CompuServe Messages

CBM made a very good showing at this year's National Educational Computing Conference. They had a very large booth — roughly the same size as Apple and IBM, and a HUGE staff to man the booth. A number of CBM biggies showed, including Gail Wellington and Copperman. Among the software I saw demoed were Tiger Cub, Pen Pal, Amigavision, the Fischer Teknik Robot and Computing kits (very nice looking), Distant Suns (drew a very big crowd) and a new laser disk product called Visions of American History. Visions really stood out, since the show was filled with laser disk products being run on seperate monitors, while Visions is genlocked into the Amiga. I can only recall one 3000 in the booth which, unfortunately, was improperly set up. They clearly hadn't paid attention to where they were loading things on the hard drive, so, for example, if you clicked on the icon for a picture nothing would happen. I did hear people making positive noises about 2.0, though. CDTV was also there. The units they were showing were crashing a lot and the software was sssllloooowwww. The techie showing CDTV said that the demos were hacked together just before the show and that that accounted for the speed. I was surprised at how positively educators reacted to CDTV. I had thought of it as exclusively a home product, but it looks like it might work in schools as well. The various educational discounts were a big hit. People did perceive Amigas as bargains. The only true problem that I saw was the CBM show slogan. They gave out jelly beans at the booth, with the slogan "Amiga. The computer for human beans." Unforgiveable. -Brian