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...
