mwm@eris.UUCP (03/30/87)
I spent a couple of hours wondering around the floor on the Nth (for some N) Computer Faire. General impressions: Lots of IBM PC stuff. Dull. Not quite so much mac stuff, including a color enhancment. Not quite so dull. Some Atari stuff. Not bad. A little Amiga stuff. Dull. Almost no - wait a minute! DULL Amiga stuff?? Right. The Atari ST crowd was running lots of animated displays, including some fast Mandelbrots, and a lot of demos for a 3d cad package. The Amiga crowd (what little there was) had lots of static displays using digi-view & similar hardware, plus one genlock demo. The most graphically exciting Amiga demo was the ChessMaster 2000 board. No animation at all. Very little of anything at all. If I had to make predictions on the future of the Amiga from that, I'd be predict that it's going to vanish in the near future. What's up? None of the Amiga hardware/software vendors thought it was worth showing up? The most exciting thing related to the Amiga as far as I was concerned was the A2000, which was apparently a prototype. The hardware had been yanked from the case, and was sitting on top of it. It is an ugly box. But that's not the kind of thing to make people who aren't interested in the Amiga take notice of the machine. Finally, I saw a copy of WordPerfect running on the Amiga, in beta test. It works correctly in the multitasking environment, runs on the WB screen, and fits well into the intuition environment. Asking if there would be an interlaced screen available drew a "don't know" response. It used the Amiga fonts for italic/bold/underscore, and played wysiwyg with them. Sub/super scripts weren't working. It's not known if more fonts will be used. It is known that the standard printer driver will be an option, but the full set of WordPerfect printer drivers from the PC should be available. Release date is set for May, and you should be able to find it in the stores in June. Of course, mg1b will be out before then :-). If I hadn't found lots of cheap 3 1/2" disk storage, the show would've been a total loss. <mike -- Here's a song about absolutely nothing. Mike Meyer It's not about me, not about anyone else, ucbvax!mwm Not about love, not about being young. mwm@berkeley.edu Not about anything else, either. mwm@ucbjade.BITNET
eric@hippo.UUCP (03/31/87)
In article <2972@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) writes: > > I spent a couple of hours wondering around the floor on the Nth (for > some N) Computer Faire. General impressions: > > Lots of IBM PC stuff. Dull. Not quite so much mac stuff, including a > color enhancment. Not quite so dull. Some Atari stuff. Not bad. A > little Amiga stuff. Dull. Almost no - wait a minute! DULL Amiga > stuff?? > > ... > > What's up? None > of the Amiga hardware/software vendors thought it was worth showing > up? This isn't quite fair. Xebec was showing their drive for the Amiga, as was Supra. There was the internal memory board from Spirit Technologies. And there were a few of the vendors with Amiga software for sale. What seemed to be missing were the flashy users group booths. I was disappointed that the FAUG booth seemed to be closed on Friday. I caught the tail end of the show on Thursday, and saw people at the booth, and planned on stopping by on Friday. Alas - nothing but an empty table. Was it open again on the weekend? Certainly the Atari user groups did a much better job of showing off their machines. I was surprised that the Juggler wasn't running somewhere. Or some nice ray-traced images displayed somewhere. Or a video done up for the show. Please understand - I'm not trying to berate any of the Amiga user groups that did participate ( or even those that decided they did not have the resources to participate ). I know that such efforts take time and commitments that are often difficult to get. But I must echo Mike's observation that based solely on the show, the Atari looks to be a much "hotter" machine than the Amiga. -- eric ...!ptsfa!hippo!eric