Friday Night Amiga Inc. Party
Friday night, after a day of developer seminars, Amiga Inc put on a lavish
(yes, Lavish!) party in the main show room with lots of free food, beer and
wine. There was also an act: The Blues Brothers came in to entertain the
crowd!!! It was a very festive spirit--as was the overall show.
Everyone seemed to be looking forward to the future and the truth re-birth of
the Amiga.
Later on that night, Bill Borsai from the National Capital Amiga User Groups
presented Joe Torre (senior hardware engineer- Amiga Inc.) with a
surprise. Custom made "boing ball" shoes that actually work!! When you
take a step the shows say "boing", "boing"!! There is a built in speaker and
circuit board that perform these functions!! Everyone was clapping and
laughing.... Joe was honoured (or should I say embarrased!) to say the
least. But for the remainder of the show Joe did wear those Boing Ball
Shoes!! Joe stated that he would have to come up with something at a
future Amiga show to top this. (If you remember back at the Ohio Show, Joe
debued the first Amiga Inc pet project: The Boing Ball Levitator
Machine. The National Capital Amiga User's group have certainly upped the
ante when it comes to wild and wacky projects! Lets see what Joe and Amiga Inc
can show us at the next show!!
Saturday - Show Day
The show opened, really, friday night, when many users were browsing the
booths that were being setup. But the real action came Saturday...
Saturday was extremely busy, with nearly the entire day being packed full of
amiga users. Most of them buying too. National Amiga, the largest
Amiga dealer in Canada, had the largest booth of the show. A nice surprise
was the arrival of the Blizzard PowerPC board for the A1200. National
Amiga was also first to be showing Quikpak's new PowerTower. This is an
A4000T motherboard in a larger case with a built in LS 120 floppy drive and
SyQuest 1.5 gig removable drive. The final version of the PowerTower will
also have a new CPU card with 68060 at 66 MHz and PCI slots. Look
for this item to be available in one month from Quikpak's
distributors. Other hot items were the Picasso 4 graphics card, the
Siamese 2.5 RTG system, and all accelerator boards. Other large dealers
present were Wonder Computers and CompuQuik.
Paul Nolan from Siamese Systems was on hand from the UK. He was demoing
Photogenics NG. Wow! Did this software look impressive, and easy to
use. It should be available in a few months. Paul was also selling
the Siamese System for a discounted price.
Kermit Woodall of Nova Design was at the show demoing Image FX 3.0. I
didn't see much of this software but it did look impressive. Kermit told
me PowerPC support will be forthcoming.
Don Pence of NewTek was also at the show, giving away free copies (Yes Free!)
of Lightwave 5.0 on CD (to those who owned a Video Toaster). Don said that
NewTek will continue to support existing Amiga products and that many of its
programmers are very excited about the PowerPC chip and the Amiga. NewTek
already have Amiga PowerPC boards and will continue to monitor the Amiga market
and determine if future upgrades to Lightwave are possible.
The full Amiga Inc team was present at the show. This includes Jeff
Schindler, Joe Torre, Darreck Lisle and Marilyn Flint (Operations
Manager). Petro of Amiga International was also browsing the show floor
and talking to amiga users and Developers. The previous friday evening
Petro gave a seminar on licensing from Amiga International.
The Banquet
Saturday evening there was a sold out Banquet featuring guest speakers.
173 people crammed into the banquet room to hear Petro and Jeff Schindler
speak. Petro's speech focused on Amiga International and its current
licensing strategy and also Phase 5's OS license and Pre\Box announcement.
Petro also made some rather pointed references to Amiga Inc. and Jeff Schindler,
stressing that it is now Jeff's responsiblity to deliver a new Operating System
and hardware platform for the Amiga. Petro is an impatient man, and he
would like this to happen as soon as possible. Amiga International needs
new products in order to stay in business, and Amiga Inc. must deliver this,
both for Petro and for the Amiga community at large.
Jeff Schindler's speech was very short, but positive. He apologized to
the Amiga Community and also to his staff for ignoring them, but he said this
will not be the case in the future. Jeff is finalizing a 5 year plan for
the Amiga and he says that this revision (#12) is far more ambitious than the
original plan. He says what he has planned will knock your socks
off!!! What Jeff revealed is that Amiga Inc is working on alot of
things...the only thing public right now is OS 3.5. They hope to release
it this year at the German Computer '98 show in November, but they have made no
offiicial announcement yet. Some of the features they hope to include in
OS 3.5 are: RTG (retargetable graphics), RTA (retargetable Audio), an Enhanced
GUI, large HDD support, integrated TCP/IP stack (internet), and of course bug
fixes. Please realize that this is not official information. Jeff
stressed that Amiga Inc. will only make official announcements on their web page
(look for http://www.amigainc.com coming soon) when they are 100% certain that a
product will ship at a specific time with a specific set of features. So
the current plan for OS 3.5 is subjet to change.
There was alot more exhibitors at the show and probably close to 1,000 people
in total attendance. Draws were held on saturday and sunday afternoon, and
some lucky amiga owners walked away with brand new A1200's and A4000T's and
Video Toasters. I wish I was one of them! The next show in North
America is the Toronto show International Amiga 98. This show will be 3 times as
large as the St. Louis show and is looking like it will be the best show this
side of the pond. Big guns like Phase 5, Micronik, and Amiga Inc. have
already committed to going. The show website is http://www.randomize.com.
Best regards,
Darren Eveland