August - a month in which I moved house, bought a Palm Pilot, finally received Netconnect 2, and searched hopelessly for a Zorro-II/III IO expansion card...
As most regulars will know, I've been running a survey about the popularity of currently proposed Next Generation Amiga systems. What started as a bit of curiosity on my behalf, began to pick up speed, and the comments submitted have been very interesting indeed. You can find a periodically updated results table on the Next Generation Amiga page. I'm still not totally sure what I'm going to do with the results, except publicise them on these pages for the naturally curious, like me.
The interesting thing is that the survey has been pretty much dominated from the beginning by the A\BOX, Phase 5's now mythical next generation Amiga-esque system. Despite the fact that the project has been effectively put on ice, it's remained a strong favourite amongst a large number of Amigans. Out of all the projects listed, A\BOX is, arguably, the least likely to make an appearance at the outset of OS 5.0 - so what's the appeal? I'm afraid I haven't had much in the way of reasoning behind this choice, but my own guess is that Phase 5's initiative and marketing has made a very powerful impression. It's understandable. While the Amiga situation looked bleak, Phase 5 took a big risk by stepping out and coming up with something bold and imaginative. Like it or loathe it, the A\BOX was an important moment in the Amiga's history...
Interestingly, at least two people chose A\BOX because it would increase access to software from the PC and Macintosh markets... I'm not totally sure I agree on that point. For example, transAM can happily run MacOS, Linux and BeOS (as well as anything else for the PowerPC), while the Alpha Amiga has mentioned MacOS and WindowsNT support as a minimum (and that's a huge combined market!). A\BOX? Faint murmurings of Linux at the beginning, but nothing else.
Phase 5's pre\BOX has also enjoyed a good response, with the promise of seamless transition between 680X0 and PowerPC being described as a major point - a good platform to keep legacy software going, while being fully supportive of new software. Personally, I think there's also the 'geek value' of multiple CPUs coming into play there - well, multiple CPUs do it for me, at least! (You'll recall my intended transAM configuration was dual-PowerPC...)
Despite the low showing of the Alpha, the only non-PowerPC system listed, it has been mentioned many times as a strong second-choice. PC integration has been frequently quoted as one of the strong points of this processor, plus the combined punch of high performance and industry support. However, just as many people surveyed have mentioned the PC as a strong reason for not opting for the Alpha or similar - mainly by A\BOX supporters, though. Prejudice? Worries about losing the uniqueness of the Amiga? Genuine concerns that the industry standard doesn't offer a truly revolutionary platform?
My personal favourite, the transAM, has been low down the ranking since the beginning. I have to admit I expected it to be anyway, mainly because Phase 5 have pretty much captured the hearts and minds of the Amiga's PowerPC camp. However, reasons mentioned for not choosing transAM have primarily been down to the apparent unlikelihood of AmigaOS becoming available for the transAM, as well as the lack of any response to the WoA announcement. Has PIOS given up on the Amiga, or are they taking their time before announcing plans? Whatever PIOS are up to, their silence hasn't done much to improve their popularity within the Amiga community, which is a shame.
Make of all this what you will. I'm going to continue the survey until November - or, to be more exact, the date of the official release of OS 4. More comprehensive results will be published soon afterwards. If you haven't already submitted your details, there has never been a better time! (That's a complete lie... I've been involved with marketing hype too much recently, it must be rubbing off...)
I finally went out and bought a Palm Pilot Professional. While PC users can grab a WindowsCE machine, at exorbitant prices and equally huge rates of power consumption, there's no real Amiga palmtop. However, there is a nice alternative - the Palm, which shares some surprising similarities to the Amiga - on hardware, software and community levels.
The Palm range of palmtop computers are wonderful - think of a hand-sized Apple Newton running on a 16 MHz 68k processor. The Professional and Palm III even have a complete TCP/IP stack. The handwriting recognition is based upon 'Graffiti', a set of character templates approximating their handwritten equivalents. It sounds complicated, but it's surprisingly easy and intuitive to pick up - I was fluent in the alphanumerical characters and basic punctuation within a couple of minutes, and could happily do special characters and command shortcuts a few minutes later. If you get stuck, you can always pull up an on-screen keyboard and use that instead.
Software on the Amiga which support the Palm's internal applications are scarce, but should be a long soon. In fact, time permitting, I'm planning to write a few small applications myself (no doubt it'll end up with the portable 3D racing car simulation engine and the raytracing API for Modula-II). However, you can happily use Richard Koerber's excellent PalmLink software, which is currently in the beta stage (though I've had no problems with it so far - it's very robust!). Believe me, you do need the software - the Palm requires a desktop machine to "HotSync" data between - for backups, software installations and so on.
It's a perfect complement to an Amiga - the closest you'll get to having a palmtop Amiga for a long time. Well recommended - I just had to share that with you. If anyone wants a more thorough review, I'll add one to the site.
Have I gone mad? Well, in a way I have, because I recently got hold of a PC - a surplus item from our office. Before I receive death threats and accusations of selling out to the Wintel monopoly, I think I'd better explain...
The machine is a 25MHz 80486SX, with a 1Mb VGA card and a whopping 8Mb of RAM. It's about 9 years old, with a case held together by sticky tape and luck (someone stole the screws!). The floppy drive connector is ready to fall off, and did I mention the 250 Mb hard drive? It's not cutting edge, but it was free.
The thing has been lying about the office for ages - it's been kicked, scavenged for spares (including mounting screws, cables and CD-ROM drive) and generally abused. However, it does have one rather sweet touch - no one has got it to run any flavour of Windows on it successfully - it bombs out after about 5 minutes every time. No problems with MSDOS, though. The little thing (and it is little... my A4000/030 case is bigger) was due for the bin, until I stepped in.
At the moment, the hard drive isn't usable (somebody stole the IDE cable!) but it runs off floppy disks quite admirably, if slowly. When I get the hard disk online and prepped, I'll install NetBSD 1.3.2 (guess who bought the Gateway Vol.3 CD-ROM!), and use it as part of a rendering farm alongside the Amiga, as well as run a test bed for developing CGI software and get some UNIX systems administration experience. Well, that's the idea anyway...
As I finished the draft of this month's comments, I received the sad news that CU Amiga have had to call it a day. The October 1998 issue will be its final publication.
I first bought CU Amiga a few months before I finally had enough pennies saved to get my A500. Yep, I had an Amiga software collection before I'd even got the hardware to run it on! CU Amiga may not have always got their facts straight, but they had the enthusiasm and the energy to keep the Amiga community's spirit up and provide plenty of things for people to do - be it programming, graphics, soldering or DTP. I'm sure you'll agree that they'll be sorely missed.
My best wishes for the future to all the staff at CU Amiga.