kurt@fluke.UUCP (Kurt Guntheroth) (06/13/86)
I have some thoughts about the future of Amiga. 1. Remember the olden days when 50,000 computers was the whole market? If CBM could only manufacture Amigas to cover their variable costs, they could "make money" in the sense of loosing less money than they'd loose by abandoning the product, so as long as there are even a few buyers, the amiga is not likely to disappear, given the existing investment in it. Now in reality the Amiga must be considerably more profitable to CBM than that. I suspect they are making real profit on it, although perhaps not too much yet, so the Amiga has staying power even if it is not currently dominating the market. 2. Amiga is the "hacker's Mac" discussed in Dr Dobbs Journal (I think). Here on usenet, you can examine the relative interest in the Amiga vs. Atari ST by examining the relative traffic in the two newsgroups. There is 3-4 times as much material in the Amiga group, and I assert that it is of higher quality -- sources, tutorials, intellegent questions. Partially we have CBM to thank for being on the net and accessible. I note that the Amiga arrived with a functioning and available C compiler, which will hasten development of software products, and will be blessed by the end of its first year, with several C compilers, Modula, Pascal, and who-knows-what-else. This availability of development tools forms a diffuse but powerful support base for software developers, and I expect high quality software titles to rapidly proliferate after the first year (which is this September). 3. The Amiga represents the future of computing in another way. Software IBM emulation. I know the all-software emulator is not blindingly fast, but it allows considerable work to be done using IBM software. I suspect the Z80 may be emulated at full speed, allowing access to CP/M. Can a 6502/C64 emulator be too far back in the wings? The C64 is no great shakes as a business machine, you say? Doesn't matter. It means a free port of hundreds of games. Apple emulation is also possible, but there may be a problem with the proprietary nature of Apple ROM software. Still, other companies seem to have gotten around this problem... In general, the Amiga should be able to emulate any 8-bit system effectively. 4. The Amiga is viable as a business system. At $1300, it is cheaper than all but the cheapest IBM clones, but with vastly greater computational power. It's C development environment will make it compatible with much commercial software, which is finally being written in C. (They are slow, but they learn.) The Amiga confuguration is professional (real keyboard w/ number pad, hi-res CRT, desk-style footprint, etc). When software becomes available, the Amiga will appear on desks, just as the Mac did. The choice of Amiga vs. IBM is similar to the choice of Mac vs. IBM, and the Amiga is faster and cheaper than the Mac. Hopefully intuition supports enough tools to allow amiga programs to be as comfortable as those on the Mac. This will be a critical point. 5. The Amiga is extremely vulnerable just now. A really fabulous new-product announcement from Apple could scuttle the whole thing (but Apple won't announce until their annual meeting in January and that will be too late). The amiga is not susceptable to IBM product announcements. The amiga gets some really bad press, and that has to hurt. I see real schizophrenia in Byte, where they praise the hardware and software features of the Amiga, then say nyah nyah they will never sell enough, and repeat incorrect and damaging rumors that are in any case three months out of date. They also print relatively scandalous lies from Atari ST fans in the letters-to-the-editor column. The business community thinks CBM will succeed. Commodore stock (CBU, NYSE) has risen from a low of around 5 at the beginning of the year to as high as 9, and was trading at 7 and a half yesterday. They must know something. I have on affiliation with Commodore, although I did purchase an Amiga.