andrew@alberta.UUCP (Andrew Folkins) (12/02/86)
Let's introduce the line eater and the GURU, maybe they'll cancel out. First, could some kind person send me part 1 of last week's VT100 distribution? Part 2 made it ok, but part 1 took an unscheduled detour into the Twilight Zone. Second, this showed up on the cover of the December issue of "Input" - "Canada's newspaper on personal computing". "Amiga responds to Atari's price war" by Richard McGuire One year after it's launch, Commodore is slashing the Canadian price of the Amiga to below the magic $1000 price level. [That's about $720 US] In a promotion scheduled to last from late October to the end of November, Commodore is selling a 256K Amiga for $999. "I'm really looking forward to the results of that promotion," said Canadian Commodore President and General Manager Rich McIntyre. "... We have a year under our belt with the Amiga now." McIntyre is not commenting on widespread rumors that Commodore is preparing to launch the Amiga 2500, which is rumored to allow some form of built-in IBM emulation. "We're working on enchancements to the Amiga line," he says. "There could be enchancements in costs or capabilities." He was prepared though to annouce Canadian release dates for several Amiga peripherals. Sidecar, a hardware IBM emulator with a single 5.25" drive, is scheduled for release Dec 1. It was delayed pending CSA approval. No exact price has been announced, but McIntyre says it will "around $1000". Genlock, a device allowing users to mix Amiga output with video signals, will be available Nov 24 for "under $500". The MIDI 1400 interface for the Amiga will be out Nov 24, and the Amiga Live video digitizer will be out in mid-December, McIntyre says. He could not give prices for these. In one year, Commodore has sold more than 100,000 Amigas world wide, McIntyre says. He notes that since it was only recently launched in Europe, most of that figure is North American. In Canada more than 5000 units have been sold, he said. Canadian sales have not been a disappointment, he says, noting that the Amiga was an entirely new computer based on new technology, coming "from a company that prior to that had not been known for machines of that complexity". Combined with sales of other computers, mainly the PC 10, Commodore's 1985 share of the Canadian business and professional computer market, in terms of units shipped, rose to 5.9 per cent from 1.3 per cent the previous year, McIntyre notes. That puts Commodore in fifth place, after IBM, Apple, Compaq and Tandy, but ahead of such other well known business systems companies as Hewlett-Packard, Olivetti, Zenith, Xerox, Wang and Sperry. Commodore leads the home market with more than half the home computers sold in Canada in 1985. Because the Amiga was launched so late in 1985, its impact on Commordore's sales of business computers is hard to estimate. However, McIntyre notes that accounting software such as the Rags to Riches series is selling well. [Accounting? Gah - what a waste of a machine] "You're not selling those types of software packages to consumers," he says. While Amiga software has been slow to appear, McIntyre notes that there is now a good mixture with good packages in all the major software categories. "I'm not disappointed (in software availability) given the amount of time the developers had with the Amiga prior to its launch," he says, adding that earlier pre-release versions of the Amiga were essentially game machines. "You'll see quite a lot of additions to the Amiga software library in the next three to six months." Far outselling the Amiga, in terms of numbers, are the Commodore 128 and Commodore 64, now rereleased as the Commodore 64C. McIntyre boasts that the C-128 is "still the fourth best selling microcomputer in the world." North American sales in the three-month period ending in September were about 50,000. [Remainder of ariticle talks about C-128.] So it seems that Sidecar, Genlock and the MIDI interface have now been released here in Canada, along with (hopefully) AmigaDOS 1.2. However, I have no idea if you can actually *buy* any of this stuff, I know I couldn't find 1.2 last weekend. -- Andrew Folkins ...ihnp4!alberta!andrew The University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Arthur C. Clarke's Law : It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.