 240 bytes of CMOS battery-backed RAM used for config- uration, a battery-backed real-time clock and a DOS that is much much faster than AmigaDROSS. Oh, but what a shame ! You can't buy the Archimedes in the USA. Sorry - you didn't like the BBC Micro much (which ran the world's fastest 8-bit interpreted BASIC and was/is still the best 8-bit machine I have ever seen... it made the Apple II look like a Mickey Mouse machine - which it is), so you'll probably hate the Archimedes - the reason being that you wish an American company could have brought out such a brilliant machine.... Sorry to harp on about this, but I thought you might like to know what all you American net people (and Byte !) have been missing in the last 6 months or so... Richard K. Lloyd, ****** This is a VAX 11/780 running VAX/VMS V4.5 ****** Computer Science Dept., * JANET : SQRKL@UK.AC.LIV.CSVAX * Liverpool University, * UUCP : {backbone}!mcvax!ukc!mupsy!liv-cs!SQRKL * Merseyside, England, * Internet : SQRKL%csvax.liv.ac.uk@cunyvm.cuny.edu * Great Britain. ******************************************************* "My opinions and those of the University of Liverpool are completely unrelated, so I'M THE CULPRIT if you feel offended by the above message - I just can't help moaning about Atari STs, PCs or clones, U**X, C, IBM mainframes, the list is endless..."