Over the last several months, I have read and heard many negative 
comments about Atari's new computer; the 'TT030'. In fact, the 
complaints were so numerous that I had almost decided that I didn't 
want to waste my time or money on one, and was seriously looking at 
products available from other vendors. That's when fate stepped in.
Last month, I had the pleasure of attending COMDEX to help Ditek 
International show a product called DynaCADD. Since I was already 
familiar with the 'ST', I was assigned to work the Atari booth, and 
given my very own 'TT030' for the week. I had only a brief exposure 
to the machine before COMDEX, so on the first day I decided to come 
in a little early and 'play' with it. I was impressed!! Where was the 
slow machine that I had been reading about? The TT was really fast. 
By the end of the week I had decided that there was little or no 
justification for much of the complaining that was going on.
Since COMDEX, I have obtained my own TT (yes, they are available 
through VAR's even as you read this), and I am now even more 
impressed than before. All of the well written software already works 
on the machine in the ST resolutions. And the really good stuff (DynaCADD 
and NeoDesk for instance) also support the new TT resolutions AND the 
TT's faster RAM. From my own experience, every program that I have 
written which doesn't work has been because 'I' have broken the rules 
for programming the GEM environment.
I have also done a little testing to see just how fast the machine 
is. For the tests, I used Quick Index 1.8 from Branch Always 
Software. This program gives a nice comparison to a 'plain ST' in 
several performance catagories. I ran the tests in all ST resolutions 
(it's not really fair to compare modes the ST doesn't have) and 
averaged the results:
                        ST RAM                TT RAM
CACHE                ON        OFF         ON        OFF
CPU Memory          566%       172%       811%       264%
CPU Register        825%       197%       825%       319%
CPU Divide         1022%       768%      1022%       867%
CPU Shifts         3528%      2050%      3528%      3106%
DMA 64K read       5853%      5853%      5853%      5853%
GEMDOS file read   2419%      2348%      2419%      2419%
TOS text            252%       153%       268%       161%
TOS String          238%       159%       239%       160%
TOS Scroll          229%       156%       229%       156%
GEM Dialog          175%       125%       179%       125%
So, what does all this mean? It means that the TT is faster than the 
ST, up to 58 times faster in some areas. That's pretty impressive!
As for some of the other complaints:
"It would sell better IF it didn't say Atari on it..."
"It would sell better IF it had a different case..."
"It would be faster IF it had a BLITTER..."
 IF, IF, IF... 
"If frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their ass so much!!"
"If developers spent less time running down the machine, and more 
time developing software, Atari might have something to advertise 
about."
In closing, let me say that in my opinion, the TT is well worth the 
wait and the money. I recommend that anyone looking for a more 
powerful system than their ST look real close at the TT; you'll be 
glad you did.