--- Jeff Hellige <jhellige_at_earthlink.net> wrote:
> >Just 'cuz ethernet cards are $9 now...
>
> Not to mention that designing and producing a very low production board
> such as the ethernet board for the IIGS surely isn't cheap. The volume just
> isn't there to drive the price down.
Absolutely. I sold the GG2 Bus+ board for $139 when it was new (they are
now $99 ;-) only because I couldn't get people to pay more. I was competing
against used Zorro ethernet boards that went for ~$200 so my board plus a
$40 new ISA ethernet card was at least a little cheaper than a used Zorro
card (had to compensate somehow for the fact that mine took up two slots).
You could _do_ more with a GG2 Bus+ than just ethernet, but by 1996, nobody
cared about adding serial ports or IDE disks. Lately, the value of an extra
slot is more than it used to be, and there are multiple alternatives because
the price of Amiga ethernet stayed so high for so long, more than one person
decided to cash in on the market, such that it was. I know that I personally
never have to worry about networking Amigas - I have more cards than I will
ever own computers (and more blank PCBs than populated cards!)
I've been kicking around the idea of an OMNIBUS SCSI card since I met cjl
person-to-person for the first time in 1994. I've never really done much
with the idea because I might as well make a prototype and publish the
schematics because I don't see people coughing up enough money per board
to fund even a run of 10. (Yes, I know there already is an OMNIBUS SCSI
card; that's one of the things that cjl and I talked about; no, I don't
have one; no, I've never seen one, let alone one for sale).
The fact that anyone at all is considering making new hardware, at new
costs for old machines that sell for pennies on the dollar (witness the
IDE-64 or Jeri's new gfx board or this ethernet card, to name a few),
is astonishing. The last C-64 I got cost me about $3. I dropped several
times that to get a rev 1 IDE-64, and more than twice that for a hard disk
for it (an HP 1.3" KittyHawk). How many other systems are there where
the peripherals cost 25 times the base CPU?
So either it's worth it, or it isn't. I wasn't shocked when I saw the
price for the Apple II ethernet card. I would have been shocked if it
had been $500. Still, as someone here (Mike Ford?) pointed out, LocalTalk
is adequate. Considering the state of the TCP/IP stack (no router access?!?),
I'm inclined to agree.
-ethan
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Received on Tue Jun 26 2001 - 14:19:33 BST