¢Reprinted from XIO3 the GARDEN CITY ACE - CANADA Jul/Aug 1993 NEWSLETTER and the OL' HACKERS NEWSLETTER Sep/Oct 1993, with thanks.¢¢¢THE BEST COMPUTER¢by Douglas Skrecky¢¢ What's better a 486 powerhouse with 8 Megs of ram, a 100 Meg hard disk, Super VGA monitor and a Laser Printer... or an Atari 800XL with a Panasonlic 1080 Dot Matrix Printer?...¢¢ Before a tidal wave of laughter erupts, perhaps we should weigh the merits of these two choices objectively just in case the obvious winner should prove to be have feet of clay.¢¢ What can an Atari 800XL do? Well, you and a friend could play Angleworm with it, which just happens to be the best public domain two player game ever invented.¢¢ What can a 486 do? If you were an accountant you could play Dbase IV, which I hear is lots of fun for these people, but unfortunately not for anyone else. The Atari can run an excellent PD shoot-em-up game called Gauntlet. The 486 can help you to balance your checkbook, which is real easy seeing that it would be empty if you bought a 486. The Atari can help you rattle off a letter to a friend. The 486 can help you go broke running your very own desktop publishing business, provided you can master the 500 page manual first.¢¢ Perhaps all this is a rather unfair comparison because of the large price difference between the two choices. A fairer contest would be between packages of equal value. So, lets throw in a used Ford Fiesta with the 486 and compare that to an Atari package with an expensive sports car that the babes are sorta... partial to.¢¢ And the winner in this contest is... I have just been handed the envelope and I am now opening it... a hush desends on the crowd, and...¢¢ The winner is Atari, just as we expected all all long. No surprise.¢
