Hello Everyone and welcome to Tech Head Story's Amiga Watch page. Amiga Watch provides perspectives on Amiga policy, strategy, and vision.

Its late.

Blues in the night

Been thinking about Amiga 2K?

Me too.

Once again its the early AM. Except for a lonely wail of an ambulance siren, Saratoga Springs is quiet. With the notable exception of old Tech Head here, most of the town's citizens are asleep. I got the Stones on the turntable, its a vinyl night here at the MWD International Headquarters...

"When the train left the station..."

Yeah...

The slide guitar sound merges with that ambulance siren. He's is pretty mournful tonight, Mick.

Jagger, not Tinker.

Love In Vain...

The Stones got us down in the zero tonight. But before we get going, there's some remembering we've got to do...

Phasers Off: The Demise of Phase 5

Yeah well Wolf Dietrich is probably listening to the same blues I am tonight. Hour of the Wolf. Phase5 went down for the count and got carried out of the ring. True, their customer service left something to be desired, but when they executed, their stuff smoked. Sort of like a Hurricane Carter one two punch to the cyber-solar plexus. Phase5 accelerator upgrades kept the Amiga a viable contender in the platform ring during the dark years. Yeah, an A1200 packing a Blizzard board was a real contender all right. Those 040 or 060 boards put an A1200 in the heavyweight division with all the Pentium PC Clone palookas. With an operating system that booted so fast that they never saw it coming, a Phase 5 enhanced Amiga made those guys see stars. The Amiga wasn't just some chump with a no-show corporate owner. Amiga had something better. It had a community of users and developers. It was a contender. Thanks Wolfman and the krewe, I know you will make it through the night.

"Well I followed her to the station,"

"with a suitcase in my hand"

The Stones always sound better on a vinyl LP. CD sound is too clean for them. All the Amiga Classic refusniks must have this tune memorized by now.

The Amiga refusniks? You know, those guys all tied up in guru meditations obsessing and posting to the Net about what's a true Amiga and what's not, and how what we got coming from Fleecy and Bill isn't even close to being a true Amiga. Well...

"I want to tell you how its gonna be"

Not Fade Away

Do you remember Mick Jagger stalking the stage like some kind of Mod panther, with maracas in his hand doing this song? Bill McEwen was kind of a tekno-geek version of that. The new Amiga leather jackets were very cool. Mick would approve. The banquet t-shirts they passed out had everybody in the aisles. Bill really wailed that night in Saint Louis. Something like Howling Wolf or John Lee Hooker. It was tekno-truth smoking out of the Delta. Bill cooked -- he was bad and the beat was strong. It was the overdriven blues amp righteous sound of the future coming at us loud and strong. Here's some of his lyrics...

Bill Rocks

He presented a lineup of Amiga companies developing for new Amiga: Epic, ACT, DCE, Met@box, Scala, Amiga Development, Titan, H&P, Digital Images, Hyperion, and Crystal Software. These dudes are porting or developing 117 titles for the Tao based New Amiga OS. There will be software for the new machine.

Bill laid on how New Amiga is coordinating with Met@box and their new AmiJoe PPC card for the A1200. Get this, AmiJoe will run the New Amiga OS.

There will be a new version of Scala for the new OS. Remember how MM400 has always smoked PowerPoint? Have you checked out their new web oriented iPlayStudio for Wintel? That is what we have coming to New Amiga. My guess is that it will be a Java applet.

Espial is providing an 800k java web browser called Escape for New Amiga. Bill McEwen told us "Our success will be the embrace of Java." That means you can expect to see many Java apps for Amiga. More on this later.

Three animators from Disney, Patrick Roberts, Michael Daugherty, and Arthur Argote, provided the conceptual designs for the look of the new hardware reference plans. Some backup band. These guys are lead designers for the new Disney movie Dinosaurs. The designs are beautiful. These guys did their work all on their own time. The designs are a gift. New Amiga wouldn't build them but you can be sure they will be part of the hardware specifications that they will license. Maybe they are just inspiration. If computers are going to be pervasive in peoples lives they need to look a lot better that all these beige breadboxes we've got now.

Its good to remember that Disney used to develop animation software for the Amiga. Bill told us that Disney used over 500 Amigas to produce computer animation for their films. This is a company that could use any platform they want and yet they chose Amiga along with whatever additional choices they made. Amiga has clout in media circles. From that perspective its no surprise that now Amiga is aligned with an array of consumer electronic firms including Sony, JVC, and others. Lets not forget big Java kahuna, Sun in that list.

A new hardware vision

Now some scoff at these announcements saying they are just vapor. Hmmmm. Do you really expect them to reveal their hand before things are ready? Now why would any strategic thinking partner do that? Doh.

Are we getting the beat yet?

And then there was the Linux riff... Red Hat and Corel are strategic partners. Why? Amiga will be the common consumer application layer for 26 different versions of Linux. Let me run that by you again. With a big bunch of Linux developers saying "fork you" to eachother, Linux is going down the UNIX trail and moving towards incompatible versions of the OS. Now from a systems theory perspective that's ok. Because evolution throws up variation and over the long run the hammer of Darwin, that's the survival of the fittest, will knock off the laggards and underperformers.

Great from a theoretical perspective, but if you are a developer or a user, this is a real bummer. What if you spent a year developing for a fork that gets hammered by the other 25 (or more) Linux forks? Groan. Should everybody be safe and just develop for Wintel? Charming. Well that's where Amiga comes in. With a common interface running on top of a Tao virtual machine running on whatever Linux kernel, its pretty easy to develop the code for another Tao VM (virtual machine), make the necessary code adjustments and go on as before. The Amiga Object Ocean perspective saves the Linux bacon.

Now do you understand why Amiga will be the common consumer interface for Corel Linux apps? Bacon smells so good when it sizzles, doesn't it? Amiga will provide Java and Linux with a common interface.

Bill told us that the new Amiga developer environment will run on top of a Red Hat Linux base and foundation. No Micro$loth. Remember you have to develop on something.

Newtek has placed its source code for the Toaster and Flyer into Open Source status. You can check out www.toaster.amiga.org for details.

Bill was in healer mode. Greenboy of the Phoenix Group joined Amiga's Gary Peake on stage to shake hands and announce that there was no split in the Amiga community. Phoenix and Amiga are working together.

There will be an upcoming announcement regarding Amiga participation in a global ISP alliance. With New Amiga being so extensible that it will run on just about everything from a cell phone to a server, it makes sense for the company to become involved in the network infrastructure as well. It will be interesting to hear the vision and the details as things emerge.

more Love In Vain

"When the train left the station,"

"It had two lights on behind"...

After a while you grow to like the clicks, pops, and scratches of vinyl. They become part of the music.

Yeah the entire computer world is leaving those good ole' refusniks at the train station. Have you ever noticed that the Amiga refusniks are always talking hardware horsepower and never about productivity, what you do with it? That's like watching those test patterns that tv stations put up when they're off the air and treating them like they were programs. I think in the end what they want is for the Amiga to be a hobbyist computer, the plaything of cyber-antiquarians. Its a weird mindset because everyone of them would agree that computers are changing the world. Yet at the same time they don't want their computer to change. They have a desktop where its always 1986.

Except its not.

The combination of Moore's Law and the global knowledge explosion is driving accelerated change in all areas of modern life including the desktop. Some have said that global knowledge has been doubling every seventeen years since the time of Isaac Newton anyway. Nothing is standing still, even the Amiga. Bill and Fleecy recognize that and are moving forward with important benefits. They are offering developers one thing that they really crave.

Sex?

Err, well other than that, New Amiga is offering platform stability and continuity. Java running on an Elate virtual machine will run on just about any processor now and in the future. No developer gets marooned on a proprietary hardware scheme. All versions of the apps run the same. And yet some refusniks say that, "his [Fleecy's] concepts are too abstract to try to go from concept to commercial without plenty of research..." LOL.

What does that bit about true Amiga mean anyway?

Well for one thing using that term is a marvelous way to try and halt all innovation of any kind. Somebody comes up with a new standard or innovation and you can drop a dime on it by saying if we do this its not a true Amiga anymore. How convenient. Here's another.

There's that not being "professional" charge. Some were "concerned that Amiga's level of professionalism was not high enough to inspire confidence." What does that mean? Among who? Bill and Fleecy were professional enough to get funded to the tune of several million dollars of venture capital funding. These guys have guts, vision, and smarts. That's professional enough for me.

Let's turn down the Stones and pass the bourbon and Coke, because here's an interesting little thought experiment I want to tell you about....

Commodore 1994-2000: An Alternate and Virtual History

I've been reading a bit of Virtual History these days. That's where historians create scenarios, thought experiments, alternative realities, and simulations in an attempt to illuminate important dynamics and factors embedded in historical events. Trying to figure out what factors really mattered is what they're trying to get at. If you want to know more check out Naill Ferguson's 1999 book Virtual History. He's a historian up at Oxford (UK, not Mississippi). Interesting and innovative stuff going on here. So let's try one ourselves...

I assume that any computer that came out of Commodore with "Ghoul" and "Muddy" running the company and Dave Haynie in the engineering department, is a true Amiga organization making real Amiga computers. Agree?

Further let's say that Commodore had by some miracle not gone belly up in 1994 and instead had flourished. What would they be doing? By now, considering that they would have been releasing new Amiga computer model lines at the Moore's Law driven rate of one every eighteen months...

Well let's see, 1994... now its 2000...

OK, that's six years which is seventy two months. Right. Now let's divide that by 18 months, the rate of new model introduction...

and we get four model upgrades. So instead of development stopping at the A4000, by now we would be at the A8000. I like Virtual History, don't you? Don't you think that over four product generations a lot of innovation would have occurred? That's what development is about. Do you really think that Dave H and the rest of the guys in engineering would have been merely arguing over whether its curry or pizza for lunch for the past six years? What about the software development team? Maybe by now the OS for the A8000 would be at ver 5.0. Do you think every app from ver 3.1 and below would still run? Take a look at the other side of the hill. Do all MS-DOS apps run on Windoze? Not. Do all Mac 68k apps run on PPC? All Operating Systems evolve. Why shouldn't Amiga?

If one put the venerable A4000, or equally venerable A1200, next to our hypothetical A8000, they would certainly be very different machines. But in what ways? For starters it is quite likely there would have been a shift from Zorro III slots to PCI ones. Maybe slots would be abandoned entirely in favor of USB and Firewire peripheral connection strategies. Why? The dominant trend in all computing is to get away from proprietary hardware and use off the shelf stuff instead. Its faster and cheaper. By the time the A8000 appeared most likely all custom chips would have been designed out. Instead there would be an AGP graphics slot and a Sound Blaster compatible driver supporting your choice of off the shelf sound cards. This would probably have occurred in the mythical A6000 development cycle. Right there with just those two examples, a lot of Classic Amiga software and peripherals would have been broken. They wouldn't run and Commodore would have done that.

"Oh they would never do that", pipes up an Amiga refusnik in the back of the crowd.

"Oh?", I reply.

Do you recall the design changes that flipped the external expansion port orientation when moving from the A1000 to the A500? Also recall that the internal 4 audio channels were merged and fed into 2 hardware outputs (4 separate outputs on the A1000). That broke a lot of A1000 peripherals.

Which is the true Amiga? The A1000 or the A500?

So what does this thought experiment in virtual Commodore development tell us?

The Amiga would have left the station anyway.

It tells us that the Amiga would have both evolved and radically changed no matter what. I have a feeling we would be more or less at a place near where Bill and Fleecy have taken us. All they are doing is jumping six years of deferred development into one year. All Bill and Fleecy have done is to give us their version of the computing system that would have emerged anyway. And considering how things actually turned out at Commodore, I think I would rather have their version of a new Amiga than the one that "Ghoul" and "Muddy" would have cooked up. At least this time we're on the train rather than under it.

While the structure of the Amiga has always evolved, the pattern of its design principles have remained constant. New Amiga is right in line with this. I think of those design principles as...

Same as it ever was.

The song remains the same.

If the Amiga is to be a living computer platform and not a retro-computing hobbyist toy, the platform is going to be changing no matter who is in charge. So this not true Amiga and lack of professionalism stuff is just bunk...

a bit of Love in Vain for a past that never was.

Oops the the needle is sticking in the inner groove of the Stones record. Time to flip it over. Don't do that with CDs do we?

A new side and a new future...

Penguins With Boing Balls Drinking Java

These Linux kernel and Java announcements really got the refusniks hopping mad. Oops, someone just kicked some more innovation dirt in their Amiga playpen. Haven't we been here before? Didn't Jim Collas trot Linux out last year? And wasn't he flamed big time for the Linux move? What's the big deal? Aligning with Linux is smart. You can check out Amiga Watch Three to get my earlier perspective on this. There's a link at the bottom of the page. However there are other reasons why this is a good move...

Linux is innovative.

Linus Torvalds extended an open source model of development that includes peer review for code. With a proprietary development model, like the boys in Redmond use, its just a bunch of bloatware oriented Wintel coders, beta testers, and software supremos, all legends in their own mind I might add, deciding that the latest WinBloat 2K is great and ready to ship. What's 63,000 bugs when you're a monopolist? With Linux there are thousands of eyeballs checking out every line of source code, testing, and proposing corrections and enhancements. This leads to very stable code and very rapid development of new versions. Because of the Open Source Licensing provisions those enhancements are folded into every Linux user's operating system. We all benefit. How long did it take the Amiga team to write the 3.5 OS upgrade? How long has Windows 2000 taken? LOL. We are talking years in each case. The Linux team can sometimes do new versions of the kernel in a few hours. We need that, our world is moving too fast for anything slower.

The full benefits of Elate, TAO's RTOS, can't occur if tied to a dated operating system like Amiga Classic. Yes ver 3.5 is excellent, but it is plowing another row in the garden of the past. The importance of the proprietary chips to the Amiga is catching up with us. There is nothing magic about Chip Memory or AGA. This is just one issue. Remember the Elate contribution to New Amiga is heavily in the Multimedia and Java support areas and tying it to old proprietary standards, like AGA and chip memory will hobble development. Amiga needs to move on.

A new screen

Remember that earlier bit I wrote about the technology industries dumping everything proprietary and utilizing off the shelf components instead? Examples? Why even the US Special Forces do this. Their mountain gear is bought from the same manufacturers that outfit the Winter Olympic teams. DOD (US Department of Defense) uses off the shelf computing wherever it can. The Marines use the Doom game creation engine to develop their own scenarios to teach rifle team combat tactics and unit cohesion. In a world like this why shouldn't New Amiga use off the shelf parts, like a Linux kernel?

Then there is the delicate matter of time.

New Amiga doesn't have much. If a concrete Amiga product isn't offered for sale in time for the Christmas 2000 buying season, hmmmmm.... Things are moving very rapidly out there in computerland. A new non-Wintel vision of Information Appliances, wireless Internet, self organizing systems, Web tablets, Java, Jini, Rebol, QNX and more than I have time to list is coming into being as I write these words. There isn't a lot of time.

Anything that Bill and Fleecy can do to speed up New Amiga development is all to the good. There is going to be a time gap between when the entire Amiga system is announced publicly and when the first truly new apps start to emerge from the code rooms of our developers. New Amiga need to shorten that gap as much as they can. Going off the shelf with Java and a Linux kernel really helps. After all no development can happen until they release a complete system to develop for. And there is another point...

I'm proud that New Amiga is aligned with Linus Torvalds.

Its interesting how much Amigans started to like Jim Collas once he got fired from Amiga Inc. Some see Jim Collas as the great friend of the downtrodden Amiga masses. I'm not convinced that old Jimbo is a great Rev-o-LUShion-ary. Check his webpage. To me he was just another suit in the Gateway chorus line. Personally I think a lot more of Linus Torvalds than Jim Collas. As opposed to Jimbo, Linus Torvalds really has revolutionized contemporary computing.

Boy did it ever need it. The development path that Wintel wants to take us down is pretty dreary.

And why am I up tonight listening to the Stones?

White flash.

New Amiga will be the first true Java computing platform. Actually Amiga is much more and this is only the beginning. But let's talk Java for now. I'm excited. That Java Virtual Machine running on Elate will have no trouble with any truly Java compliant applet that is out on the Net today. I'm thinking of Sun's Quote or Codebrain's Gutenberg or Slider.

By my count there are at least ten Java applets available NOW that will be useful in multimedia production. Upon launch, New Amiga's machine will immediately run. Java Notebook, Wav, Slider, Gutenberg, Quote, AudioCentric, Anispeak, MoveFX, Javu, and Stereoscope. Java makes the network the computer.

Another thing to ponder is the announcement from Sony just before Amiga 2K. They announced that they were a network company. And some Amigans need to expand their thinking from single a single platform perspective to a web of relationships perspective. This is both Biological Systems thinking and Object Ocean/AmiVerse thinking. Sony will be releasing a PDA. Now a PDA from Sony has got to be multimedia oriented. Its Sony, right? Sony has relations with both Palm and Tao, covering their bets as it were. I wouldn't be surprised to see their PDA running the Palm OS with the Tao intent Java multimedia middleware. It could even be possible that Amiga could OEM this PDA (i.e. license it). I would imagine it would have Memory Stick capability along with some sort of AV production capability. These are just my observations. I have no insider knowledge but that's how strategic partnerships work.

Close to the Metal: New Amiga Hardware

Did you see Samsung's announcement about the $200 disposable computer they intend to sell at the end of the year? It kind of tells us something...

Hardware is a commodity...

and New Amiga is a software company.

The fact that Amiga/Tao will run on multiple cpus is great. I want to customize my own hardware. I don't care about PPC chips or G4 chips from Moto(rola). I think there is more bang for the buck coming out of Intel and AMD in this regard than anything that is coming out of Moto. But you may think I'm wrong. That's OK. With New Amiga there is no "either/or" decision to be made. We can design our own different hardware systems and we both still have Amigas. For instance Tao's Elate automatically recognizes multiple processors, even different ones on the same motherboard. Cool.

What I'm personally planning to do for my system over the second half of 2000 (a few changes from what I said in the last Amiga Watch) is to upgrade my Wintel box to a dual processor mother board (around $260) put in two PII @ 450 mz cpus ($125 ea.) and double my existing memory from 256 meg to 500 meg ($250-$375 depending on ram prices). I will make this system a dual or triple boot OS system. I'm thinking of Amiga/Tao, Win 98 (boo), and BeOS.

I'm being conservative in my processor selection because so much is going to be happening over the next 18 months in this area. I would not be surprised if a lot of companies were releasing 2 gig clockrate cpus by Sept-Dec 2001. I don't want to tear down my entire system again (2 Gig CPUs will require faster everything: motherboards, memory, i/o, hard drive controllers, graphics) and so soon in order to get the 2 GigHz gains in speed. Also I don't want to get blindsided by events. A lot is happening in this technology sector.

Heavy Metal/Total Impact

The Amiga point here is that hardware like the kind I'm describing will run whatever combo of Elate, Intent Java VM, Linux kernel, Amiga Object Ocean/Wrapper emerges. This hardware undergirding will make their code fly. As you know rendering is always a big hit at the end of any computer animation or video project. The combo of this kind of hardware and a very lean operating system will make rendering very probably a real-time or near it process. At least on the New Amiga side of the computer. Since I can get the components for this kind of system very cheaply, and so can you, I might add, by comparison shopping on the Net and continuing to use my existing hard drives, case, power supply, graphics card, sound card, keyboard, mouse, memory, and monitor. Who needs Bill and Fleecy to build me a box?

New Amiga's big contribution is being collage makers. They are blending code components, standards, and interfaces into a unified whole. Just getting all this stuff to work together and with a vast array of hardware is a big achievement in itself. Remember sampling, collage, and montage are the dominant contributions of the Twentieth Century to the world of Art. We need to talk more about this in another communiqué.

Amiga creativity

Here is how I will approach utilizing New Amiga's soft-collage. Apps wise I will run a combo of Amiga Classic graphics and SFX (Special Effects) apps on top of the H&P emulator and UAE from Cloanto. They will fly on the kind of hardware I described. I'll run the new Scala app for multimedia production. The Java apps have lots of capabilities. I'll use a Java NLE (Non-Linear Editor) editor for cutting video. I'll also use VideoWave III and Premiere on Win98. I think this will be a pretty capable system for multimedia, webcasting, and streaming/CD/DVD production. I will fill in capability with selected Win apps, i.e. Video Vegas 2.0 (Sonic Foundry). If the new applications materialize like I think they will, I'll eliminate Win98 from my system at a future date.

My analysis is all based on what is known now. What is really interesting is...

What else will be coming? I'm sure there will be more major announcements in the weeks ahead. We haven't even begun to consider Renderware, Sessyo and most of all -- AmiVerse. I will in the next Amiga Watch. Once developers get going there will be additional good stuff on the way. For instance, ProDad an Amiga developer that has been doing a lot of stuff for Draco is a prime candidate for media app development. I'm sure they will port to the New Amiga. However I believe that the most exciting and innovative developments will come from Amiga programmers once they have assimilated the new AmiVerse thinking.

Speaking of what lies ahead, what do you make of these statements from Fleecy taken from the Harv Laser IRC transcripts:

-Fleecy: soft: the problem with that is we could end up doing a Be and spend more time writing drivers than developing our core product. What we need is a unified driver model - HAVi will hopefully allow us to get there.

-Fleecy: auto-config ;-) Wait until you see what we are planning with the HAVi device object model.

HAVi?

All right, listen-up everybody. Homework. Between now and the next Amiga Watch posting, I want you to research HAVi and e-mail me at: techheadstories@yahoo.com about what you think are the implications of HAVi for the New Amiga. The best ones will be shared in the next column.

"When the train came in the station,"

"and I looked her in the eye."

Aren't you getting tired of always wondering what Micro$loth is going to do next? Are you tired of obsessing about Linux or BE or QNX? I know I am. In today's world operating systems are turning into commodities like hardware has already. That's one of the underlying implications of the AmiVerse concept. The whole thing that this endless ranting about Operating System components and the cult of the true Amiga misses is that in the end...

Its the content that matters.

Fleecy calls it the digital content universe, the AmiVerse. He is right and so is Shakespeare when he said "The play's the thing." This view tells us that hardware is just a commodity used to get into that universe and software presents or makes the content. Users want easier ways to make or use content. Simplicity. Some doubt the validity of this vision. However it reflects a train of thinking in computer science going back to ENIAC of the 1940s, through the thinking of Alan Kay and Ted Nelson in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Amiga is making this possible. It will be very clear and compelling to the millions of non-Amiga users that must be attracted in order for New Amiga to succeed.

Fleecy Moss

If 600 people came to Amiga 2K in Saint Louis, I would be surprised.

OK, time for an art lesson. Have you ever seen Bruegel's painting of the fall of Icarus? Click or go look in a Renaissance art history book. Like the farmer plowing his field, going about his business, ignoring Icarus falling into the sea (see his foot?) not everybody is caught up in Computerdom's longest running soap opera -- the Amiga. This shouldn't be a surprise. They have a life so they don't know and don't care. True, maybe not as interesting a life as an Amigan, and yet it is precisely from this vast group that the bulk of New Amiga users must come from.

The series of New Amiga moves are important steps in reestablishing the Amiga as the computer of choice for the leading edge/imaginative user. Gameheads and websurfers are great to have on board any computer platform because they add sizzle. But the doings of the imaginative users is what captures mindshare of people looking for the next computing advance. The Amiga must once again become the preferred machine of the garage developer start-up in programming, the arts, music, Internet, and multimedia development. Nobody in this group cares about what is a true Amiga. They are interested in capability, sizzle, and price. And that is exactly what Bill and Fleecy are offering. An Amiga mix of Java, stable Linux, modularity, scalability, simplicity, and the wonders of the AmiVerse is very attractive. A computer system that enables low cost access to the creative edge of computing while maintaining open standards will be a very compelling computing platform.

Well amigos, the record is skipping and our bourbon and coke supplies are about all drunk up. It looks like dawn is coming up and along with it a great new day for Amiga. So its time for you and me to get a bit of shuteye. Good times are coming.

End.

Remember when you need analysis and insight.... Check the Tek.

Comments and responses to Amiga Watch are welcomed at techheadstories@yahoo.com

A special note to Amigans everywhere: Be sure to read the Entering the AmiVerse article in the first issue of Amiga World. Its important and will be discussed here at Amiga Watch in an upcoming communiqué.

Remember when you need analysis and insight.... Check the Tek. Comments and responses to Amiga Watch are welcomed at techheadstories@yahoo.com.

Interesting Links:
Tech Head Home
McLellan Wyatt Digital
Digital Cinema
Interactive Stories
War For The Eyeballs

Amiga Watch Archive
Amiga Watch: Communique One
Amiga Watch: Communique Two
Amiga Watch: Communique Three
Amiga Watch: Communique Four
Amiga Watch: Communique Five