Comdex Report 2
Howdy…
Not too much that might interest Amigaheads directly, but there are some
interesting sights nonetheless.
Of course, everything in town is PC related, nearly. My joke is
that there are 140,000 fellow geeks in town, and nearly all of them are
working for Bill Gates.
Talking about Bill Gates, there are countless clones running Windows
NT. If anything in the PC world is going to give the Amiga a run for its
money, its something running NT. NT is *very* fast from what I can see,
especially when running on non-Intel equipment. I have seen some very
complicated graphical tasks running simultaneously on an NT machine, with
almost no visible degradation. NT is going to be a very important product
in the next two years, no doubt about it.
More interesting to Amigaheads is the new Atari Falcon '030. This
is a very potent machine, and it was running real software, with a real
multitasking OS. One shocker was seeing some very mature productivity
applications running on it; there was Calamus, which is an amazing DTP
package. It has the best features of your favorite page layout program,
with healthy doses of Photoshop and Illustrator thrown in. This is going
to be ported to Windows (an Amiga port is out of the question), where I
expect it to be a great success. It is very fast, and a great interface.
Another nice program was an illustration program with animation and 3D
abilities, as well as great MIDI apps.
This brings me to a question that has been echoed here over and over
again…where are the serious Amiga apps these days? I mean, how come we
don't have a Video Spigot kind of thing? We have a fast bus, we have fast
throughput, but instead we see this kind of thing for slow ISA bus PCs…
Hope to see the Amiga booth tomorrow, or perhaps, Friday. I hope
that it as least as impressive as the Atari booth, which made it look like
Atari actually had viable products. There were a surprisingly large amount
of impressed folks there…hope to see the same at the CBM booth.
Last…minature devices are very big this year. There are some