blgardne@esunix.UUCP (Blaine Gardner) (01/17/88)
I realize that everyone in this newsgroup has probably canceled their
subscriptions to Byte (or at the very least ignores Chaos Manor), but take
a look at Jerry Pournelle's column in the January 1988 Byte.
In between complaints about how easy it is to crash the Amiga, Jerry falls
in love with Fire Power. MicroIllusions is really missing the boat if they
don't quote Jerry in their advertizing: "The graphics are stunning."
"... one of the best arcade games I've ever played" "I sure like blowing
up my friends." (Maybe I ought to sell an ad campaign to them. :-)
This is the first mention of the Amiga (bad or good) I've seen in Jerry's
column for months, if only the game hadn't crashed on him, he might even
come to like the machine. I'm just wondering if he has a broken Amiga, or
is still running 1.1 (1.0 ?), since I've never had Guru problems with
Fire Power.
Someone suggested a while back (with tounge firmly in cheek) that a CATS
person be sent to Jerry's Chaos Manor for a month of baby-sitting. That's
a bit extreme, but Commodore could do worse than sending him an A2000 and
a batch of the wonderful hardware and software (fully wrung out please)
that all of us have become addicted to. Give him a Workbench disk loaded
with goodies like PopCLI and ConMan too, all the stuff that makes life
easier. Maybe a babysitter for a week or so wouldn't be a bad idea either.
At least a "hotline" to a local Amiga expert (Jerry must have a special
talent if he can crash the machine at the Kickstart prompt).
It seems that it would do Amiga sales a world of good if a "gee look what
neat gizmo showed up for the Amiga this month" appeared in his column
regularly. Since there are so many things that can't be done well (or at
all) on other micros, it shouldn't be difficult. The Amiga already has
Word Perfect which is his favorite wordprocessor (depending on the phase
of the moon).
Remember how he vacillated on the usefulness of the Mac, and then became a
convert with Excel? All we need is a similar hook ("buy the computer for
this program alone").
--
Blaine Gardner @ Evans & Sutherland 540 Arapeen Drive, SLC, Utah 84108
UUCP Addresses: {ihnp4,ucbvax,allegra,decvax}!decwrl!esunix!blgardne
ihnp4!utah-cs!esunix!blgardne usna!esunix!blgardne
"Nobody will ever need more than 64K." "Nobody needs multitasking on a PC."