Email : adamh@spots.ab.ca, houghrb@bix.com
Hi!
The new owner of the Amiga is Gateway 2000 of South Dakota as of the 27th of March 1997. They succeeded when VISCorp of Illinois has dropped out of the race. For those out of the picture, after Commodore died, the Amiga was bought by ESCOM, a German clone manufacturer, which also promptly went bankrupt. There have been rumours of an Amiga curse circulating...
I also ran a bulletin board specifically for the Amiga running Sycom Design's Excelsior Pro software. However I was considering moving over to a newcomer on the scene, Zeus due to a rather more extensive set of capabilities, but my move to Ottawa meant I had to close it down. The value of BBSs in these days of cheap Internet access of minimal at best, so I've honestly no idea if I'll ever open it up again. Of course, a dead power supply in the BBS machine doesn't really help much.
I do own an NEC Ready 7022 Pentium Windows '95 box for games and compatability, but the Amiga is still the favoured box.
You can frequently find me in #amiga in IRC. Alternatively I hang around an Amiga specific IRC network called ARCnet. Standard IRC clients work, although there's some proprietary stuff as well. For recommended IRC clients and other Amiga software, have a look at this page. Recently I've wandered into rendering as well.
There is a new arrival to the Hough collection of interesting computer gadgets: the USR Pilot. This handheld, pen-based PDA is very very very very very very very very cool. It's not as cool as the Amiga, but then nothing is. Not even a PC with Warcraft 2. But it's still extremely neat. Ok, the Apple MessagePad 2000 looks a bit cooler but it's about four times the size and ditto in price. If you've not taken a look at this bit of equipment and you're getting fed up of losing bits of paper, being unable to use microscopic keyboards, and (periodically) losing your PDA with all your bits of information on it, this is the machine for you. Look, the handwriting recognition is sufficiently good that I can take notes at university using this thing. Accurately. In full. And there's an Infocom interpreter out for it. Wishbringer with a writing based interface. Very cool. It runs for weeks on a single pair of regular AAA batteries under constant use. It comes with really good PIM software (mirrored on the host (sob) PC.) Try it. I think you'll like it.
I used to be an Apple ][ afficionado, and, to a certain extent, I still am. I even have an old Apple ][ tie as sold by Windfall. The Apple ][GS and Macintosh just didn't grab me though which is why I migrated away from the core. I do however still play with an excellent Apple ][ emulator called Apple 2000 for the Amiga. You just can't match "Wilderness" or "Lemonade" :)
For those with a hankering for the nifty new front in non-mainstream personal desktop computing, there was a rather nice new machine called the BeBox which looked like the Amiga 1000 for the late 1990s. Recent developments have involved Be dropping the hardware side of the business in favour of producing just the PowerPC base OS for Macintosh and Mac-clone hardware. If this Amiga things never works out, I may yet end up heading in that direction.
Another interest, pursued when I have the time, is MUD2. This is an absolutely stunning text based multiuser game, and blows the hell out of any others I've ever seen. Highly recommended. Currently the only instance of it running is on mud2.com in Canada, run by the author of the Visual C++ Unleashed books.
My father's home page is here.
And for those people who wouldn't leave me alone (you know who you are!), here's the What's New listing.
As can be guessed, this pages always under construction -- after all, what web page isn't. For feedback on this set of pages, please use this form. To see more about SPOTS, my ISP, follow this link!
This page was last updated on the 19th of March, 1997 and is
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