Amiga Technology Brief





Well, the Amiga Technology Brief document has been released to the public on the Amiga website. We're not allowed to print it since it's not open, or freely distributable. You can find it online at

http://www.amiga.com/diary/executive/tech_brief.html

We can, however, deliver the open letter from Jim Collas, in which he introduces the technology brief and explains some of the thinking behind it.

So, since Amiga have decided not to let us print the Technology Brief, that's given us even more work to do, evaluating it all and telling you, in our own words, what it means. How irritating So, here we go then.

And, in true WOA tradition, we've got a few opinions from various peeople around the net. Firstly, Rick LeFaivre of Amiga Inc has been posting to comp.sys.amiga.misc regarding the new system and the tech brief.

Open Letter from Jim Collas

World Of Amiga Technology Brief Report

Amiga start by saying that the mission of Amiga is to make computers and the Internet a natural part of everyday life. Sounds fun. They then go on about the Operating Enviornment and say what exactly it is. They say the term operating environment is used "purposely, as this software infrastructure extends the traditional operating system to provide a host environment for a new class of portable applications that exist in a pervasive networked computing environment."

Ok, that's very long, but you get the idea. The OE is like an OS but contains an environment for applications on a network. Easy.

Apparently, Amiga are working on two products at the moment

. Rick LeFaivre
Subject: Note from the Amiga R&D Team
   Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 03:29:17 GMT
   From: Rick LeFaivre <rickl@amiga.com>

Very interesting and active debate over the past two weeks. We *love* the passion of (most of ;-)) the on-line community. Linux? X- Windows? PCI? USB? MIDI? Floppy Drive? ATI graphics, etc., etc. While an overwhelming percentage of our email is quite positive about Amiga's directions, there are those who have raised quite legitimate technical concerns, and a small percentage who are just bashing everything we do (more on them later).

One positive aspect of the Linux announcement is the huge influx of technical talent into the Amiga camp from the Linux community. There are legitimate issues with Linux, as anyone with a technical background will acknowledge. One positive aspect of the Linux phenomenon is that there are hundreds of thousands of programmers out there working to fix those problems. There are also hundreds of companies working on applications and drivers (and hardware) for Linux, that we can immediately tap into. Yes, there are integration and testing issues to work on, but there are many, many more positives than negatives. Please understand that the Linux decision was not purely (actually not mostly) a technical decision. It was a decision driven by a reasoned analysis of what underlying OS would give Amiga the greatest chance to succeed in the marketplace, and as a company.

Also understand that we have not yet seen a single technical issue raised in the news groups that we are not already aware of, and working on either inside of Amiga or through partners. Will the Amiga MCC under development be perfect? Of course not -- product development is all about tradeoffs. When it is shipping, will it be at the heart of the best distributed multimedia computing environment in the marketplace in terms of price/performance/usability? Yes! Even more important, the MCC is only one piece of a much broader strategy that we have chosen to not really discuss yet. When Jim Collas talks about revolutions, it's not a revolution in terms of what happens to be inside the MCC box (although some of the unannounced components are, indeed, revolutionary); it's the entire distributed home computing/Internet environment and experience that will be revolutionary as it rolls out over the coming year. DON'T JUST FOCUS ON BOXES AND OPERATING SYSTEMS! (sorry for shouting.)

So, to those of you raising legitimate technical concerns, we will do our best to communicate solutions as they are worked out. Better yet, help us track down those solutions. Linux is getting better every week, with issues getting resolved at an amazing pace. ATI may not be able to ship their new graphics/video accelerator (which looks great) on time, and rest assured that we're also looking at 3dfx and NVidea. Yes, there will be a floppy drive (probably a 1.44MB / 120MB combo). We're working on the sound/MIDI requirements. We're listening to proactive suggestions, and will do our best to manage the inevitable tradeoffs to create the best next-generation system we can.

To the small number of individuals who have been sending vulgar, threatening hatemail because you don't like what we're doing, and have announced that you're fed up and are leaving the Amiga community, goodbye. Millions and millions of people will purchase Amiga-branded and Amiga-compliant products over the coming years, and we're sorry you won't be among them.

Rick LeFaivre, Allan Havemose, and the Amiga R&D Team

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