Bob Eller invited me to say hello... Yes, I'm still around!
I was an early Amiga developer. I have Amiga 1000 serial number 36 down in the basement. I had been working at a company that was developing music software for the Commodore 64, MIDI editing software for the PC, and a music synthesizer based on Atari's AMY music chip.
I started as a writer. I wrote for Amazing Computing, Amigaworld, Compute, INFO, AV Video, Byte and a number of other magazines. As part of Amazing Computing, I maintained the AMICUS floppy disk collection. I was their Bandito anonymous columnist for quite a while. As tech editor, I took all the plum assignments, so for a few years I was flying around to all the Amiga conventions and developer events, interviewing and rubbing elbows. I spent a lot of time online, on the early Internet, at the PeopleLink dial-up network, and was on Compuserve's Amiga forums and the BIX network.
Eventually I started a software company called Syndesis with a 3D conversion tool called InterChange, made a few CDROMs of 3D models, and released a port of DECnet for the Amiga for the X-11 market. I wrote some of the 3D and image conversion tools for NewTek's Video Toaster. I wrote the smoke-and-mirrors PS/2 PC version of the Toaster that won a COMDEX "Best New Product of the Show" award.
As the company grew, I ported InterChange to several other platforms (Windows, SGI, Mac, etc.) by 1995, and licensed it to several companies. In 1997, the technology was acquired by Viewpoint DataLabs, who you might recognize from the "Viewpoint Media Player" entry in the Add/Remove Programs list on your Windows XP machine, but who at that time was most well-known for selling 3D models and doing the 3D modeling for many movies. According to my records, the last copy of InterChange for Amiga was sold in Feb. 1998, a decade after its release!
I've been meaning to scan the collection of photographs that I took at various Amiga events back in the day. I also have a stack of mint Robocity posters from the 1986 developer's conference. I probably have a bunch of rare or unusual docs that should be scanned and preserved, too.
