Dennis_Grant@CMR001.BITNET (11/04/90)
(Before I start, my MAIL access has been down since the 24th, so if anyone
tried to send me anything, I didn't get it. I also am a wee bit behind in
reading the newsgroup. They say my mail access is fixed, but I'll wait and
see.)
Last week my university had its "Science Day", and so they shipped the
lot of us off to a computer trade show in Montreal. Nothing really huge,
but large enough. Mostly a collection of dealers/analysis houses showing
off their stuff, with a couple of local companies/subsiduraries tossed in
for good measure.
Commodore wasn't there, but 2 local dealers were, and there were
Amiga systems scattered throughout.
Stuff being shown: An Amiga 3000 (old news, but my first look/feel.
I hereby take back everthing bad I ever said about Amigas. This thing is
awesome. My only beef is that it wasn't free.) Imagine (beta version). This
was a 98% finished version, only a couple of things weren't ready. But it
is, bar none, the most impressive bit of 3-D/anim software I have EVER seen
It BLOWS Sculpt out of the water. It's fast, it renders great, and the user
interface is AMAZING. If you do 3D anims, GET THIS PROGRAM THE INSTANT IT
GETS OUT.(I'll post a more complete review to amiga.tech later on)
Also seen: The new MPS 1275 (?) ink jet printer, this huge black tower
case from hell for your 2000-series that is a great idea but priced way too
high ($750), a new set of hard drive controllers called ALF that are WAY
fast (but way bizzare, review posted to .hardware RSN), and, finally, the
A3000 UX.
This piece of kit was running in a corner - the dealer who had it
knows zero about UNIX, so he just set it up so the business types could see
that it was availible. I, incidently, have a specs sheet for it lying
around somewhere. Remember, this is a dealer who has this machine, not
Commodore. My impression of it: Slow. I also know little about UNIX, but I
do know slow, and this was slow to me. The demos it was running was a hack
called "xeyes" or some such, and some icon-edit program, so I assume this
is X-windows. In any case, it was there.
Best of all, I only saw 1 Mac at the whole show. SPARCstations
outnumbered Macs. And the Amiga was drawing huge crowds. My morale is up.
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| Dennis Grant DETUD595@CMR001.BITNET | There ain't no replacement |
| Computer Science (Systems) student | for cubic displacement. |
| at CMR. (The "other" MilCol) | |
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