robertsl@stolaf.UUCP (Laurence C. Roberts) (08/29/85)
I'm a little uncertain about the pedigree of this newsgroup, but it will probably have to be created eventually, provided that the Amiga is not VW. Gene Spafford should probably remove this group and then re-create it officially. Enough of this net.guerilla stuff. Oh well, may as well contribute while it's Here. I of course don't yet own an Amiga, but I did go out and buy a copy of Amiga World, the Amiga magazine to be published 6 times a year (MacWorld is 12x) It's the same humungous conglomerate as MacWorld and practically any other computer mag with "world" in the title. AW really looks a lot like MW, although it tends more towards screen-shots than graphic dumps of computer output - graphics that is. The Magizine is pretty much hype. They like it. It's funny to note that every shot of the Amiga not in an ad has the down-arrow key on sideways- obviously the same sole machine. One close-up of the mouse makes it look badly tooled. According to Byte, the case is pretty flimsy - low-grade plastic. Electronic Arts has been doing Amiga dev. on IBM's with graphics cards & cross-assemblers. Apparently the machines are in short supply. Hey you who have one, are they production models, and how are they? I compared this issue to the primere issue of Macworld for fun. Suprisingly, there's more advertisers in the index of AW. However, the software doesn't look nearly as finished on the Amiga. They show beautiful "paintings", but not the mechanics of the painting software as MW did. All it seems capable of doing are these neat "color cycles" and also dotted lines and "airbrushes". They showed a prototype of intuition and also EA's Financial Cookbook- about the only screens with text on them I saw. You can draw good pictures with anything if you're talented - Saul Bernstein's famous Einstein on the Apple ][ was done with really primitive software, nowhere near Macpaint. Software looks grim, unless you like MS-dos & 5-1/4's. I'm not buying an Amiga until I see Apple's January stuff. Probably the Amiga will be that late anyway. One of EA's guys said that if Apple had had the Amiga hardware and the Mac's software, they would've beat IBM. I doubt Commodore presently has the Mac's software, however. We'll see. Who was the first to have opened-symbol closed-symbol? I think Atari, Apple, and Commodore have all done it now, right? Aren't the Atari ST ads cheesy? -- Laurence Roberts ...ihnp4!stolaf!robertsl I bet that J. S. Bach never wore legwarmers.