I'll come out and say it, the Amiga is a commercial insanity. If someone was going to code the absolute best application in a genre, they could make it half as good, ten times as expensive and earn comfortable living on the PC. Instead, Amiga authors decide they could do better than already high standard software and set out to build The UltimateProgram, TUP for short, for your Amiga.

These authors slave away, implementing all of the things Amiga users demand as standard; top quality installer, Arexx interface, RTG friendly, multithreaded asynchronous cybergraphic executive GUI library front end from hell. That's before they get onto what the program actually does! Then there's the trivial task of making their 'TUP', getting it beta tested, constantly refining it by spending so much time that their work/studies suffer and then hand optimising it in raw assembly until it's faster than something like it on a Quad Pentium Pro 233Mhz, running on an A1200.

I'm exaggerating of course, to a degree. Bottom line is that while using my outrageously specced up PC, nothing is half as good as it is on the Amiga. You know this, I know this, every reader of CU Amiga Magazine knows this. Perhaps even Gateway know this and with luck they take what we have and give it the commercial background that the platform needs to not onlysurvive, but to prosper.

My belabored point is that it's these backyard, overworked and under appreciated programmers who make the Amiga what it is today. It's not the Amiga's hardware anymore, lord knows most of you spend all your money upgrading your hardware until it has more bolt-on bits than Legoland. Software gets precious little look-in, admit it. I know the Amiga shareware scene isn't a pay-through-your-teeth situation like the PC's pitfulful excuse,but there is a limit.

You're all using, shareware and demos of commercial software, older full versions (from coverdisks) and so on. Please consider that not only are these packages worth the (small) asking price but that there is little more you can do to keep the Amiga thriving than paying for software. You already get so much for free (and some take for granted) on coverdisks, so spare a thought for Jimmy Bob bashing away at TUP in his basement. It just might be the real reason the Amiga is what it is. Anyway, hooray for Gateway.

Mat Bettinson, Technical Editor of CU Amiga Magazine.

(Who hates that horrible old schoolboy picture of himself)