Picking up the Amiga bug again

[Gojirax]

Just found this particular forum and thought I should introduce myself.

I was an avid Amiga user from the early 90's until about 2000, when I had to purge all my extra stuff and sell off a lot of my computers when I was out of work. At one time I had at least one of every model of Amiga except the A600, all of which were expanded with the latest and greatest. (I was an obsessive Amiga user lol.)

I just fired up my old copy of Amiga Forever 2.0 last week and found enough ADF's and Workbench hardfiles to get my feet wet again, but I'm trying to get my hands on another A1200.

I even spent some time as president of our local Commodore and Amiga user groups, and flew to St. Louis in '97 to meet Petro Tschenko and Jim what's his name from Gateway.

I actually live about 50 miles south of Snoqualmie, WA and  Amiga Inc. and Bill McPalmpilotstuff, but I gave up on Amiga when all I saw was Palm pilot software being developed by them.

Nowadays, I come home from work and MAYBE check my Email every few days or so, or play some Everquest (Retired a few months ago from that though), but playing on my PC or any computers just doesn't seem much fun to me. (I repair PC's for a living, so I can't stand to touch the things when I get home.)...

So what's going on in the world of Amiga now? I see there's an A1 being developed, released? (For a Gazillion Dollars of course!) I see Amiga Inc. has sort of washed their hands of OS4 and is leaving it up to Hyperion or someone else to do the work on?

I also saw that EyeTech is no longer a reseller, but a wholesale distributor? Strange.

What developers are left with us? Which Browsers are still under development? Which developers still make software/hardware?

I have to admit, I was rather surprised to see such a community left after all these years. (Happily I might add)

Take care,
Jack

[mikey2001]

Well hello Jack, and a warm welcome back to the community. :-)

[Jeff]

Hello Jack,

I it's nice to know another Amigan exisits in the Pacific Northwest :-).  I'm in the North Seattle area.  Do you remember all the local Amiga stores and dealers around here?

Those were the days.

Jeff

[FastRobPlus]

You are the second new person from the South Sound in as many days here on amiga.org!  Maybe you guys need a user's group!

In your Amiga "prime', you didn't happen to see an Amiga 1000 with a bunch of holes drilled into the top, did you?

[Gojirax]

Yeah, in my Heyday I remember about 5 Amiga dealers in the Portland/Vancouver area. Clackamas Computers was the biggest though.

I even had a retail computer store in the mid 90's and sold Amiga hardware. (I remember the waiting list to be about 3-6 Months on Phase5 products.. Arg!)

[SamuraiCrow]

So what's going on in the world of Amiga now? I see there's an A1 being developed, released? (For a Gazillion Dollars of course!) I see Amiga Inc. has sort of washed their hands of OS4 and is leaving it up to Hyperion or someone else to do the work on?

KMOS has bought both AmigaOS 4 and Amiga Inc.  So after yet another buyout the company lives on.  Gary Hare (the head honcho at KMOS) has said he would be focusing on mobile devices but knows that developers don't write software on PDAs so is continuing the desktop model Amigas as well.

Hyperion is expected to have AmigaOS 4 out the door and on the shelves by the end of the year but there is a prerelease circulating amongst the Earlybird AmigaOne purchasers which is fairly well recieved.

Amiga Inc. is still developing for handheld devices and producing software that will run on both handheld devices and desktops without modification.

Eyetech is expected to release the MicroA1 to their distributers by the end of the year to coincide with the full release version of AmigaOS 4 and will likely be used as a TV-set top box for distribution of internet-based Video on Demand applications (reading between the lines on Gary Hare's speeches).

[TjLaZer]

Hey remember Nibbles 'N Bytes?  There is a User Group called UPCHUG here in Tacoma.  I have not gone yet but was thinking of going.

[FastRobPlus]

I remember Nibbles n' Bytes in Tacoma.  I was going there once and told someone, and they asked what kind of dog I was getting.

Remember Zipperware?  They held on the longest AFAIK.

How about Omni International?  Southcenter had 5 stores:
Techstar, Software Centre, Software Pipeline, rental store (can't remember name) and one more I can't remember.
Familiy Computers in Factoria was great.  They had Digiview setups you could rent by the hour.

One store at Thrashers corner in N Seattle held on for a real long time.  Can't quite remember the name.

I think the first Amiga dealer in the PNW was in Kent!  I can't remember thier name either just now.  They were out of Amiga due to the 1.1 fiasco very early on.

I also went to die-hard Atari dealers Butler's Computer and Allen Sound, both on Hwy 99 in Federal Way.

[TjLaZer]

There was also Computer Concepts in Mill Creek.  They held on until 1998 I think.  Ah those were the days.  Now it's eBay... lol

[TjLaZer]

Yeah I went to Zipperware a few times.  It was cool.  I remember back in 1996 they had a Amiga 4000 hooked up to a monster Hitachi monitor hooked up to the internet with AMosaic.  It was awesome!  It was that moment that I decided I wanted to get a 4000.

[Gojirax]

One of the funniest things I ever saw was at Computer City (Not the same as the chain in Europe, this chain was owned by Radio Shack).

They had this really cool video wall. It was one of those walls of 32" monitors, 3 wide by 3 tall. It was showing people talking, and cool computer graphics and kickass techno transitions and stuff.

So I walked up to the video wall and what did I see behind the curtain? An Amiga 4000 with a Video toaster sitting there.

I asked the sales manager (Already knowing the answer) "Hey! That video wall is awesome! Do you guys sell the computers to make that?!?!?" He just looked at me all confused and said "No, we just sell low end computers, nothing that professional, you'd have to go to Hollywood to get that kinda stuff."

I had a real hard time keeping a straight face.