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

After multiple infusions of New Year's bubbly I realized that I had spent big parts of the last decades of the Twentieth Century waiting for the return of three chunks of my life that had gone away.

Returns?

Yeah, they were bright and shining moments that had added much to my life; times when all was well and nothing could go wrong...

for a while.

But for many reasons the bright and shining moments went away. Sigh.

More bubbly, please.

And what were they?

The Beatles, Star Wars, and the Amiga.

With the release of new Beatles music, among them, Free as a Bird and Real Love, I got the my first return. Once more it was a hard days night within and without us. Then last summer with the release of the Phantom Menace I got my second return. Once more tales of the Force graced our silver screens.

After the release of the infamous Schmidt-o-gram, I thought there was no way the third return would ever happen. Gone.

Then on New Year's Eve, at the turn of the Millennium, it happened...

The third return.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Force is with us again. Boing it up baby, let's pop open another bubbly.

I guess crossing over that great divide into a new Millennium is enough of an experience to put one into a very pensive mood. But shortly after New Year's Day I was crossing another great divide, the Mississippi River.

At 40,000 feet.

CES, the Consumer Electronic Show is held every January in Las Vegas, that first known example of civic virtual reality. Once again I was riding the friendly skies in search of another shot of digital enlightenment. It was all there--Qubit, Packet Video, INetCam, Avio, and many more. In the end, I didn't expect to find that the most important development at the show could be summed up in three letters....

TAO.

The sound byte for the rest of this article is....

Tao rocks.

All you techno-hipsters, get your sunglasses out, the Amino/Amiga's future is bright. No longer is the light at the end of the tunnel that of the on-coming train. The Tao move is going to propel Amino/Amiga into the front ranks of the emerging hyper-networked new computing environment. I think that for once the worlds longest running cyber-soap opera, aka the Amiga, has an uplifting episode. Something very real and very exciting may come of it.

I saw the Tao demo at CES and it was terrific. I think we will have a modern leading edge Amino/Amiga on our desktop and in our pocket within the next year. Q3 and Q4 of Y2K are going to be very exciting. The wizards of Reading (Tao guys) have really cooked up a tasty Amigan stew. Some ingredients...

Tao's got an object based RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) named Elate. It supports user invisible plug and play for getting on the Net or adding new peripherals or software. This stuff always hasn't been that easy on the Amiga, what with hardware hacks and all.

Tao has a Sun approved clean room version of a Java virtual machine. It means that Java by Tao is 100% compliant with Sun's Java standard. This is really important to Amigans because it means outstanding new software now. Java is a lot more that funny things dancing on Websites.

Tao implements a system of dynamic binding. Elate loads and uses tools only when required by the apps. Tao clearly follows the Amiga Zen-programming path of the lean code. Blinding speed is the result. If Elate doesn't find those tools in memory, or on a local hard drive, it starts searching for cds, floppies, then out to the Net or other networks. Its sort of like the Terminator,isn't it?

I'll be back.

"We are targeting x86 and PPC for the first consumer release of Pathfinder products...."

Ah, Fleecy, your words are music to my ears. The great thing, the forward looking thing, about the Amiga/Tao agreement is that Amino/Amiga will become hardware platform agnostic, just like Tao is. That means that the new system will run on Intel, Moto's PCC, G3, Coldfire, or StrongARM, a whole lot more, and whatever else rolls out of the world's fab plants (not the Fab Four). How long do you think before Tao is running on Transmeta?

Porting apps to Tao is easy. A developer writes a Tao translator program and it happens. Pow. In Reading they say it takes a few days to learn how to do this.

We're getting link drivers. They allow communication between different processors. Tres cool. But there's more to this processor story. We get load balancing which allows Elate to balance tasks between processors, even different types of processors. Could this be a hardware hackers dream? A lot of Amigans are that way.

Tao multi-tasks. With automatic system recognition of multiple processors we have a system that will push this very Amigan characteristic to new heights. How about rendering an Anim, AVI, QT, and Mpeg version of the same non-linear video edit at the same time.

Excuse me while I prop up my jaw. I hate it when that happens.

There's a lot more. Click here to go to Tao and check it out.

The thing that got me though was seeing the Boing ball running on their system. That made it very real for me. This isn't another example of drive-by press releases leaving vapor in their wake.

It was Graham Nice, Commercial Director at Tao who answered my questions and demoed their stuff. I recorded this on video. You can see my interview with Graham Nice by clicking here. Since Java isn't currently available for the Amiga, there will be a more Amiga friendly version available here later this quarter.

So what are the implications of the Tao agreement?

For starters it provides Amino/Amiga an opportunity to create a technical environment and a set of technical rules where the garage oriented independent techno-creative, i.e. Amigans, can prosper and flourish.

Beyond that Amino/Amiga reaches a higher level of computing capability and practice. Characteristics that emerge from this are: Modular, Connected, Networked, Distributed, Migratiable, and Aware. The implications of each characteristic contain equally deep implications for how Amigans will use their new machines. Our capabilities have been greatly extended.

Here are a few points....

1. In light of the Tao announcement all basic Amino/Amiga apps need to be rethought. Developers need to make their new apps modular and connected. Think proactive and self-organized. It remains to be seen whether connectivity will be achieved through Arexx, Rebol, Jini, something within Elate, or some combination of them all. But however it will be done, apps that automatically do things with other apps will be the order of the day.

Here's an example of what this could mean. After working away all night on some new Tech Head anim, I hit save for the last time. My new Amino/Amiga computer chugs away with a new Amino/Amiga app. As it saves my anim, it automatically saves a thumbnail of the project into a central database of all my anims, iffs, sounds, regardless of the program that created them. All my programs can read these thumbnails. Maybe the anim app has prompted me for some metatags somewhere along the way. Now the program inserts this data into both the database, in the anim itself, and on to a web search engine. Modularity, Connectivity, and Awareness.

2. IRC and the Web should be available from inside all apps. If I want to, I want the ability to save my files to both a Website and my hard drive simultaneously. Tao easily supports this. With an instant Web save from inside all graphics apps, it should be a complete no brainer to automatically upload to Aminet a new anim, or mpeg, or whatever. We could donate some, but not all of our images to a central on-line Amino/Amiga clip art collection that all would be free to use (royalty free, with some restrictions) for the benefit of all. Tao combined with Amino/Amiga enhances network thinking. Remember that McLuhan thing about when information brushes against information the results are startling and effective. Here it is in action. Networked.

3. Integrate the Net everywhere on the Amino/Amiga. Why not have the ultimate spellchecker in all Amigan national languagesavailable on the Amino/Amiga website? I don't need that on my hard drive, do you? Networked. Distributed.

4. The Object Ocean concept is a good idea. Stay with it--no exceptions. Enforce this concept in all developer agreements. Here's the payoff...

I would like all my data available in all my apps. Sometimes, but not always, I would like to put an anim of clouds behind the text in my word processor. Why? Who knows? I want to do this without switching apps. I could do this if every program plugged into all the others. As Nicholas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab Big Kauhana) says, its just bits. Then after all that, I want to pull that text with cloud animation into my ray tracer as some kind of texture. Maybe I want to send it to somebody. I want a common memory place where all my apps, not just some, can work on the same data. Ideally all at once. What's multi-tasking for? I want every Amino/Amiga app to be in effect a plug-in to all the others. No conflicts. Connected.

5. Dig the gig.

This time next year we will be discussing which 1 gig clock rate cpus we should select for our hot Amino/Amiga platform(s). We don't want to be locked into any hardware maker's whim, greed, or glacial development or pricing schedule. I don't want Mick Tinker's sense of speed, second only to geology in stateliness, to determine my upgrade schedule. Do you?

I generally upgrade the computer(s) on my techo-altar about once every eighteen months. What I had planned for Q3 of Y2K was to put a dual processor board in my Wintel machine. I call it Richelieu. All Wintel boxes on the techno-altar get named after bad guys in Dumas' Three Musketeers. I also have Rochefort. Since I have an Intel PII 400mz inside already, my plan called for another one. They are going to be very cheap by the time Q3 rolls around. Along with that I was going to add another hard drive and make the system dual boot with BeOS on that new drive. Why BE? Besides a free operating system, what else? Click here.

Now I hope to add a third drive and make it triple boot with New Amiga/Tao OS in there as well. I suspect I will be able to pull this off. If you recall what I said earlier about Graham Nice showing me a demo at CES of some generic Intel Inside laptop running Tao software which was in turn running a Boing ball animation. Migratiable. It was very cool. This I think, is a clue to the future direction. Speaking of future directions....

Amiga Likes Toasters

We liked toasters from Newtek. Maybe we will get to like talking Net toasters as well. Let's not forget those Information Appliances. I think they are going to be very cool and very important.

For example, I don't keep any sort of calendar on my desktop machines in spite of On The Ball being the best of them. Why? Nothing special, a lot of the time I'm not at my desk. Remember that plane at 40,000 feet? Since my calendar should be where I am, not on my desktop, wherever that is, I keep my calendar in an obsolete Casio organizer, the BOSS SF-5980. It sits in my pocket until I need it wherever I am. A calendar must be available at the point of need, at any time, at any place. Sometime in the next few months I will replace that Casio (its three years old, let's see, that's 18 Internet dog years. Arf!) with a Visor. I would love to replace it with an Amino/Amiga solution.

Amino/Amiga can do a lot in this area that will benefit both users and the developers. Users get new capabilities and developers get new markets. For example, there has never been a real Amiga portable. Let's bag the laptop and go straight to the palmtop. I would love to have something that would run Scala MM400 and fit in my pocket. Or a Java version of it. Don't you think Java is an obvious development path for Scala? Somebody should tell them. The Casio Cassiopeia 105, very multimedia oriented, runs on StrongARM cpus. Unfortunately it runs Windoze CE. But Tao runs on StrongARM as well... So my Scala scenario could become very real. What a great way to show of my streaming video portfolio to a potential client.

Amino/Amiga should consider a tablet form factor made modular with usb and some form of wireless (Irda or Bluetooth) connectivity. Maybe licensing the National Semiconductor tablet would be the way to go. I can see it now, there I am editing video on a tablet sitting in my favorite chair....bliss.

Yes its going to be a very good year.

End. A Special Note to Amigans everywhere: Be sure to check out Gary Storm's excellent AQUAFRESH where sense gets made of the fast moving Amino/Amiga scene. Regular weekly interviews with Fleecy Moss are a highlight.

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