How to Shop for an OS Division

January 24, 1997

Yep, they did it. Apple pulled the alligator out of their proverbial hat, doing what some of us have wished they'd do for years but never for a moment actually expected them to do it. After all the talk of Be, Inc. and the talks with Apple about possibly converting the BeOS into the next Mac OS, Apple finally decided Be wasn't the way to go, instead buying NeXT Software in its entirety and bringing cofounder Steve Jobs back into the fold.

But you knew that already.

Yeah, after being "gone" since mid-December, for me to reappear suddenly and write a column "announcing" the Apple-NeXT merger as if you'd never heard it, would be kinda wimpy on my part. Besides, this is supposed to be an Amiga page - admittedly it's my page and I can write whatever the hell I want, but if you're here, it means you at least have some interest in the Amiga. So it kinda behooves me to write something from an Amiga perspective.

So I will.

Think about what this merger means. Two things here: first off, EVERY graphical OS to appear in the last 12 years has owed something to Steve Jobs, either by ripping off the Macintosh, or by ripping off NeXTSTEP. The Amiga is guilty of this too, but Microsoft is even more blatant about it - Windows 95 looks SO much like NeXTSTEP - right down to the "X" close gadget in the upper right corner - it's scary, stealing most of the gadgetry without keeping any of the ease of use. (Only Microsoft makes it impossible...) Whatever Steve Jobs does, whether he did it first or not, sooner or later the rest of the industry follows. The World Wide Web itself was invented on a NeXT cube, for crying out loud. The trend toward network-centric object-oriented systems was started largely by NeXT in 1989 - the NeXTStation, remember, was a diskless, networked GUI box. And let's admit it, the Xerox Alto was a commercial failure, as was the Lisa (which now sits beside the Apple III, Mac Portable, Mac TV, and PowerBook 5300 in the great Apple Failed Product Graveyard in Michael Spindler's backyard), and if Apple hadn't made the Macintosh, Microsoft would never have bothered with Windows. Steve Jobs is not the smartest man around, not the shrewdest businessman around, and isn't even right a lot of the time. But he's certainly a nexus in the industry. Even Bill Gates has done nothing but take whatever Steve Jobs does, reinvent it (often with square wheels) and stamp the Microsoft brand name on it.

Steve Jobs has an ego that would put many rock superstars to shame. Quite frankly, Steve Jobs is an asshole, everyone who's ever worked for him will agree with that sentiment, he's a perfectionist, expects 120 percent perfection 120 percent of the time, can tell you lies and make you nod right along with him believing every word of it, is a slimy salesman who could sell hair care products to Patrick Stewart, and just generally is Bill Gates with style. Where Gates is the Seattle nerd, Jobs is the Cupertino hippie; while Gates sat in his basement flipping switches on his Altair 8800, Jobs was out smoking dope along the California beaches - there's a major stylistic difference there. Gates builds the technology and then tries to apply it to humans; Jobs looks at humans and tries to apply technology to them. Jobs is no tech man, but understands just enough of the technology to know what sucks and what doesn't. Jobs and Gates are opposite sides of a single coin: both can look at a product and dismantle it mentally into salvageable parts for a product of their own.

So think about it. If you're going up against Bill Gates, who better to have on your side than another Bill Gates?

This does come back to the notion of the Macintosh and Amiga as potential allies. We had a nice little bar fight going back in the mid-1980's, the Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST, vying to be "the" next generation of computer - and along comes Microsoft and IBM and Intel, well, Microsoft and Intel anyway, blindsiding everyone and ramming this outdated Windows thing down our throats. Once Bill Gates is in federal prison, and Microsoft is down to a manageable size again, then we can start kicking the Macintosh's ass all over the planet - and we WILL. But until then, the Mac is the only remaining "other" desktop computer platform that still has market share - and we need them, at least until we get back on our feet.

The second thing to notice about this is the technological side. See if you have any sensations of deja vu here. Apple already has the System 7 line, which includes the brand-new-but-nothing-to-write-home-about System 7.6. There's MKLinux, which brings Linux to the Mach microkernal and Mach to the Power Mac. There's the BeOS, which although still in pre-beta developer release, already runs really snappy on Power Mac hardware, and a product called VirtualMac already runs Mac System 7 applications on the BeBox in a Shapeshifter-like window. And now, long about late 1997, what is Apple going to release? Yet another Macintosh operating system, entitled Rhapsody, based largely on NeXTSTEP but with a Mac-like interface probably resembling Copland.

So here's the question: you're a Macintosh developer. Which Macintosh do you develop for? The System 7 platform, which should run on any major MacOS but has a legacy stretching back to 1983 and is unstable and slow? The Be platform, which has nifty features and comes standard with certain Power Computing clones but is not officially sanctioned by Apple? The NeXT/Rhapsody "thing" that, when it's released later this year or early 1998, despite its NeXT and UNIX underpinnings, will more or less be a completely new OS - but should ship with new Macintoshes and have the Apple brand name on it? Or do you just throw your hands in the air and say "Fuck it - I'm coding for Windows NT" as so many Mac developers have begun saying recently?

Keep in mind the NeXT merger happened almost simultaneously with Microsoft's announcement that they are no longer developing Windows NT for PowerPC - so when the first CHRP/PowerPC Platform boxes appear, they'll run MacOS, UNIX, and that's about it. You go with Windows NT, you leave Macintosh hardware behind. It's that simple now. Microsoft has spoken.

So why is this all familiar? Rewind a bit and see if any of these names ring bells for you: PIOS. Phase 5. ProDAD. AOS.

Now, Intel hardware has long had a selection of OSes available. The IBM PC itself in 1981 ran PC-DOS but could run an aftermarket 8088 version of CP/M itself. Then there was XENIX, which was as close to a real OS as Microsoft could get: a UNIX implementation with eight-character filenames. Today the list of X86 operating systems is enormous: the various Windowses, IBM OS/2, BSD, SCO XENIX, System 5 UNIX, Linux, Solaris/X86, GEOS (!), MS-DOS and clones (yes they're still around), and even NeXTSTEP itself. But they can be divided into two categories: ones that run Windows apps, and UNIX.

But here's something else to consider. In 1985 Tandy started migrating all their Color Computer software releases to OS/9. This itself was remarkable - OS/9 was a third party system, a preemptive multitasking memory-managed multiuser object-oriented operating system that ran on 8-bit home computers in 1983, and Tandy was selling it in the back behind all the MS-DOS machines. (In those days, when bragging about your Color Computer, to shut your C64 friends up in a hurry, you simply booted OS/9 - which loaded blindingly fast compared to the 1541 - and ran two programs at once. This worked great for me until all my friends started buying Amigas.) But Tandy, by moving so much of their software from Disk BASIC loaders to OS-9 bootstraps, effectively made OS/9 "the" official OS. Sure, to get the full OS/9 environment, you had to spend $80, but every game that required it came with a "run-time" version so you could boot. I still don't understand the rationale behind using OS/9 for games: the Color Computer didn't have asynchronous hardware like the Amiga does, when the CPU stopped, so did sound, serial traffic, and disk activity. Under OS/9, there was no way to let the processor have enough timeshare to do sound properly; although the CoCo's 6-bit DAC could do remarkable sound (there are even a few MOD players out there for it!), sound under OS/9 was eerily like that of an Apple II, obnoxious warbly beeps and buzzes. But the point was, Tandy in a single stroke basically said "We're not supporting Disk BASIC anymore." And the developers were stuck, saying "do we sell OS9 stuff or Disk BASIC stuff?"

Admittedly the market did finally settle down near the end: Tandy could sell all the OS/9 games it wanted, the ROM pack games and third party Disk BASIC games were better anyway. OS/9 was for hackers and industrial applications. Disk BASIC was for the casual users, BASIC programmers, and people who didn't want to argue with OS/9's UNIX-like interface. It became a matter of "get the right tool for the right job" - and once the two systems found their places within the Color Computer community, they coexisted quite happily, even despite their incompatible file formats. OS/9 was a part of life. RAINBOW Magazine even toward the end was still supporting both OSes, with program listings in Disk BASIC, BASIC09, and Microware C; RAINBOW On Disk for several years shipped in a special dual-format, with a Disk BASIC "partition" and an OS/9 "partition" both on the same side of the disk. (This was possible because Disk BASIC and OS/9 kept their file allocation tables on different tracks.)

OK, so I'm rambling and forgot the point I was trying to make. Yes, I had fun reminiscing, but I can't remember where I was going with it. Let's try again.

On the Macintosh, no one will want to reboot to a different OS just to use a particular application. All this talk of CHRP neglected a very important issue: you have to reboot every time you need a different OS. You're running System 7.7 or 7.9 or whatever. You're whizzing along in BBEdit 6.0, building your homepage, and now you need to make the graphics for it. So you exit it, shut down, and bring the system back up in Rhapsody. You load the Rhapsody-enabled Photoshop 5 - because Adobe long since stopped supporting System 7 - and build the graphics, saving them to the System 7 part of the hard drive. Then, once that's done, you need to test it all in your browser. So you shut down, bring it back up in BeOS, load the new BeOS version of Netscape Communicator 5 (because Netscape didn't like Objective C and never wrote a Rhapsody version), and use it to preview the pages - and you notice you misspelled an image name. Back to System 7 and BBEdit again...

On the Color Computer this was acceptable because Disk BASIC took half a second to boot from ROM - and because OS/9 and Disk BASIC were incompatible so you wouldn't be spreading one task across both OSes. On the Amiga this would almost be acceptable because a clean system can cold boot in eighteen seconds flat - though any other OSes you may have loaded might take longer. On the Macintosh, you're looking at two to three minutes for a stock System 7.5 machine with the Apple factory-installed extensions to boot to a usable Finder. NeXTSTEP is based partly on UNIX technology, and UNIX can take several minutes to boot, even without the file system checks. I don't know about the BeOS. I DO, however, know that the faster computers get, the longer the OSes on them take to boot, because the OSes keep getting bigger. A Macintosh SE/30 running System 6 boots and runs faster than a Power Mac 7100/66 running System 7.5.

So let's consider for a moment, a modified version of the above scenario. It's the summer of 1998. You have your nice shiny new QuikPak machine with the 500MHz Exponential chip (the 566mhz model wasn't enough of a speed difference to be worth the price), 128 megs of RAM, 16 megs of video RAM on your 3-D accelerated video card, and three hard drives totalling twelve gigs - an excellent deal for $4000. Now, you're in LightWave, rendering graphics for the game you're writing. Problem: your development environment only runs on the PIOS version of AmigaOS. You're running the QuikPak version, the one that still has "Commodore-Amiga, Inc." and "ESCOM/Amiga Technologies" in the "About" box, the "official" OS. You'll be damned lucky to ever get the PIOS OS to run on your QuikPak hardware. Most of the new games coming out are coded for the A\Box, hardware banging and all. And for that matter, all your old hardware-banging Amiga games only run inside the "emulation box" and thus are a pain in the ass because they won't promote properly to the video card you have. Your C compiler runs fine on the QuikPak OS, your game developer kit (a CanDo-like system) was built for PIOS but you didn't know that until you bought it, LightWave runs on all the OSes but is happiest under the "native" one, your favorite word processor (Excellence) was never ported to PowerPC and thus runs exclusively in the emulator, and plus, you just saw a cool new paint program that only runs on P-OS. Then there's Shapeshifter...

Scary scenario, huh? You might easily end up buying three different boxes to properly PowerPC-ize your Amiga environment - not counting that 603 card for your 1200 that you simply HAD to have. :-) This is multitasking the Windows way - multiple computers.

Now, it doesn't have to be this way. Shapeshifter proves how it COULD be done - running one OS inside another. Shapeshifter is made possible by features in the 68000 series, and is almost straight out of the textbooks from Motorola on how to do it. Your main OS, in this case, AmigaOS, moves the vector base register (VBR) away from zero, and "recalibrates" itself to the new location. Then the second OS, in this case, Mac System 7, is loaded in, given memory to run in, and given a "fake" VBR at zero. It runs as if it owns the machine - its VBR sits right where it expects it to sit - its interrupts are either executed directly (from the vector table) or handled by exception trapping in the 68000 itself (a mechanism similar to the GURU). And when System 7 asks the processor, "Am I the supervisor?" it traps it, sends it to the Amiga, the Amiga does some clever swapping of bits, sends back a fake "Yes you're the supervisor" when it really is still in user mode, and System 7 goes on its way. (The user/supervisor mode trap, by the way, is one reason Microsoft BASIC crashes on newer Amigas - it uses a supervisor-level instruction in user mode, which the 68000 doesn't catch but the 68010 and up don't like.)

But to my knowledge, the user/supervisor trap and the vector base register don't have equivalents on the PowerPC, or else the major vendors would be exploiting it: "run multiple OSes at the same time!" Shapeshifter and other multitasking Mac emulators are possible because Motorola said so in the chip specs. It may very well be that the reason no one has written PowerShapeshifter or its equivalent for the BeBox is that the relatively simple OS-switching mechanism of the 68000 series doesn't exist in the PowerPC.

There is, of course, a wild card thrown into all this. Here where we're trying to decide on the direction future Amiga operating systems must take, there now exists a weird option: P-OS. It's made by ProDAD, a company who has already worked one miracle: full-screen animations at 30 (or more) frames per second on the native Amiga chipset. ClariSSA, the software that performs this magic, was on a Euro coverdisk some time ago, and is among the top five coolest pieces of software I've ever seen in my life (Colorware's Max-10, POV-RAY, Bare Bones' BBEdit, and AmigaOS 2.0 and above are the others - with Photoshop, VED, OS/9, Tekken 2, and CoCoMax II as close runners-up). Mac and PC people's jaws drop when they see it in action - we've always known the Amiga could do this, but ClariSSA was the first product that for me, proved once and for all, that THIS was the best computer in the universe, THIS was the computer on which I could build my dreams, or at the very least, a movie. (That's exactly what I'm doing, btw, with Imagine and ClariSSA as partners in crime.)

Well, P-OS is perhaps a better option in some ways than the other PowerAmiga OSes around. The biggest problem with writing an Amiga operating system to run on PowerPC chips has been compatibility with existing applications. Memory protection is nearly impossible because of message-passing mechanisms, something RJ Mical said back in 1987; even forbid()/permit() have been implemented as compiler macros from time to time, so there's no easy way to emulate that behavior for, let's say, multiple processors. More applications bang the hardware than anyone wants to admit; MacroSystems found this out the hard way, and are no longer billing DraCo as an Amiga clone, instead selling it prebundled with software they know will work. And while the Amiga is more than happy to let the MacOS run on it, the Amiga itself gets much more intimate with the hardware it runs on - and thus would be more finicky if run under a Shapeshifter-like system. The best way they've found so far to accomplish the legacy-code transfer is UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator - and it's painfully slow and limited. The principle is there, though, which is what Jason Compton and others have been getting at: on a 500MHz Exponential chip, an AGA-compatible UAE will run rings around an unaccelerated 1200, thus making it practical. But then you're left with an entirely emulated machine - your Amiga is no longer an Amiga.

P-OS gets around this somewhat. It is, as ProDAD's web site explains, an attempt to redo the Amiga the right way, not just in spirit, but in look and feel. The screen shots look VERY Amiga-like, right down to the old-style Topaz-like screen font. But there are a few subtle differences. The screen gadgetry (close gadget, etc) is a bit more 3-D. The size gadget and scrollbars are in the proper aspect ratio - no more thick right scrollbar and skinny bottom scrollbar. The scrollbars on the window border and the scrollbars in applications look alike - as they should have all along. The description says they've reworked the retargetable graphics system, the datatypes, the printer system, and the pen-sharing schemes, taking the "good ideas" and giving them a proper implementation. P-OS supports memory protection and resource tracking, multithreading, and can probably be modified to support multiple processors. It currently exists in a 680x0 version and is being ported to PowerPC. And - this is the important part - it's 75% source code compatible with the Amiga.

So here's my dream Amiga.

P-OS gives us a chance to start over fresh from an applications standpoint, all the things the Amiga did right without having to learn a whole new OS architecture. So let's say for a moment I keep my 1200, but toss the Microbotics 68030 board and replace it with a nifty Phase 5 card that has a 240MHz 603E and a 24-bit graphics chip onboard, 64MB RAM with UMA so there's no more VRAM or Chip RAM limitations. Stick that in the belly slot. Install P-OS on it. Install some sort of Amiga emulation layer - UAE or some variation on it, preferably various "levels" of UAE optimized for different applications, a "complete" emulator for games, a "partial" emulator for applications that hit the hardware, a "processor" emulator that mimics a Draco for applications that don't hit the hardware. Now, all my Amiga apps work in emulation, but can exchange messages with "stub" applictions within the emulator that in turn communicate with P-OS, so emulated applications can talk to native P-OS applications in ARexx. This, all while the best applications (Lightwave, Photogenics, ImageFX, Final Writer - yeah, I could wish for Imagine, DPaint, AdPro, and Excellence, but that's what emulators are for) are being recompiled for P-OS and the PowerPC. Legacy code eventually disappears. The Amiga remains, not in RJ Mical's original 1985 Intuition code, but in a newer, enhanced, "Special Edition" version, all the beauty of the Amiga's design without 12 years of kludges or compatibility with obsolete hardware to weigh it down.

This approach depends as much on the emulation system as on P-OS itself. Several people have said any such emulation should use a 16MHz 68030 as a baseline; if a new Amiga runs existing apps that speed or faster, we'll be happy. That's a reasonable target to hit; the Power Mac 7100/66 I use at work (with Speed Doubler installed) runs 68000 code at about the same speed as a Performa 600 (32MHz 68030 with 16MHz system bus). Newer PowerPC systems like the 225MHz 604e models can probably beat most Quadras running 68040 code, and the Exponential chips at 500MHz could leave the fastest 68060s in the dust within two seconds of leaving the pole. The current Phase 5 lab prototype PowerAmiga (A4000 with two processors, a 68060 and 604) sits at 150MHz; expect production models to run no slower than that. At those speeds, UAE could already keep up with a real A500; a leaner version of UAE, optimized for 68020 emulation and little else, would scream on such a chip. But it all depends on how seamless such an emulator could be made to work with P-OS. I rather like the idea of "stubs" within the emulator environment, traps patched into Kickstart that redirect certain OS calls to the PowerPC side, so graphics.library gets a massive speed boost for instance, maybe patch Intuition itself so it can open windows alongside P-OS windows instead of on its own "emulation screen" like UAE and VirtualMac, ARexx stubs for P-OS applications that sit inside the emulator and redirect messages back through the "firewall" into the memory-protected environment where they get passed to the application in a safe manner... the possibilities are endless. The trick is, whereas the Mac OS is only partially converted to PowerPC code but services both sides at once through clever emulation, P-OS would have to be completely functional before the emulation would work, then the emulator itself would be the part getting upgraded - as pieces of the "original" AmigaOS (which for all intents and purposes stops at 3.1) get patched and ported to PowerPC, at the same time as all the "cool" apps get ported to P-OS.

I like it.

P-OS solves the proprietary-hardware problem we're seeing now with PIOS and Phase 5; P-OS will run on either company's custom boxes. It could theoretically run on a Macintosh or a BeBox - if ProDAD compiles it to do so. They've already announced their intentions to port it to the A\Box - thus answering a major question I've long had about THAT box. It's already working in prototype; screenshots are out there; it will actually exist long before PIOS or Phase 5 manage to make their port, and certainly long before QuikPak can write an "official" Amiga port. It will be first, and it will be on all the hardware that matters. It has what the Amiga needs in terms of OS features. It looks and feels like AmigaOS. It's 75% source code compatible - which basically means you go through your code, make a few minor changes, take out the hardware-bangs and replace the obsolete library calls with newer ones, and recompile. It's portable. For any one OS on a given hardware platform to stand out, it has to have an edge; Windows on PCs has the lion's share of software, and is shipped with new machines. All three Mac OSes - System 7, BeOS, and NeXT - are roughly at the same tier, the trade-off being between applications and technology. In the Amiga universe, P-OS stands the best chance of rising above the crowd once the move to RISC begins.

Of course, I'd like to see all this become obsolete by the turn of the century anyway - after 12 years of lookalike GUIs, it's probably time we rethink the whole notion of user interfaces - put the user back into interface. Now we're back to Steve Jobs - every OS he's been involved with, Lisa, Mac, and NeXT, has in some way redefined the concept of a file system. The Mac gave us the "forked" file system - data and resource forks, something no other file system had, and no file system since then had until the BeBox. NeXT blurred the line between application and directory - an object-oriented approach that was absolutely beautiful. Maybe it's time to dispense with the file system altogether, and go with a more document-centric approach. I like the idea of an OS that looks like a blank sheet of paper; onto it you put text or pictures, or turn several sheets of paper into an animation or book. Put names on the paper and put the paper away where you can find it again. There's no reason for your letter to your uncle to wind up in the same directory as the system's internal files - as often happens in Windows or the Amiga - separate the user file system from the system file system as much as possible, to the extent that a technoweenie like me could get in there if I wanted, but that Grandmother doesn't accidentally put her recipe collection in the Extensions folder. No human doing real human work - novels, pictures, whatever - would ever need to put files more than five or six directory layers deep. That only happens on modern computer systems because the software does it for you - applications create their own directories and install themselves and their files in it, the OS itself uses directories as arbitrary forms of structure for keeping its own junk organized (UNIX is a particularly loathsome example of this), and nested directories are a poor form of security. Organize your computer the way you organize your desk - do you put hammers and drill presses and car parts in your filing cabinets? No. Do you put folders inside folders inside folders inside folders when filing things? No - you label your folders clearly, so you know what you put in it when it's time to go get it again. Imagine makes me create a directory for every new project I start - plus separate folders for rendering projects and frames and objects and post-processed frames - and I can't find a damn thing. Excellence doesn't care - so I have a "Stories" drawer, and inside it, a drawer for each separate story I'm working on, and maybe inside those drawers have drawers for older revisions of the story. Excellence lives in one place, the stories in another. It's sweet. It's called "get the hell out of my way and let me work." A novel concept Microsoft should learn.

But then, I've long known it's perfectly feasible to have a "Watch one program while recording another" button on a remote control. Every cable-ready VCR has the feature - if you have a cable box or cable-ready TV - but to actually do it requires a technodweeb like me to come do it for you. For that matter, on most modern remotes, half the buttons don't even work on the equipment it came with. I want fewer buttons that do more things.

I want Cut, Copy, and Paste keys on the keyboard. I want Open, Save, and Print keys on the keyboard. I want "OK" and "Cancel" keys on the keyboard. I want Bold, Italic, Underline, and Plain keys on the keyboard. I'm tired of ctrl-key shortcuts. I want Help keys that WORK. I want the Num Lock key GONE - it's a numeric pad, OK? we don't need two sets of arrow keys. Who uses Scroll Lock or Sys Rq? Put a second Delete at the upper-left, give me a "Next" and "Previous" key instead of making me hit "tab" all the time, give me a full reverse-L-shaped ENTER key, put "accent" keys on the keyboard for acutes, umlauts, and the like. "Modern" keyboards were designed for 1970's applications. Of the 105 keys on modern keyboards, only about 40 are actually useful for writing letters to your girlfriend - the alphabet and number keys, ENTER, Delete, Shift, comma, period, slash/question, minus, and equal. Programmers use [], {}, _, |, `, and ~ only because they're shorthand for various computerese constructs, like pipelines, loops, redirection, and the like. Give me keys I can use - so I can explain it all to Grandma, instead of having to say "This key doesn't do anything, don't use this key, you don't need this key, don't EVER touch this key..."

Well, my review of AWeb-II came out in Amiga Format last month, in a gorgeous two-page spread complete with nifty screenshots taken straight from my machine. (Just in time, too - my copy of IBrowse expired the day after the comparison screenshot was taken.) I got nifty money from it, but next time Amiga Format has me write a review, I'm gonna insist they send me the money in something besides British pounds, all the local banks are assholes when it comes to foreign money.

Better still was the fact that, just three days after I submitted the review, AWeb 2.1 was released. I felt like an asshole - I'd just slammed AWeb-II left and right, it was a good program but was virtually useless on the Web because it couldn't handle any of the newer tags. And here was AWeb 2.1, answering most of my complaints. I brought down the 2.1 update, and installed it on the review copy; I never bothered to download any more IBrowse demos, AWeb 2.1 is my Amiga browser of choice now. What's changed since my review? Tables. Centering and alignment. Cookies. A popup menu. Cache control. Replaceable transfer animations and button images. I love it. I use ALynx for my Aminet downloads, and AWeb 2.1 for absolutely everything else - and best of all, it doesn't use MUI. It still uses datatypes, though - it's REAL easy to run out of Chip RAM, but don't sweat if you do, just go to the Cache menu and tell it to flush nondisplayed images from memory. The hotlist is still a mess, but oh I cannot live without the status window! What? There's a 213K image in the middle of this page? *click* *click* Now concentrate on loading the other graphics. This is just a modem, y'know.

Anyway, now I'm a celebrity of sorts.

Seeing my name - and my web page - in print wasn't the shocker. It was realizing, as I was sitting in my apartment rendering spaceships in Imagine, writing stories, with that issue of AF beside me, that I was finally living my dream. I work at a Web company making cool computer stuff - programming in Perl, doing graphics work, etc. I write stories. I'm making a movie on the computer - something I always wanted to do, and something I always knew the Amiga could do. I'm drawing pictures that people all over the world get to see. I have a place of my own. And I've been published. All this as I turned 22 and realized I'd missed my chance to be a "millionaire at 21" - but had already accomplished more than most people my age. I've touched my dream. The Amiga helped get me there. The Amiga will help me complete the journey - but that's no surprise, I always knew it could, the question was whether I could do it. And now I know the answer. The only thing missing in my life - aside from God, but that's another can of worms - is a girlfriend, but then, remember your Spanish class - what does Amiga mean anyway?

Take care - and follow your dreams. You are what you dream. Feed your dreams well.