On Mar 4, 10:20=A0am, fairwa...@... (Derek Lyons) wrote:
> Earl_Colby_Pottinger wrote:
> >Base memory would be 1MB instead of the 256K as it first shipped on
> >the Amiga. =A0The Atari ST shipped with 512K but you need at-least 1 MB
> >to have a clear advantage over the IBM PC for business programs.
>
> And 1MB of memory would make extraordinarily expensive. =A0Just like the
> Apple's and Mac's of OTL, cheap PC's would push it off the market.
>
> In the time frame specified, computers often shipped with less memory
> than they were notionally capable of handling because memory was
> expensive.
True and not true. The first thing anyone who bought an Amiga 1000
with 256K of memory did at that time was buy the 256K expansion within
a week of using their machine.
How about this idea, ship the machine with 256K of RAM, but all the
sockets needed to expand to 1 MB of RAM already installed in the
machine sitting on a plug-able daughter-board?
I remember buy sockets at this time at 10 cents each, but the RAM
chips at $18+ each, big price savings.
24 sockets at .10 each =3D $2.40
24 256K chips at $18.00 each =3D $432.00
Yes, I know the PCB, caps and PC socket will add some more cost
always.
Why a daughter-board, (1) keep the non-techies away from the main PC
board, (2) debugging bad installs are easier, (3) without DIMMs there
probably is not enough area for the sockets on the main PCB.
This basic idea did work okay for the Apple I and Apple II mother-
board, the original IBM PC worked like this but only expanded to 256K
at this time frame. And I saw third-party daughter-boards for both the
original Mac and the Amiga 1000 by the end of 1985.
If people could expand an (Amiga/Atari/Mac) type of machine 256K at a
time by just plugging in a bank of chips you would see the demand
explode. I did a lot of the piggy-back expansion of the Amiga 1000 to
768K in 1986-7 when the hack to do this came out for members of my
computer club. Until then many companies still did not believe people
would want more than 512K in a personal machine.
Move the *EASY* memory expansion period back 2-3 years and these
machines would have a leg up over the IBM PCs of the same time frame.
Memory at that time was no cheaper for PCs (no/few DIMMS) and a
machine that could handle bigger spreadsheets/in memory data than PCs
would have given them a run for the money.
Just look at the original Mac, it had many limits but it's biggest was
the fixed and sealed memory, if it had a simple slot to plug in a
memory expansion up to 4 MBs it could have probably doubled it's
market share.
The original Atari STs, also did not have a memory expansion (it was a
ROM slot for rams with no 'WRITE line) which also limited which
markets it could enter.
The Amiga 1000's Zorro port needed too many support chips to work
properly (I hacked my static memory expansion on this port not to need
them, but I sure would not want to support that design if I sold it to
anyone) and the expansion port on the front only supported another
256K, it should had dropped the ROM/Game signs and supported adding
768K of RAM instead. Real serious expansion to 8 MBs were available
for the Zorro port but that costed *REAL* money. :)
What I am suggesting is aside from having better general hardware
designs what was really needed to beat the PC was ease of access to
adding more direct memory than the PC supported at that time. That
windows closed when 386s mother boards started to ship that supported
more than 1 MB on the motherboard, till then a different machine with
a lower cost to expand memory would have an advantage.
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