#Advertising the 2500?
29 messages in this thread
I was told at the recent Amiga Users Group (Amuse) meeting that the
upcoming advertisements will be aimed almost exclusively at the A500. Is that
true?
— Ethan
Ethan,
Yes, that is true. The TV advertising will be rather generic yet the final
shot will be that of an A500.
Lloyd Mahaffey, VP of Marketing at CBM, will be our guest in the next few
weeks in a formal conference. The date an time will be announced shortly.
I understand the concept of advertising the 500 over the 2000: get the
name out and sell TONS of machines as quickly as possible, I just don't agree
with it. Commodore and the Amiga have a horrible image problem. This may bring
the Amiga into the household but it may put the last nail in the coffin for the
higher-end Amigas. Business-Land already thinks the Amiga is a toy and seeing
advertising showing the 500 will convince them they're right!
Arrgh!
— Ethan
I second that! Folks around here (at my office) are all hyped about their new
pet buzzword – "Workstations". They want to buy VAX 3100's! As X-Windows
Terminals!
Geez! An Amiga with a flicker fixer is a much better deal, but folks don't
think of them as workstations!
There were rumors about HP and CBM making a deal… I hope some of it comes
true. I would like to see the Amiga move into a bigger and bigger system,
filling in from the high end of the home market to the low end of the mini
market. I imagine an Amiga 6000 – a free standing unit supporting several
Amiga 1500s, 2000s, 2500s, 3000s on a high speed network that would compete
with a Cray in overall graphics performance.
Ah well, I dream.
Chris -)—-
I just wish I could get the long announced xwindows and decnet for Amiga's.
Ron
Well, as I understand it, you can buy Xwindows for the Amiga, but it doesn't do
DECwindows yet. (Only TCP/IP for now.) However, Syndesis is looking at the
end of this year for TSSnet (DECnet) and Dale Luck says that he should have a
DECnet version of Xwindows ready (using TSSnet) before 1990. Those are not
promises.
Chris -)——
You *can* by XWindows for the Amiga. I know, because I've done it!
Steve
So, Steve…
Seeing as how you already have and use this stuff, could you give me your
overall impression of it? The installation where I work is lousy with
Ameristar ethernet boards, and I'd kind of like to know what this package could
do for me. Alternatively, you could just point me at a review of the X-windows
stuff in any recent Amiga rag, but why deny yourself the pleasure of expousing
personal opinion? ;^)
Thanks,
Ariel
Hehe….Well, I don't know of an review of X-Windows software in any magazine,
so you'll *have* to listen to my opinion. 😉
If you're familiar with X at all, it's very straight forward to use. Generally,
when I use it, I start up the Xinit program (to start X running on the Amiga),
log into a system with the X clients via telnet or rlogin, and run the clients
to my X Server. It would be really nice to have a bigger monitor than just the
1084S (and a flicker fixer), but it works out pretty well. Dale includes a
bunch of X clients that can run native on the Amiga, so you can run clients
locally as well. (Note that if you want to run terminal sessions to another
machine, those machines must have the X clients available on it, notably
XTERM).
If you're not familiar with X, a good book to look at is the X Window system
user guide by O'Reilly and Associates. It's a big thick book with a pink
cover, and is one of a three volume set.
Personally, I think having X on my Amiga is the greatest thing since sliced
bread! I just need a bigger monitor now, so I can fit more windows on the
screen. 🙂
Steve
Thanks, Steve.
We may invest some money to experiment with it, what is the package running
nowdays?
Ariel
Let's see here….the X software itself is $395. X software with 3 button
optical Boing Mouse is $475. X, mouse, and ethernet board is $1399.
Call Boing for details: 408-262-1469. Tell him I sent ya. 🙂
Steve
Right, that's what I thought I said. But you CAN'T buy a DECnet version yet.
The DECnet version is still being worked on.
Chris
I understand all this, but the original dates (sound familiar) were somewhat
earlier. I would like to encourage CBM to get involved here because the
business potential of xwindows and/or decwindows plus tssnet/decnet is
phenomenal. So far their interest is pretty much non-existent.
Ron
I couldn't agree more! I've heard of people designing X terminals that would
do no more than run the Xserver software, but would cost the same as an Amiga
system.
If there is money to be made making that kind of terminal, then there is money
to be made with a computer that does everything else as well.
Chris -)—–
Imagine a workstation that is x and dec windows compatible, has all the
presentation ability of the Ami, full multitasking, a pc built in, multiple
windows to handle things like market feeds, etc, and you have something that
someone on a trading floor would probably kill for!
Ron
Lets buy some amigas, paint them, and triple the prices. Thgem we could sell
them as Xstations… talk about value added
Talk to Thomas Holiday about that. He has exactly that kind of a concept in
mind for the bond trading firm he works for. Anything and everything that
might advance Amy toward that should interest him, I would think.
Ray Lewis
Where did you get the original dates ? Gfxbase's X11 has been available
commercially since April [and before if you call Luck directly]. I've seen
messages from Synthesis talking about work on Decnet, but none promised any
'release date'. Cann't missed any promise that way 🙂
One fact is that Commodore does not have high enough profit margins to afford
sales engineer calling on you weekly. I think the choice is between shopping
at high-priced Beverly Hills store with personal service vs self-help
warehouse. At one end of the spectrum lies IBM vs CBM being way over the other
side. Aside from taking over the management and repositioning the company
there is no conclusive way to demonstrate the best approach for CBM.
Still, if you dangle prospect for a big sale in front of CBM's regional people,
you will get some attention. They probably just have insufficient staff to
chase down every alley. I know a local dealer was able to get regional help
when Boeing was looking to buy hundreds of machines.
I found out about their x11 from an article in a DEC oriented weekly, which
suggested rather strongly that they had a rather ready to go set of products.
That was many months ago.
As to CBM, they have a chance if they move on it to break into a very difficult
but potentially very profitable market, that of traders workstations. The
Amiga is perfect for that role if the missing links are provided –
xwindows/decwindows with Decnet over both serial and ethernet. I talked to 2
CBM reps. One was not my local one, the other is, and the local one never got
back to me (the other one is now gone). He had promised to. I tried calling
someone at CBM directly and they either don't return calls or refer you to the
rep. In the 4 years I've been involved in Amiga's, I've never had a rep in
this area who paid any attention to current and possible customers. Even here
when they stand to make some really good profits by just putting things
together and giving a little help they make it painfully clear that they just
don't care.
Ron
If there is ANY validity to a takeover rumor the first evidence comes
from the stock quadrupling. Commodore's stock has been plummeting!
— Ethan
Whoa there Chirs…
Please don't get me wrong, I LOVE my amy, but compete with a VAXstation ???
Hmmm… if I can believe our hardware guru at work, a 3100 is about 1/2 of an
8650 or 3X an 11/780. I don't think that an Amiga can really approach that
even with the GVP '030 card. Plus X-Windows is a H-O-G memory-wise. Our
stations have something like 8-Meg in them and with one batch job running and
two terminal windows open, things start getting swapped out.
Plus, let's see… a 2000 + GVP card + flicker fixer + multi-synch monitor +
extra memory + ethernet card = approx. $9000 which is getting quite near the
VAXstation range.
Well so much for my two cents… fire away…
Kevin
X-Windows might be a hog on your system, but I run it from the Amiga quite
comfortably on a 3 Meg machine.
Steve
That's because the VAX is running VMS or ULTRIX. I don't know much about
Ultrix (DEC's UNIX), but if the architecture is anything like VMS then
1) you will be using a couple of Meg for the operating system, all
of its tables, resident libraries, etc.
2) each process will be given a certain amount of memory for I/O,
etc. even if it doesn't need it.
3) there will be a couple of programs that are just always there…
and a few other things going on as well.
We put in a single-user LANserver 2000, which is a MicroVAX 2000. The original
configuration had 4MB of RAM, but we found that we had to expand it to 10MB or
we started to run out disk space because of the page and swap files. There is
a heck of a lot going on in VMS. It is designed as a multi-user system that
also handles a lot of jobs in the background, like networking, page swapping,
process monitoring, etc.
Chris -)—–
Well, if they were going to use the VAXstations as anything more than
Xterminals
then I would see the point. But to purchase five or six VAXstations just as X
terminals? I would rather see the money go to upgrade our 6310s to 6410s or
6320s.
Chris -)——
Ethan:
The way the Mac got into business was having lots of folks have them at home
first. Management wasn't sold on the Mac until enough of their people said
"there's this other machine that can do stuff the IBM's can't. Let's at least
get one or two in here."
I have no problem with CBM pushing lots of 500s out the door. Once they are
out there, a certain percentage of people will start trading up, and the
fellowship of Amiga "power users" (what an awful expression) will vastly
expand. THEN we will have a shot at the big leagues.
Ray Lewis
But there is a difference between here between the Amiga now and the
original Macs: Macs were always in the thousands of dollars. You couldn't call
them game machines because no one could afford them for that purpose.
Meanwhile, the Amiga 500 with monitor is only around $750.
— Ethan
So what? Somebody gets one for the gee whiz games (tho I expect that the
commercials will emphasize animation, video, multitasking and sound). Then a
certain percentage pick up an Amiga mag or three, maybe just for the game
reviews. Then a certain percentage of them read some of the other articles and
say to themselves, "Holy batdoo, I didn't know this machine could do THAT — I
want to learn more!"
And from there, we conquer the world!
(Today Ashtabula — tomorrow Poughkeepsie!)
Ray Lewis
The problem is that both Commodore and the Amiga have strong images as a
game machine company and that company's game machine. This is something which
will hold the Amiga back in the business world. Apple (with the Mac) never had
that problem, as their computer was priced so high that no one could consider
it a game machine. Also it was an excellent innovation at the time. What it
lacked was software, which the Amiga lacks today. Soooo, my point (which I
think is based on a message about 5 back) is that if Commodore advertises the
Amiga 500 with a kid playing a major role in the ad (as is expected), this may
permanently solidify the game image.
— Ethan