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Amiga dropping plans for new machine
Jesper Svennevid came in with the
hook-up to yet another Amiga story (YAAS). It now appears that Gateway/Amiga has dropped plans to build a new computer, and are going to work on creating a "simplified Internet interface". The article also talks about Amiga wanting to go into "home-networking", competing with Sun and others.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
"Amiga will be the Internet-appliance infrastructure company. We don't intend to build anything," says a source close to the company.
If there's one thing Amiga has proven itself to be incredibly good at over the last few years, it would have to be "not building anything." So this looks like a sensible strategic move, given that they seem to be recognizing and leveraging their core competency.
PS-- Sarcasm. Humor. :-)
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Amiga has been chasing their tale for years now. They seem incapable of sticking with an idea long enough to create an actual product.
All the waffling has taken its toll, too. Even the old hardcore Amigans are leaving now. There remain precious few die-hards...certainly not enough to constitute a market.
--Lenny
Now is the time for Amiga fans to face the fact that Amiga Inc is not going to do anything to preserve or advance the Amiga values. Come with us to QNX Neutrino -- it will be glorious!
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think it's time to let it go... flame me if you want, but that's what I think. Sorry.
Remember the article in Wired News about a computer generating better ad copy than human writers?
:}
Well, they hooked that computer up to the Internet, and have it generating "buzz".
Really, has anyone ever met an actual human being who works for "Amiga"? Or are they just randomly generating press releases based on buzzwords and standard IT industry plotlines?
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Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
I agree that Be has alot of the old Amiga flavor, and really I'm beginning to think it's the only way forward for long-suffering Amiga fans.
Anyway, not sure how many (if any?) Amiga people are working at Be, but Jean-Louis Gassee's license plate used to read "AMIGA96", I believe.
Here's a thought... maybe they had to dump their plans because they actually WERE planning on using Transmeta's chips, and those just aren't hacking it yet.
I mean, really, how can they expect to come out with a new super-duper system that fast, when the supposed supplier for the processor has never even talked about the chip, much less demoed a simulator, or gone to silicon.
And you know there's not much chance they could go to silicon without people finding out. Its not like they're going to build their own fabrication plants.
So maybe its not really Gateway's decision. Maybe they've been making plans based on assumptions that have turned out to be incorrect.
As an owner of the A1000 and then A2000, I was looking forward to an Amiga MCC... It sounded like what I want for my living room. Now, screw them. I'm going to homebrew my own. D*mn Gateway, I'd say that was the definitive nail in the coffin.
We've seen this before: CDTV.
Ages ago they took an A500 and crammed it into a VCR-like consumer device. Sales were a flop, and I suspect they will be again, because of lack of a market opportunity.
If they want to go after the web-surfing market, then they have problems:
1. Established low end competition - WebTV $199 and WebTV Classic $99. Very cheap, good enough for light surfing. Even the Sega Dreamcast $199 has the ability.
2. Bundles - The free or close to free PCs bundled with internet access.
3. Cheap general purpose computers - Your average $750 PC, except now you also have a general purpose computer.
4. Higher end - The ubiqitous $2000 home computer. Many people are willing to pay $2000 because it's what they think they can spend.
Where is there room for them to play?
Don't mind all the confusion coming out of Amiga lately, they just drunk.
If there's ever been a more anti-Free company in existence, I can't imagine who it would be.
A little background to that statement:
Phase5 is a outstanding hardware manufacturer. Their gear is good. However, their software side is a bit crazy. Last year, they released the Amiga-famous CyberStormPPC accelerator, which shoehorned a PowerPC 604e and a 68060 (exact CPUs depending on the model you chose) onto the same board. Yes, that's right, many modern Amigas are asymmetric multi-processors. Anyway, P5 released an initial stub API to developers so that lots of new PowerPC apps could be written. Another company, Haage & Partner, didn't like the new kernel, called PowerUp; they felt it was un-Amiga-like, so they wrote their own, called WarpUp.
Nothing too interesting (except for those of us with new boards on order) - until P5 decided to change their API, cutting the feet out from under their early-adopter developers. PowerPC applications that had been written and tested suddenly quit working, and P5's publicity department went to town blaming those 3rd-party coders. In backlash, many switched over to the competing (and incompatible) WarpUp system.
This is where it gets really fun. P5 didn't like the migration one bit. In the early days after the boards' release, flash firmware was being constantly updated to iron out last-minute bugs. P5 re-worked those new flashes so that WarpUp could no longer even be loaded, no matter how badly the end user wanted to use that system.
Their explanation and defense?
They developed the hardware, so it was their system. If they wanted to re-engineer their firmware in such a way that users were forced to use their OS, then they should be allowed to.
I, like many other people, got caught in the crossfire. My shiny new hardware could only use half of the software written for it, and the decision of which kernel to use was taken out of my hands.
No, people, you don't want to rely on Phase5 for your new hardware. They are terribly (and I chose that word on purpose) likely to decide, for you, what software you are allowed to run on it.
Not even Intel/Microsoft managed to pull that one off.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
While GW are thoroughly messing up the amiga, there is some development, (mainly in Germany and the UK) for the "classic" amiga line, companies like haage&partner, phase5, blittersoft.
/their/ name, not by the drive they were in - So if you're an application developer, you ask the end user to insert "volume named Shovelware1:" rather than "insert Disc 1 into drive e:".
/mnt/cdrom/name_of_cd/, floppy in /mnt/cdrom/name_of_floppy/ which would make working with removable media much less ambiguous...)
The aminet still gets lots of uploads.
The amiga OS is lacking in some (major) areas,
but it is a platform that many European Free Software coders grew up on, and is much more similar to Linux than windows. The GNU GPL is a popular license for amiga software too.
It has a good, well-integrated CLI and GUI, and "felt" like a cut-down unix, with some weird stuff thrown in. It, along with linux, and unlike windows and the mac, always encouraged creative hobbyist programming, with AMOS and Blitz for beginners, C and 68k asm for bigger projects.
(BeOS is basically the AmigaOS done right.)
It was very,very easy to program for ( 68k asm is much, much, better than x86 -most 68k macro asm projects look pretty much like C), there are 3 freely available, open source C compilers - egcs, vbcc and DICE. (The entire GNU suite was ported to AmigaDOS), and if you've ever read the amigaOS 3.1
system include files, you'll know what a pleasant architecture to develop for it was. Aahhh, taglists... messages... exec list nodes... devices...
It was always fun, like linux is, and I for one would like to see some of the slick little features of amiga os make it into linux - maybe not the core os, but the bits people left in the amiga community consider important - i.e. near-realtime multimedia performance, retargetable graphics and sound.
And little things, like the way disks were referred to by
This cuts out having to poll, like in the debian installer, which has a file on it saying, basically, "this is debian disk 1"
It also makes automounting much more sensible. (and yes, I know about vold - but why isn't it used more? - you could have an inserted cdrom appearing in
Choice of masters is not freedom.
I miss the days when you could try 6 or 7 _fundamentally_ different computers in a computer store and pick the one you like. Now you get the choice of trying Windows machine 1, or Windows machine 2, or...
:~(
The only place I've seen a Mac on display lately is Sears.
The new Amiga could have helped the home computer stagnation a little bit, except it would have been seen only in Gateway stores and not in places like Best Buy or Sears. Still, I missed it the first time, and now I'm not going to get another chance...
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Denial-of-bread attacks could become commonplace once toasters start getting IP addresses. I'm not sure that's a world I want to live in :-)
Let's not forget that the original Amigas were the birthplace of the MOD music format, revolutionary for home computer music. Over time, these files have evolved to become more powerful in later mutations, and have been featured in too many Apogee and Epic Megagames productions to count. Unreal used them (well, the recent mutations known as XM and IT.) The artists and coders weren't the only ones having a field day with the revolutionary power of that legendary machine, the musicians loved it so much they took the music format with them into the PC world (and occasionally, the Mac, and so on.)
I knew from the second the change in OS was announced that the new Amiga was doomed, the whole of its development little more than a feeler for market interest. So I say, let's not grieve the fact that it hasn't been brought back, and instead lern from what was good about the Amiga and work with that on what platforms do exist. The new implementations of MOD-style music are one of the finest examples of that.
A digital picture is worth 0x01F4 dwords. - Jessie Tracer / Electric Keet
ok. when amiga was in full force, they were far ahead of their time. great stuff. the only problem is that it happened years ago, and since then, the rest of the world has caught up, and in many ways past what amiga was. now, amiga is just an old company trying to get back on top without doing anything. what have they offered recently? not counting vaporware os's, promised new machine architectures, networking devices, etc. please - let's only hear about amiga when they actually do something. until then, i'd rather hear about microsoft vaporware - it's more likely to actually be developed.
Looks like this is yet another opportunity for those people who make petitions to put one to good use.
I'm amazed that a company could see so many people get so excited by a product, and then dump it. Maybe they figured the delivery could never live up to the hype. Still, it looks like there is a lot of pent up demand for a new Amiga.
Too bad the Amiga fans will have to wait again. Gateway shouldn't be allowed to get away with whipping the poor Amiga fanatics up into a frenzy and then leaving them high and dry. I hope they get lots of bad press!
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari
This is TOTALLY uninformed speculation, but I lived through an experience just like this once. When egos and business objectives clash, strange things can happen.
Basically, I think Amiga got bought up because some exec in Gateway had a soft spot for the Amiga. The Amiga execs were then under pressure to produce something - anything - that would justify the purchase. The only thing they had of value was their name, so they traded on that.
Shrewd negotiations led to the QNX deal. Only one problem: while the left hand was making deals, the right hand didn't have any money to pay. So Amiga was forced to drop QNX; their only alternative was something free.
Enter the industry buzzword of the hour, Linux. They needed an announcement fast (to keep Gateway at bay), so they announced they'd be bringing out a Linux box. Problem: they don't have any real expertise with Linux. When it became apparent that bundling this "free" OS would be a lot more expensive in terms of talent than they had thought, that plan died too.
And, after heavy market research, consultation with Gartner Group, email to Jesse Berst, a double espresso, an Altavista search and three hits of acid, i found the name of this project - Elizamiga.
Apparently, it's an experiment in marketing Darwinism by a bored MIS/marketing double major with his finger perpetually on the fast-forward button.
The 2.0 beta release will go into IPO later in Q4.
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Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Phase5 (who does the best PPC and video upgrades for the Amiga) has been working on an Amiga replacement for years (the project used to be called A\\Box). They have announced a pretty sweet new version of the Amiga for early next year using the QNX kernel. They're at www.phase5.de.
Unlike Gateway, it appears they really are going to do it.
The Amiga wasn't just about a computer.. to me anyway the Amiga was a community, and a set of developers who we all respected, and some applications that we loved (partly because we all kinda knew the people who were working on them)...
:)
I don't think this is something that can ever be recaptured as Amiga. It's too late for that now. Be has the same flavour to it (are there any Amiga people involved in that?) as did the Atari Lynx and the 3DO.. both of those had some of the Amiga crew onboard at some point.
The Linux community is the same way, really, but it's grown so big that it's really hard to feel like you're a part of it these days. (Maybe that's what will make the Hurd catch on).
Anyone else remember Dave Haynie and RJ Mical and Jay Minor and Bryce Nesbitt and Dale Luck and the rest of the original Amiga crew?
Whatever happened to Leo Schwab anyway?
I loved the Amiga back in the old days. I remember walking into an Amiga dealership in Des Moines (back in the Commodore days... another system that I've a soft spot for) and seeing the "Walker demo". I'd never seen anything like it, it really was years ahead of anyone else.
Unfortunately, the times have changed. Amiga is never going to take the marketshare of SGI in the high-end graphic workstation field. They're not going to beat out eMachines or any of the other cheap Internet computer manufacturers. They've fallen behind, and in a world that works on Internet time, that's not something anything can easily recover from.
Now, if they actually did build a Transmeta-powered Linux system with support for full-motion video editing, audio, 3D graphics, and support for Windoze software at an affordable price, they might actually be able to survive. However, I wouldn't hold your breath for this to happen. Amiga is dead... it has been on life support for a long time, and perhaps now someone has mercifully pulled the plug. Let's just remember that they got there first, and make sure that we also never forget why Amiga is dead as a doornail and SGI is thriving.
...I hereby let out the following scream:O OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!PLEASEDON'TMAKEMY AMIGAAWEBTVCLONE!".
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
This is insane...sure, the idea of household integration is cool, I'll be the first to get one (though don't get me started on the security issues involved in an online toaster). But why does Gateway have to use the Amiga name to foist this product on people? The Amiga has name recognition, sure, but recogition of what depends on who you ask. Most people, if they have even heard of one, think it's an old gaming machine. Anyone affilated with video production probably associates it with the Video Toaster. Then there are the (relatively) few people who actually know about the unqiue architechture (sp?), and admire it for that.
It seems to me, though, that none of these images could in ANY way help someone launch what Gateway is apparently now trying to launch. Does anyone have any idea why they choose to piggy-back the Amiga name, instead of launching a brand new product? They can't say "Amiga's back!". One, we've all heard it already. And two, this isn't the Amiga. The Amiga is something you can buy from Antigravity.com, Phase5, etc...so does anyone know why they did this?
Also, from a hardware standpoint, what could this new (insert whatever buzzword they're using at this time, I forget) possibly have in common with the old Amiga? From what the article makes it out to be, the 'new' Amiga is going to be a glorified X10 controller, with an X-windows interface. At it would need would be an ARM CPU (not to diss them, I like 'em). And they are certainly going to be cutting costs. So what becomes of the Amiga's sort of asymetric multiprocessing, with graphics/sound/math split into separate cpus, and all the other things from the hw on up that made it the Amiga. This new amiga has more in common with, well, a thinclient tv remote.
Arrrghhhhhhhhhhhh, I'm angry.
Sorry if this was a vent, having fun moderating me down.
The Amiga was a cool bit of tech, but it's dead, Gateway killed it!
Gateway picked up the pieces after the Amiga had already crumbled. Sometime in the early 90s, the spirit of the machine died, even before Commodore folded. At one time the Amiga was a hotbed for innovation. Remember games like Mind Walker? But after a point a destructive compulsion to outdo other machines (the PC, the Sega Genesis, the NES) took over, and the innovation was replaced with a "me too!" idealogy. Witness how much time has been spent showing that the Amiga can play a decent game of Doom and Quake. Before that, there was a race to show that the Amiga was better at Sonic-style platform games than the Genesis. Unfortunately the only results were to make the machine look even sadder than ever.