bard@jessica.Stanford.EDU (David Hopper) (04/13/90)
Well, after wading through a Spring Vacation's worth of depressingly pes-
simistic outlooks on how the Amiga has become a second-rate low-end boat
anchor, I was *amazed* by a Bay Area computer magazine that had a multimedia
article on the Amiga.
A bit of background: Computer Currents has been notoriously pro-Mac and pro-
IBM for a long while now... It has a huge number of mail-order ads in it,
and finding an Amiga dealer among the Macs and clones is about as easy as
finding a justification for Bush's election. But I digress.
The article in question was a fairly long, fairly technical introduction to
the state of multimedia on the Amiga. It was written by a Michael Brown.
The article was a terrific introduction to the outstanding products currently
out for the Amiga, including ARexx (Brown does a terrific job of explaining
IPC to the layperson), DPaintIII, DVideoIII, the Magni 4004 genlock, and
other outstanding applications and hardware. He even discusses the Video
Toaster (and from the information he gives for the thing, it would seem that
he was at NAB); he admits that it isn't released yet, but I think we all
can guess at the impact it will have on the video industry (if/when it passes
FCC, of course). The article did well to raise my spirits about the future
of the Amiga, as this rag is read by many PC/Mac users.
The article immediately following the Amiga article was one on the future of
Mac multimedia. Unlike the Amiga article, it mentioned no prices for the
hardware and software. The whole bent of the article was to stress that the
Macintosh is now approaching "VCR-quality" video, saying that broadcast
quality would soon be on the way. The article was written in a very imper-
sonal and vague manner (I work with Macs every day, I know the lingo); it
put me off next to the Amiga article, especially considering the assumption
the article makes about how Macintosh started multimedia, and how it will
finish it (both untrue statements).
Turning to the editorial, it really blew me away to read that the editor
admitted that the Amiga was in a better position than the Mac when it came
to multimedia software and hardware. Wow. Perestroika in the IBM/Mac world.
Take care,
Dave Hopper | /// Yesterday, CS. | Anaal Nathrac
| /// Today, Anthro/History. | Uthvas Bethud
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