A Word From The Top

Vince Pfeifer

As I sit here writing this editorial, I realize that six months ago I went through a birthing process: I had my first child, a baby boy. With Amiga, I am getting another chance to witness a birth. While I am not going to start gushing about my new baby boy, I am going to gush about what we are working on at Amiga. Nine months ago when Bill McEwen approached me about my thoughts on what Amiga wanted to do, I was rather skeptical. I didn't grasp the concept of a single application code base using the same code to run on multiple platforms.

I thought of Java and the challenges that it faced as different implementers of Java Virtual Machines made small changes to the system that required modifications to code to run properly. I thought of the power required by machines to run Java Code. I saw a mountain of technical problems that were impeding Bill's vision. At that time, the Amiga vision was a work in progress and wasn't fully fleshed out or presentable. I didn't understand the underlying technology and it's abilities. And most of all, I didn't know about the continued Amiga loyalist community that exists in the computing world. You see I am a heathen. While I owned Commodore and Atari computers as a kid, my first real powerful machines were IBM PC clones of the mid 80s. For 12 years, I sold, supported, developed, designed, and managed hardware or software for MS-DOS, Windows, or Novell Netware systems.

I would laugh at the Apple Macintosh people whose products never made the numbers that their PC counterparts made and usually required changing Heap size or something. In all honesty, Commodore didn't market their products in such a fashion as to convince the companies I worked for to invest in selling to their platform. I was (and am) a product of the market driven computing world. I make products for platforms that have large user bases so that I can have a product line that doesn't require an unrealistic buy-in from the group. Which brings me back to Bill's mountain of problems when he came to talk to me. If the new Amiga computer were to be recreated in its old form, Amiga Inc. would have a tough time. Creating a new Operating System was tough enough, but to build a new hardware line that runs the OS in today's market seemed an insurmountable task for an un-established company. However, if the Operating System worked on X86, PPC and other off-the-shelf hardware AND smaller, less powerful computing devices AND they could talk to each other, well, this had real potential. That's when the excitement starts. When you can build a system like the one Amiga Inc. has envisioned, you have an exciting new computing paradigm opening up to you. The last year has seen several companies offer new solutions for home networking through phone lines, electrical outlets, and other non-traditional network connectivity methods. Why? Because users want and need to be able to share data and devices between multiple PCs. Amiga is going to go beyond that. I can't fully tell you about it today, but two years from now Amiga will be the forerunner in home digital data access. Since the Amiga assets were bought from Gateway in December 1999, Amiga employees have been working very hard to release their first product, and this first product is now ready to be released as the Amiga 1 Software Developers Kit. This is our first step in creating new digital content for the Amiga platform. This release will be primarily for developers who will make development tools for the platform. Other releases this summer will continue to expand the system and will contain additional capabilities by the Operating System and additional tools. Things will only grow. As a community, our success will depend on us all creating quality content for the different Amiga devices that will be available to the market. And judging by past community efforts at producing quality content, I think we are all going to be quite successful. Good Luck to us all. Vince Pfeifer VP of Operations May 31, 2000