by Com of Brainstorm
HARDWARE at the Amiga90 exposition
Most firms sold their products at the Amiga90 with about 10-25 per cent under the normal price. One of the most impressive attraction was a harddrive form Gigatron. It's an internal harddrive only for the A500 ! Gigatron says : "The smallest harddrive in the world!". It's a square with each side is 2.5". What are the qualities of this mini harddrive? The "Giga Fix GT 20" has the following possibilities: autoboot, 20 MByte, on the average 23 ms time for a grip, transfer speed 400 KByte per second. You weren't able to buy this already on the Amiga90. They couldn't tell us the price yet. I suppose they are still testing it but it'll be soon on the market.
An establishment from Italy sold 100 3,5" Disks single-sided double density for 78.- SFr. Two Atari-Emulators were at the exposition as well. One without hardware expansion. We couldn't test it but I spoke with a software developer for Atari (probably his most enormous mistake in his life). He was testing it. His arguement after the first testing phase was that most programms run without problem (not like on the C64-Software-Emulator). And that with an acceptable speed.
Like on the Amiga90 in Cologne was again Comp-U-Save from New York there. This is a buisness which sells almost everything very cheap. Their leading sentence: "Software does not have to be expensive to be good!" They sell also public domain disks. What they sell : Joysticks, harddrives, pd, memory expansions, freezers, in- and external drives, chips, sony-disks, and so on...
Certainly Golem was also there. Two beautiful girls gave informations for their own productions. But you couldn't ask any technical details because the girls didn't know a lot about computers. But they were able to give me a price list. On the price list was the normal price and the price for the exposition in SFr.,DM,FF,Lire,Schilling. A 3.5" Amiga Drive cost 149.- SFr. or 167.- DM intern for A2000 142.- SFr. They sold of course also memory expansions, harddrives, filecard systems and so on. One coder of Golem was there. We looked a bit over his shoulder. He typed a colour-copper-list in with dc.w instead of generating it! Orlando and his friend Outlaw asked if they could test a drive. The coder was in panic. He thought that could be very dangerous for his loved drive. When they asked him for any technical details in fact something about step delay he was perplexed, helpless...
A company with only a price list on a small sheet of paper called Rossmoeller Handshake Gmbh sold a A500 512k memory expansion with a clock for 98.- Sfr. 2 MByte (clock internal) 349.- SFr. For your A1000 you could buy a 8 MB Ram expansion with 2 MB on it for 449.- SFr. the same for the A2000 cost 399.- SFr.
Dynamic establishment sold some Hurricane cards for the A2000 with 68020 and 68030 prozessors and arithmitic co-prozessors 68881 with 14 Mhz and the 68882 with 28 Mhz. The card with 68020 and 68881 cost 990.- SFr. another card with 68030, 68882 and 1 MB Ram expansion cost 3250.- SFr. One Hurricane Card was available for the A500 with 68020, 68881, 1MB for 1490.- SFr. Exists also for A1000 but with price modification.
Somewhere I saw some A2000 with 40-50 Mhz prozessor speed ! But I can't remember which firm it was and if it was only a testing phase or not. That was the most important on hardware at the Amiga90 exposition. Their weren't any well-known software houses.
This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #5" by Brainstorm 1990.
Some content may refer to activities that are illegal in some countries. BitFellas does not support such activity.
Addresses and other contact information were only valid when this magazine was originally published, in june of 1990.
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