papa@uscacsc.UUCP (06/18/87)
The following is an undedited quote from the last issue of InfoWorld. It is taken from Jerry Purnelle's "A User's View" page reporting on Comdex. The quoted Amiga stuff took one entire column out of Jerry's usual 5. -- BEGINNING OF QUOTE This year's spring Comdex overlapped with the spring Consumer Electronic Show. It's probably significant that Commodore Amiga came to Comdex in a big way, ignoring CES, while Atari did just the opposite. Atari even had an airline suspended over its CES booth. Commodore is strongly pushing the Amiga 2000 as a serious business machine -- which it certainly has the potential to be -- even though it is likely to get more immediate revenue from the Amiga 500, which Commodore hopes to sell as a follow-on or replacement to its Commodore 128. Commodore chairman Irving Gould told a packed press breakfast that they had "turned the company around." I thought of writing the leads as "Commodore rotates; Tramiel quakes," but in fact there was considerable significance in its announcement that the marketing team that has made the Amiga a serious business machine in Europe will take over the United States. Meanwhile, Word Perfect announced a successful port of its word processor to the Amiga. Word Perfect for the Amiga uses the mouse as well as function-key commands. I haven't had a chance to use it much, but it looks pretty good. There was considerable action around the Commodore booth, with more than 50 developers showing spreadsheets, databases, and other business products. There was even a thing called Station Manager, which claims to be capable of completely managing a radio station on an Amiga. Naturally, the most impressive stuff made use of the Amiga wonderful graphics capabilities. There were frame grabbers, paint programs and such. The most impressive was a Commodore-developed program that let's you take recorded action video and do edits at the bit level -- compressions, expansions, and generally any kind of video editing. Its demonstration was made at the last minute, by editing a tape of a Commodore secretary giving a short speech. I was shown around by Dr. Harry Rubin, who is a real computer enthusiast as well as Commodore chief executive officer. When I left the Commodore booth, I noticed an Atari vide president watching the action. Of course, the real question is whether Commodore can enter the market as a serious business machine now that it has finished alll the paperwork for FCC approval of the 2000. It's betting that most computer users think PCs and clones are boring and will welcome the Amiga's graphics excitement while retaining the capability to run their PC software. Of course, Apple is betting on much the same thing. -- END OF QUOTE A similar positive article entitled "Oustings, Revamped PC line Arm Commodore to Win U.S." appears in the last issue of PC-Week (p. 143). -- Marco