Have you made a profit with your Amiga?

[Dandy]

Amiduffer wrote:

... does your Amiga actually generate some profit or significant income for you? Did you earn more than what you invested in the equipment?

Hmmmm - let me think - I would say yes.
Back in January 1998 I wrote the application for my current job on my trusty, old A500 - my A4000PPC wasn't finished yet.
From the money I earned since then I could buy I_don't_know_how_many_complete_Amiga_systems ...

Amiduffer wrote:
...
Has there been anything that you have done on the equipment, gotten you some recognition beyond our little community?
...

Annother "yes".
Not on the equipment I mentioned above, but read yourself:

I had just started on my current job in the Homologation office of Ford of Europe, when my Senior Engineer told me that we need an CAD drawing in A4-format as an attachment to our approval documents, and that I could go to the CAD office and get an printout there.

So I went to CAD office and asked for our drawing.
They gave me a plot in A0-format and told me to go to the printing office, where I could get the drawing scaled down to A4 format.

Amazed by this procedure I went to the printing office and get my A0-plot scaled down to A4 and printed out.
Subsequently I went back to my office and gave the A4 printout to our "scanman", who put it on the scanner to make it electronically available again.

I asked the people from our Help Desk for a conversion tool for my x86-PC, but they told me that "such an tool does not exist - at least not within the Ford world"...
I couldn't believe it - nearly the year 2000 and still such stone-age methods!

I remembered that at home I had a tool called "Metaview" (from Henk Jonas) for my Amiga that was able to convert the .cgm-format from our CAD workstations into e.g. .jpeg-format. This was what I needed here - provided, I had an Amiga here at work.

So I went to my manager with the proposal to buy AmigaForever, to install it on my PC and install AmigaOS plus the graphical tools I need to do my job in a more modern and more economical way.

He agreed and so it came that Ford of Europe used its first Amiga(emulation) to introduce a modern and economical way to get A4-printouts from A0-plots from a CAD workstation.

After I bought the software, I demoed how easy life can be (with an Amiga, of course) - and only Amiga could make it happen!
 :-o
I had to contact Henk Jonas to enhance his .cgm-module, as his didn't support the latest .cgm-format we were using at Ford.
He acted promptly, used the example .cgm-files from our CAD-station I sent him for analysis and a few days later I had an updated version of "Metaview" that could flawlessly convert our .cgm-files into better supported graphic formats like .jpeg.

We used this method here for three or four years, until our PC-Helpdesk offered us "Vis Mockup", which does the job now...

[Dandy]

Since there have been a lot of threads along the lines of "what games do you play?", "what kind of utilities do you use", etc. I was curious, does your Amiga actually generate some profit or significant income for you? Did you earn more than what you invested in the equipment?

I'd say yes.
Although not in the direct sense you mean - but back in 1988/89, when I got my first A500, this machine taught me the "modern" way of computing (from 1986 on I had an CBM 610/620 and learned coding in CBM Basic 4.0 like hell on that "beast" and created a sort of GUI for it - somehow similar to DOpus).
It helped me a great lot during my CAD analyst postgraduate studies and I was "computing" on it day and night. My wife back then asked me at one point:
"You are sitting at your computer day and night - but I can't see anything coming out from that. What is it good for?"
Well, when I got my current job as an system admin back in 1998 and a quite good payment, I reminded her of her question from years ago, showed her my latest salary printout and asked her:
"Can you see the outcome of it now?"

Leaving aside obvious people like Jens  :-)  are you someone who programs software, or produces videos or artwork, and have been successful at it?

No.

Has there been anything that you have done on the equipment, gotten you some recognition beyond our little community?

Done a lot of CAD/CAM/CNC on my little A500 and learned other things like DBase, MS-DOS and even Wiondows as well on it. Got a good degree from that and based on I have a good and well payed job today, if that counts.

I remember, quite a few years back, some guy had a scheme for putting Amigas running Scala (or some such program) in mall kiosks and generating income from the advertising.

As I said - for me the benefit was more indirect...

EDIT:
Oh yes, and I certainly earned a lot of more money with my job than I ever will be able to spend for all my Miggies...

[Dandy]

...
on serious note my second home city Christchurch (New Zealand) has had natural disaster
so please good thoughts to are people there l know of few amiga folks living there

Yeah - we had it on the news here. All my best wishes to all the people there.
I hope all the Amiga folks (and their Amigas) are doing well.

Didn't Trevor Dickinson at some point tell that he lives there part time?
If so, I really hope he's well - O.K. - that's not really unselfish, as I'm eagerly awaiting the A1 X1k...