R:981002/0031Z @:NL3DAV.ZH.NLD.EU #:8330 [Leiderdorp] FBB7.00f $:9278_NL3NW
R:981001/0551Z @:NL3ZMR.ZH.NLD.EU #:16077 [Zoetermeer] FBB7.00g $:9278_NL3NW
R:980930/0802Z @:NL3LDM.ZH.NLD.EU #:8027 [Leidschendam] FBB7.00f $:9278_NL3NW
R:980929/2014Z @:NL3RTD.ZH.NLD.EU #:9432 [Rotterdam-Noord] $:9278_NL3NW
R:980929/1913Z @:KW3BBS.ZH.NLD.EU #:20139 [Katwijk] FBB7.00c $:9278_NL3NW
R:980929/0826Z @:KW3BBS.ZH.NLD.EU #:22917 [Katwijk] FBB7.00g $:9278_NL3NW
R:980929/0818Z @:NL3NW.ZH.NLD.EU #:9278 [Noordwijk (Z-H)] FBB5.15c $:9278_NL3NW

From: NL1SMS@NL3NW.ZH.NLD.EU
To  : AMIGA@NLD

Back? The Amiga Never Left
From Chris Oakes at Wired Magazine
comes this great article of the
Amiga's past, history, and future
based on the strategy plan outlined
at the World of Amiga show.

For a long time now, the Amiga has looked like another candidate headed for
the good-technologies-that-might-have-been pile.  Like the Betamax
videotape format and, to a lesser degree, the Macintosh computer, the Amiga
is seen by devotees as a superior technology betrayed by the commercial
success of inferior competitors, poor management, market vagaries, and
other mysterious technology forces.

But  last week, the Amiga underwent another of its periodic rebirths, which
seem  to  date  back  to  the debut of the original Commodore Amiga 1000 in
1985.   Amiga  Inc.,  the  Gateway subsidiary that bought the rights to the
system's  patents  last  year,  took  the opportunity at the World of Amiga
conference   to   officially  declare  itself  open  for  business.
Amiga Inc Web  site provides information on plans
for  a  fall  revival  for the operating system some had given up for dead.
And  as  Gateway  quickly  discovered,  this  revival already has a captive
audience.

"We got tens of thousands of email, faxes, (magazine letters), saying 'What
are you gonna do?  What are you gonna do?'" said Amiga Inc.  spokesman Bill
McEwen.  "There was this huge community [Gateway] didn't know existed.

Gateway  saw,  he  said,  that these users had "an amazing passion for what
this device could have been and should have been."

Loyalists'  devotion  to their machine is almost eternal in computer years.
Known  for  power  before  the  word  even  began to be applied to personal
computers,  the  1985  Amiga  sported  advanced  on-board  processors -- in
addition  to  its  Motorola  68000  CPU  --  for  image rendering and sound
generation.   In  the  pre-PC  era  of the mid-80s, the Amiga was combining
images,  animation, and video with stereo sound, making it a pioneer in the
then-unheard-of field of multimedia.

Built  around an architecture originally meant to drive visually-rich video
games,  the  Amiga  had  a  latent graphical power that its savvy users and
developers quicky sought to tap.

"Among  people  who  care  about  what  their  computer can do, it's a very
popular machine," said Mathew Ignash, leader of the Amiga faction of the
Michigan Computer User Group.

The  computer  also won accolades for its efficient use of memory and drive
capacity, operating features that are prized to this day.  Still relatively
new  for today's computers, 32-bit, "preemptive multitasking" has been part
of  the Amiga's operating system since Day One.  (Windows added it with the
release  of  Windows  95.)  "The OS was written very efficiently and is way
ahead of its time," Ignash said.

Under the Hood
  
The Amiga's platform is a model of efficiency.  Ignash provides an example:
Running  on  only  a  7-MHz  processor  (today,  even  a 233-MHz machine is
starting  to  look a little slow to high-end users), Ignash said he browses
the Web with the machine, "with graphics on."

But  how?   "The  OS  was  written  from the ground up to be multitasking,"
Ignash  said.   "It  wasn't  trying to be backward compatible to an OS like
MS-DOS, which is a single-tasking system."

Another  example  is  the  use  of so-called "shared libraries" -- reusable
program  functions  that  different programs call on to do common OS tasks.
Windows  95,  for  example,  knows  these  as  .DLL files.  But the Amiga's
handling of such libraries is unique.

"When  [the  Amiga operating system] loads up shared libraries, it only has
to  load  them  once,"  Ignash said.  "It doesn't have to load them at boot
like  the  Mac.   It just loads them up as needed then flushes them when it
doesn't  need  them  any  more."  And  unlike Windows, he said, one library
serves  each program that needs it.  By contrast, Windows loads a duplicate
library for each application.

Proof of the Amiga's unparalleled technological prowess came with its early
success  in  video.   In  the  early  1990s,  when  the average PC couldn't
display,   let   alone   edit,   video,   producers  quickly  took  to  the
still-available  Video  Toaster,  a specially  adapted  Amiga, getting 
high-end, high-quality video compositing and editing capabilities for a 
comparatively inexpensive US$6,000.

Suddenly  video  artists  had  dream capabilities within budget reach.  "We
were  one  of the first places to buy one," said Kate Johnson, president of
EZTV, an avant-garde video production company and digital art center.
"We used it mainly for its computer  graphics  capability.  It's fast,
it's easy to use, and it does a great  number  of things in real time 
that takes other programs a long time to do.  And it's fairly crash proof."

The  list of Amiga credits goes on.  A file system that was ready to manage
disks  with gigabytes worth of data on them -- this when a 30-megabyte hard
disk was considered big.  Also, video capability demanded drives that could
be  accessed  quickly:   Thus,  many  Amigas  had fast drive ports built in
(so-called  "wide"  SCSI ports) where the drive controller was located near
the processor, circumventing "bus" circuitry that would otherwise slow them
down.

"On the PC, some of these things have just become popular in the last two
years.  Well, they were on the Amiga in 1985," Ignash said.  "They [the
Amiga's creators] were always forward-looking when they were designing
things."

The Underground Amiga Road

With all of these features, the platform has seen some prosperity in spite
of hard times. Companies such as QuikPak and Index have continued
assembling Amiga motherboards and hardware, while software support has
thrived online.

The Amiga Web Directory is one site rich with evidence of a platform far
from its deathbed:  Companies offering hard-to-find Amiga books, CDs made
by Amiga-using composers, German vendors of Amiga CD-ROM software,
Amiga-oriented Internet service providers, software and hardware dealers in
the Netherlands, Belgium, Perth, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Finland, and
Moscow.  A company called Vaporware develops software to keep the Amiga
Internet-ready:  connection utilities, chat applications, Telnet software.

"What  they've  done as a community is pick up the ball where the corporate
entities  have  failed,"  said  Amiga  Inc.'s  McEwen.   "There are over 30
monthly publications.  They have a global following.  They are everywhere."

Now What?

This  is  all well and good, but can McEwen's company succeed in taking the
Amiga to the next stage after so many others have failed?

"They  definitely  seem  serious about it," said Ignash.  "They've invested
money  in  it,  they've put together a professional team, they've been very
open to licensing other parties to make things happen for them."

Ignash  sees  one  hopeful  sign  in  third-party Amiga development.  "I've
noticed  that since the Gateway purchase, there have been a lot of licenses
from  game  companies  and various applications being ported to the Amiga."
Games,  the  Netscape  source  code,  Quake, Myst, and a lot of the popular
shareware have been ported over, Ignash said.

In  another  sign  of  forward  momentum,  last  week, the makers of the 
Opera Web  browser said they would develop a version of their increasingly
popular alternative Web software for the Amiga.

Meanwhile,  Amiga  Inc.   has  major changes in store for its newly adopted
platform.   The  company  plans a wholly new multimedia-intensive operating
system,  Amiga  OS  version  5.0, due by the end of 1999.  It will run on a
new,  as-yet-unnamed  "multimedia"  processor (already earning the nickname
"mystery  chip").   This  system  would  finally  take the Amiga beyond the
outdated Motorola 68000 line that dominates today's surviving hardware.

Indeed,  the  company  is promising that this processor will be so capable,
integrated,  scalable,  and  efficient that it will achieve performance and
price  breakthroughs.   It  is expected to run five to 10 times faster than
today's  PCs, while featuring 3D support capable of handling the display of
400  million  pixels  per  second, playback of up to four simultaneous MPEG
video streams, and high-speed Internet connections.

Amiga  Inc.  sees some versions of the new hardware selling for under $500.
And some "digital appliances," such as set-top boxes, could be cheaper than
that.    If   that's  not  enough,  the  company  also  envisions  backward
compatibility for the operating system throughout.

In  the  next  30  days,  the  company  expects to announce a key operating
"kernel"  for  the  Amiga  OS.   Speculation  includes  the possibility the
company  will  try  to  wrap  in all or part of the Linux or Java operating
systems.

But  other  aspects of Amiga Inc.'s plans have some users concerned.  Until
the wholly new Amiga OS and hardware architecture is completed, the company
plans to provide developers (and maybe consumers) with a "bridge" system by
this fall that will be based on conventional Intel processors including the
Pentium.

That  has  some folks raising eyebrows over what's percolating behind Amiga
Inc.'s doors.

"At  this  point,  I'm  somewhat  confused  about  this,"  said  Amiga user
Alexander  Dorn  via  email.   "I know that if Gateway intends to release a
stock  PC  with  an  Amiga  label on it ...  it won't go over well with the
masses of Amiga enthusiasts out there."

Still,  Dorn said, he is very excited about where the company may be taking
his  platform  of  choice.  "If they do intend a new platform, based around
some new 'mystery chip,' that prospect seems extremely exciting."

"There's  the  possibility  of  the  Amiga once again becoming the computer
pioneer that it was at its conception."