Hi, just wanted to point what started as a
comment, and ended up in "my own private confession, and public apology to the walker project team"
Mind you, it's a quite old hat. No news in this rant, just the expression of my sadness. Feel free to ignore it, as we all did with the walker.
Walker prototype
Everytime I see the walker some part of my body gets cold.
I vividly remember when it was unveiled. The way I see it, WE Amigans killed it.
It was a GREAT machine. It would have been the last really KickAss 68k platform, introducing the cross-platform HW compatibility with the PCI bus, that were amazingly overlooked (is that the right word ? I mean that nobody seemed to care - even me - about this bus, when it was THE THING !) In fact, it's only when the first PCI busboards were produced, WAY after that, such as the prometheus, that I realised my mistake : Those guys@Amiga had figured it all !
The case was *great*, it was the early rendering of what a friendly 'puter should look like way before the IMac, AND it was expandable as hell, unlike the IMac, already modern-equipped (CD-Rom) , And hey, it EXISTED !
And we ranted it away, had some good laughs (remember "try it on the floor" ? I can't find this image anywhere) but generally, while the rest of the world already did not care anymore, WE should have supported the project all along !
Everybody & his sister was badmouthing it, arguing all day long about stock configs when the point was, precisely, that it was an AMIGA, stripped-down basic computer but already heavily compatible, AND expandable for those in need !
I cannot believe that we DARED to state, page after page, that it was slower than a stock 1200, It was a *prototype*, he-llO !
Of COURSE it would have worked great, It was not the 1st 030 machine C=/AT would have produced, and to my knowledge, NO machine that they released was crappy. So there was no reason for this one to be. Yet in EVERY mag I read, long statements were made about the current state of the CEBIT machine, when it was basically pointless.
And if only that, but NO, they also heavily critisized every choice they made, when in fact, they did'nt had any practical alternative. I mean, all this (lack of) MMU talk, when if you needed one, you'd also probably want more horsepower, and by a accel board with a MMU 68k CPU !!
I mean, and it would be the bottomline I think : how smarter did we think we were than the guys in charge of this project ?
Everytime I wonder, what if the (Amiga) press would have been enthusiastic, what if the dev would have been completed, how many of those babies would be around now. I'm sure that it would have rivaled the 1200, I mean, everybody here, that has built a towered 1200 would have bought one, for start. there would be walkers everywhere. Boards for it called runner, EPO, modems&NICs called Walkie-talkie, and many smart configs.
I feel bad for having followed the trend and dismiss the machine, when I finally, only now, realise that the whole project was good, and that it already had a fair share of man-years development time. I feel bad for all the guys involved in it.
So long, walkie.
I'm sorry about all this fuss, and wouldlike to excuse myself for my weird english (here we say "laborious") but I needed to unload that bag.
