rouaix@inria.UUCP (Francois Rouaix) (01/30/89)
PRELIMINARY NOTE: Neither Commodore Amiga, nor the other companies
and individuals mentionned, nor me, are responsible for the contents
of this report, or the validity of the statements contained in it.
These are my own impressions and opinions.
----------------------------------------
As announced, here are my personnal notes about the 2d European
Developers Conference (and please excuse my poor english...)
The place is: Germany, Frankurt, Hotel Intercontinental.
The time is : from Sunday (Jan 15th) 16pm to Wednesday (Jan 18th)
end of afternoon.
The participants are:
many german developpers, but also people coming from norway,
sweden, UK, Italy, and France of course. There were people from the
Commodore Staff in these countries, and naturally many from Westchester.
Among them Bob "Kodiak" Burns, Jim Mackraz, Bryce Nesbitt, Andy Finkel,
Carolyn Scheppner, Bill Koester, Dave Haynie, Johann George etc...
Some "big ones" were also present (Gail Wellington, Jeff Porter).
I won't forget John Toebes from Lattice and Tom Rockiki from Radical Eye Software.
Among the crowd, some well-known PDS-writers such as C. Balzer and Heiko Rath
from the Software Brewery, JM Forgeas and Alex Livshits from France.
Let's talk about the contents now: after having discovered Sunday afternoon
the figures of these people we all admire, some of us took a look at the
machine room : many 500 and 2000, all equipped with A1084S monitors, S
meaning Stereo. In the 2000, there were 40M HD (autoboot of course),
68020 cards, and XT/AT cards. In short, enough to play with, except one
detail I will tell you about later. No need to say that all machines were
running KickStart 1.3, and using german keyboards (!).
So, while TECSOFT (a french company) was showing the latest Wild Copper
Crew demos (which you may have seen even in the States), other people
were showing neat demos and animations. At 2 in the morning, I finally left
the room, just after the hotel waiters brought some snacks...
Now we are ready for three days of conference, on various topics.
Most of them were already discussed at the Washington DevCon last year.
Some of them have been updated, (such as the Multiple Port talk, by
Bryce and Andy, where it was shown how the software will change while
staying backwards-compatible and supporting multi-serial card for example.)
It was also the first developers conference (to my knowledge) where UNIX
on Amiga was discussed.
For the other new products, we learned nothing that you already now if
you follow UseNet or other net services.
We have not seen these products, except the Transputer and Unix. There was
no public demonstration of Unix, but there was somewhere an
Amiga (2000 + cards ?) running under Unix. I could play 2 minutes 30
with the windowing system, and what I've seen is nice and fast (slick is the
word I believe). Concerning the performances, we'll have to wait for
another occasion.
The demo for the Transputer showed a 2000 with a T800 (10 Mips) card in it.
You may put up to 7 T800 in a 2000, but it is also possible to connect them to
another Amiga using a serial port. The Transputers are running under Helios.
There was no multi-sync monitor, so we couldn't see the window-system
of Helios on the Amiga, but there was another Amiga connected to the
serial port, and running an Helios server, so that the demonstrator could
open (on the second Amiga) windows with the Helios shell running in them
(BTW, each shell was running on a separate processor...). It's *fast* !
Although the Transputer cannot use the Amiga bus, Helios is able to
use the AmigaDOS file-systems directly, so you don't need different partitions
(as you do with MS-DOS).
The conference was oriented on 1.3 and 1.4 topics (what else ?).
1.4 seems to be a big leap.
Besides the thickness of the conference notes, it is important to follow
the talks, which help us to understand many tricks. For those who
will have the occasion one day, don't miss a talk by Jim Mackraz. He is
a great pedagogue, and an exceptionnal orator...
We should have complained about the meager comfort provided by the
chairs of the hotel, especially after these short nights, but you really
don't care about this, do you ? ;-)
Developers have had many occasions to ask questions, and to make suggestions
about 1.4 and after. The guys from Westchester wrote carefully all the
suggestions, and noted that they were more reasonnable than those from
American developers ;-). Among these suggestions, many were about
enhancements on the WorkBench. People also need new phonemes (for european
langages) in the narrator.library, a standard File Requester, etc...
Tuesday evening was a Show-Off, that is a mini-expo of new third-party
products. The best of them (for me) were Genlocks/Video devices, a new
Sound Sampler with Midi features (and a *real cute* spectrum analyser),
Lattice 5.0 (BTW the first patch will be *SEND* to registered users).
HiSoft was showing its new development environments (DevPac 2.0 and
their Basic).
The rest of the products didn't impress me, except a new presentation of
the 2000 as a workstation (to be installed next to your desk, in vertical
position), and a 500 where you can choose the version of the KickStart.
The cocktail party that followed was the right place to be, for taking
courage for the crazy Fish-copying-party that went on all the night...
The difficulty was to find both a machine with 2 drives and the Fish-disks
we needed. Almost all 2000s had a HD indeed, but no external drive...
Well, this is about all I can write about the Conference. You may think
that I don't give any hot details and you're right. Commodore-Amiga, if
they didn't ask us to sign a non-disclosure agreement, talked about
being "responsible"...
Anyway, I've not gathered more *hot* news than in the latest reports
on various conferences/shows on Usenet.
Francois ROUAIX
--
*- Francois Rouaix // When the going gets tough, *
*- rouaix@inria.inria.fr \X/ the guru goes meditating... *
*- SYSOP of Sgt. Flam's Lonely Amigas Club. (33) (1) 39-55-84-59 (Videotext) *
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are my own, not those of my employer.