Another Boring Update

August 3, 1996

Ah, the joys of technology. I just paid $109 for a sixteen megabyte SIMM. I'm not that old, but I can remember when 16K was an acceptable amount - and 64K was cool. It's only been ten years since Atari's 1040ST was billed as the first computer to sell for under a dollar a kilobyte - a one megabyte machine for $999.

And now, 16MB is the baseline.

Yes, I could have gotten more, but a) I didn't want to spend TOO much money, b) my Microbotics 1230XA maxes out around 32MB, and c) a 16MB simm is more likely to be single-sided (i. e. will lay flat against the board) than a 32MB. It seems every other power of 2 in a SIMM size is "usually" single-sided - 1, 4, and 16, while the others tend to have chips mounted on both sides - 2 and 8. (Actually, with EDO and other newer two-chip designs, this happens less and less often, but it's still a weird side-effect of the way computer RAM works that RAM must be grouped a certain way electronically. 4MB and 8MB SIMMs are both made from the same chips, just more of them... the same with 1 and 2MB, and 16 and 32MB. Usually.)

Yes, I'm feeling oddly nostalgic for some reason. Perhaps it's just the knowledge that RAM has finally gone below ten dollars per megabyte. As one who remembers paying $70 for a 512K board for a Tandy Color Computer in 1992, and $170 for the 4MB SIMM on my Microbotics just last December, seeing a seven-dollar megabyte (and knowing that each one of the little chips on that SIMM contains two million bytes worth of transistors, knowing the one-meg DRAM was only invented in 1984) gives one whiplash.

Next stupid question: what the hell am I, an Amiga owner, going to need a total of eighteen megs of RAM for? Well, for the usual Amiga stuff, not a whole helluva lot. My machine is just fine with 6MB (2 chip, 4 fast). But I'm getting more into stuff that will require a bigger toy - things like Macintosh emulation and Linux, image processing, animation, etc. Besides, RAM prices are worse than gasoline. You see a seven-dollar megabyte, you break out the debit card. (That, by the way, is a "credit card" that pulls money straight from your checking account - works like a credit card but you actually have to have the money in the first place. Another great idea.)

And there is one other thing for which I need lots of RAM: My hard drive is an 850 meg Seagate ST5850, y'know, the 3.5"x.75" hard drive that's smaller than a paperback book and will fit inside an A1200 with no case modification. The bigger partition (HD1:, also known as Squid:) is about 780 megs... and is therefore too big to defragment in only six megs of RAM. Now, I did defrag it once, using VMM - put your swap file on HD0: and use it to defrag HD1: - but it took two days. (By the way, defragmenting using virtual memory must rank as one of the dumbest stunts ever pulled with an Amiga - because I have never made a backup.)

This is, from a hardware perspective, a wonderful time to be alive. With RAM sitting at $109 for 16MB, hard drives at $200 for a gig, and ultra-fast processors (Pentium Pro 200MHz, PowerPC 604e 225MHz, DEC Alpha21164 366MHz) coming our way at reachable prices ($5,000 will take you home a Power Computing 225MHz Mac clone fully loaded - the fastest personal computer on the planet) the physical goodies are just incredible.

Software, on the other hand...

I've been playing with Microsoft's Internet Exploder (oops, that should be Explorer) 3.0 Beta these last few days - on a Pentium 75 with 8 megs of RAM and Windows 95. (Needless to say, the hard drive light stays on constantly.) IE3B has some cool features - the buttonbar at the top is slick-looking, borderless frames, and some of what I've seen with ActiveX is kinda neat - but is SLOOOOOW, unstable, and generally Microsoft-centric. As far as the Rumor Mill can tell, there is nothing Macintosh in the works. ActiveX is compiled code using OLE, therefore it is not just Intel-only, it is Windows-only. It's faster than Java, yes, but in large measure defeats the cross-platformity of the Internet. Yes, 85% of the Internet uses PCs, but 85% does not equal 100%, and that last 15% won't change unless their life (or job) depends on it.

Now, I don't talk much about the Microsoft side of things here in the Rumor Mill very often - for one thing, the PC market has SO MUCH going on that you can't keep an eye on it. There's no definitive software for anything (except that which ships with Windows itself) - such that a new release of a program from ANYONE elicits little attention unless it's BIG news which rarely happens anymore.

But sooner or later I have to rant about Microsoft. Everyone else does, admittedly - but yet they still practically OWN the desktop OS market and damn-near own the software market itself. Nobody (who knows better) really likes Microsoft software - unless you have 256MB of RAM, a twenty-gig RAID, a 600MHz processor, and a machine that reboots in eight seconds. But yet everyone buys it. It's funny to listen to how it happens - one corporate guy says "We should move to Microsoft products because it looks like they're going to take over the market," another corporate guy says "We should move to Microsoft products because everyone else is," and another corporate guy says "Microsoft is taking over the market because everyone is moving to their products." It starts nowhere and ends nowhere.

This is what bugs me about Microsoft. They are, or at least Bill Gates 3.0 is, in a very real sense the embodiment of everything we as citizens of the free world are supposed to stand against. Microsoft exists today because Bill Gates wants to rule the world - and he will tell you exactly that. It's all over their web site and literature - a little world with a Microsoft flag planted in it, etc. Microsoft has achieved its current market share not through superiority, but through strongarm tactics and either eating or destroying the competition until they no longer need superiority - Internet Explorer was an exception, they were embarassed badly by Netscape and had no choice but to make a decisive counterattack. Microsoft wants to be on EVERY computer, thus limiting our freedom of choice - and they do not seem to care. Even their commercials look ominously like Communist propaganda films - eerily utopian, showing everyone living in a happy world using Microsoft products to do harmless things, like a secular Ned Flanders. Microsoft has been under federal investigation no fewer than three times already, and before any kind of real investigation could take place, a key lawyer will change his mind, or a key witness will disappear, etc. The Justice Department hates Microsoft - at least one Supreme Court justice has said "Microsoft is a monster." I will stop just short of calling Gates the new Hitler, though, because as yet we haven't seen any evidence of actual murders being committed by Microsoft cronies.

I don't like Windows. I don't like the interface. I don't like Microsoft Word - the bloatedness, the sluggishness, the bugs, or the fact that there's SO MUCH useless features hidden in nonintuitive places in the menus that you can't find what you want. I don't like their Microsoft products - which are almost bones thrown to the dogs, Microsoft FoxPro 2.6 for the Macintosh is almost a non-product, so sickeningly buggy it is ABSOLUTELY USELESS. (Lemme get this straight, you are actually SELLING a Macintosh program that is PPC native but is 32-bit unclean? Most FREEWARE arrives in better condition.) They are incapable of writing to a style guide of any kind - Amiga Basic works like Microsoft Windows, right down to the window-refresh, neither smart nor simple, but handled internally by the program. Their Mac software looks and feels like Windows - complete with all Windows' shortcomings, there are countless examples of how they've violated Apple's style guide and sidestepped the operating system wherever they felt like for no real reason. Even their own Windows products don't follow the rules - Microsoft Office initially wouldn't work under Windows 95, because they had to write their own API to circumvent the one in Win3.1 that they KNEW was defective, and when they changed it again for W95, things broke. Also notice that Microsoft products just don't look like other Windows products - not as intuitive, don't follow style guidelines, etc. You'd think the company that wrote the style guide could follow it better, though admittedly Commodore and Apple had the same problem.

Microsoft's stuff is cartoonish-looking. Their icons look like NewIcons - ugly - and their toolbars are so small and poorly drawn you can't tell what anything is. Their Mac software is particularly nasty - there's a reason Apple doesn't make their software look like that - and the OS itself is either ugly or is a ripoff of something that isn't ugly. (Win3.1 was ugly. Win95 is a ripoff of NextStep.) The Start menu is one of the worst abuses of interface that I've seen - it doesn't take long for a Start menu to get so cluttered it's unnavigable, people have great difficulty using it, it requires a concerted effort to get it organized and a bigger effort to keep it that way, and actually changing things in it is unintuitive. The desktop is also counterintuitive - as it is on the Macintosh - but instead of actually thinking about how people will use it, and maybe rethinking the concept so it's workable, Microsoft instead opted to steal the idea outright for the sake of claiming they were just like a Macintosh. (They could at least have been kind enough to add scrollbars to the Desktop - so you can access the icons that it hides off to the right if you have too many icons...)

In any case, software development within Microsoft is for Microsoft, not for the people who will have to use it. Software development outside Microsoft is much better, but slower, without the same financial resources as Microsoft, people like Apple have a helluva time writing things. (Copland is now what, three years behind schedule?) Nobody gives a damn when Be writes a cool OS, Apple comes up with something cool, whatever - they're not Microsoft. When a PC software company besides Microsoft comes up with something unique, it isn't noticed until Microsoft steals it. Technology cannot truly grow in such an environment - and already we see it stagnating. If Microsoft ever succeeds in taking over, software technology will STOP because without competition, Microsoft has no need to improve.

Oh well. Sooner or later, we as humans will get fed up with Bill's bull, and either boycott Microsoft (while it's still possible) or just start buying into non-Microsoftian platforms (UNIX, Macintosh, Be, Amiga, and so forth).

In other news, apparently the POV-Ray team has suspended their work on the Amiga version temporarily. They lost e-mail contact with Joel Newkirk, their Amiga development division, and now apparently they've just said "Nope, no Amiga version yet." We're stuck at Beta 6, which has a weird glitch in the animation loop (renders two frames and says "Aborted by user") and also expired two months ago. (Needless to say, my Amiga thinks it's early April right now...)

I just visited SASG's web site, and I have to say it's the best-looking Amiga web site around, even better than this one. You'd think a computer renowned for graphics would have a better selection of great web sites... instead we get www.amiga.de (yawn), www.pios.de (didn't anyone actually LOOK at the site before it went live?) and Amiga Computing's web site (looks like it was done by a high school student - web pages for the sake of making web pages). But www.sasg.com was designed by the inventor of Magic Workbench - Martin Huttenloher himself - and is EXQUISITE. (And no, it doesn't just look like a MagicWB web page - it's got a look all its own, and only uses MagicWB style when actually illustrating a program.) Plus they have an online ordering section, which means you can actually register MUI now, without waiting for whatshisname to get off his butt. (SASG's United States registration agent is rather infamous for his apparent inability to keep up with demand... lag times of several months are not uncommon.) It has options for secure and nonsecure ordering, so break out the debit cards! (My MUI registration is on the way...)

Yes, I know some people don't like MUI. Admittedly it's very sluggish on anything less than 25MHz, and it's a RAM hog. But it is VERY configurable (though some things could be implemented better) - there's something to be said for being able to practically design your own OS look - and offers a lot of GUI functionality that the Amiga OS normally lacks (recursive virtual groups, movable frames, collapsible trees, tab gadgets). MUI makes Web browsers a LOT easier to write - that's why most of them use it - and on top of all that, is a LOT easier to program for. There are other GUI libraries out there, ClassAct and BGUI being two that come to mind, and both do make coding GUIs easier than just laying out Gadtools by hand, but don't offer NEAR the features that MUI does. Admittedly, those features come at a price, in resources, and of course, in shareware registration... but for those who like it, there's no going back. It is a matter of taste, as with everything else, and I do occasionally have my "non-MUI" days, when I use Grapevine instead of AmIRC, AWeb instead of IBrowse, etc... but MUi is still there and does a damn good job at what it was designed to do.

And one last non-computer related tidbit, did anyone else see Sarah McLachlan's cameo appearance on "Poltergeist - The Legacy" last night? Although I know it's just TV, there's still something very disturbing for me about watching her die horribly like that. But she did look cute (though she's cuter as a brunette) and it was a nice sick touch to use that fan-club promo picture of her on the front of the newspaper the next day. :-)

Anyway, I've got 128 megabits of silicon sitting in a Fedex package behind me here, aching to move into its new home in the socket on the back of a Microbotics accelerator. Who am I to keep it waiting?

Till next time, fellow cephalopods.

As the End Draws Near...

July 25, 1996

The last of the paperwork has gone through at last. It's sorta official.

Sorta official? Well, here's what I hate about corporate red tape: you sign paperwork that says you're authorized to sign more paperwork, and on and on, until you finally sign paperwork that says such-and-such will take place a month from now. So it's official, but it isn't official until a month from now.

On August 19, come hell or high water, the Amiga will be in the hands of Viscorp.

And not a moment too soon.

Here's what Bill Buck, VISCorp's CEO (and repeated target of Squid attacks) has to say in an open letter dispatched the world over today:

"1.Escom AG and Amiga Technologies GmbH are in bankruptcy and will cease to exist as corporate entities. VIScorp has reached an agreement with the Trustee for the liquidation of these companies and with the creditors of these companies for the purchase of "Amiga." There were at least eleven different banks or companies that had claims to be "owners" of the technology and/or the inventory. Escom had liabilities of over $250 million. Imagine the confusion..."

The thing that worries me is that ESCOM could very well disintegrate before August 19. Anyone want to lay down money on what will happen if ESCOM gets dismembered by the banks - thus leaving no one to actually take possession of Amiga Technologies from - before the 19th?

"2.The steps that we had to follow through the last three months were painstaking. As the situation at Escom deteriorated, we had to continually re-negotiate our purchase contract. We could not speed-up the process. Many things we wanted to begin immediately we have had to delay. The situation at Amiga and Escom were extremely troubled. This was in part because of the difficult financial and management situations at Amiga and Escom, but also because of how poorly organized the intellectual property had been under Commodore. In the course of the Commodore bankruptcy many problems developed that were never repaired."

"3.The final (and last of three) purchase contract was signed on Friday, 19 July. It cannot be changed; it has been executed. The intellectual property of the former Commodore and the inventory of the former Amiga Technologies will be owned finally by VIScorp. The final paperwork will be completed in the next 30 days. During this month, VIScorp GmbH will be registered and Amiga Technologies will continue to operate temporarily in bankruptcy for VIScorp.

4.Petro Tyschtschenko and his staff will continue to operate from Germany. Raquel Velasco and Petro Tyschtschenko will be the new General Managers of Amiga, to be known as VIScorp GmbH. Al Duncan, a former General Manager of Commodore will join VIScorp to manage the sales and distribution of VIScorp and Amiga products in North America. Petro will continue to operate from Germany and manage the existing business."

"5.The engineering efforts of the former Amiga Technologies and the on-going engineering of VIScorp will be combined and professionally managed. We intend to begin to implement the plans we outlined in Toulouse very shortly. "

And again I ask, what engineering efforts of the former Amiga Technologies? Their entire development staff is GONE. And when it existed, all it did was write a new Setpatch and design a computer that looks like a penis.

"6.Please excuse our lack of communication with the community over the last months. We were severely restricted from communicating our activities. Please resend your emails to any of the VIScorp staff if they have not been answered by this letter. We simply could not answer all the emails."

"7.Do not expect miracles from VIScorp, expect slow, but steady progress."

ESCOM bites it.

July 16, 1996

The Amiga is a curse. This just in, today, ESCOM decided they wouldn't be able to restructure after all, and has filed for bankruptcy. Oh goodie. The second-largest maker of PCs in Europe is hitting the skids.

And this time last year, we were all trying to convince ourselves that an ESCOM-owned Amiga would be a good thing, because ESCOM was financially sound.

In any case, ESCOM could continue to function through the bankruptcy, if they had some investors. But then, if they had investors, they wouldn't need to file bankruptcy. Besides, they tried this part already.

Maybe we should rethink our strategy. Let's see if we can con Microsoft into buying the Amiga...

Just the usual updates.

July 11, 1996

I'm going to start splitting off the Rumor Mill updates every month or so, so the page doesn't take an hour to load. (cheer) Meanwhile, I've got just a couple of minor tidbits, nothing really major. :-)

First off, the deal between Viscorp and Escom, the document containing the ownership of the Amiga, has been signed. When the transaction takes place, I don't know, but I hope it's soon - Escom is in SERIOUS financial trouble.

Escom has been hit HARD by the slowing PC market - along with people like Hewlett-Packard and AMD and - believe it or not - Motorola. Well, between the hard market (caused, most pundits believe, by Windows 95) and the expenses of buying and resurrecting the Amiga, Escom isn't feeling too well right now. It seems the decision to unload the Amiga came at the right time - seems things were a lot worse than former chairman Manfred Schmitt let on, things that Helmut Jost has been fixing.

But there is this odd, Commodorian twist to the story. Shortly after Escom filed for protection from its creditors, news came to the Rumor Mill that Escom was going to be investigated by German officials - something to do with unusual insider stock trading.

Now, it may be nothing - perhaps it's just Amiga owners selling off stock on a hunch, sensing early on that Escom was not doing as well as they wanted us to think. Or there may very well be some underhanded shit going on. In any case, Escom has so far been a disappointment, as I've harped upon before - they started manufacturing Amigas again, but at exorbitant prices and never even trying to bring them to America - and they did little else.

A1200s should be hitting store shelves in the US here before too long - albeit at the ridiculous $800 price point with hard drive. This is not 1992, people. A1200s will sell reasonably well among the A500 crowd - but you won't attract any NEW customers until the price comes down. People won't buy the $500 box if it costs $800.

I've gotten email from those who say I'm being too harsh on Viscorp. It's going to be a good thing, they say. Viscorp understands the Amiga and is made up of ex-Commodore people, people who helped design the Amiga.

Well, I'm not so sure. They have Sassenrath, yes, but he was a Commodore employee at the time AmigaDos was invented - and the Amiga's OS came from Metacomco, when Amiga Inc's own OS fell through they just used the Metacomco one and extended it instead. Most of the OS structure was already there when the project got dropped into Carl's lap - and as I recall, in those days, the OS was written in a particularly buggy BCPL compiler, and didn't even become usable until Kickstart 1.3. (Everything they say about Windows today, "buggy, slow" they said about the Amiga OS in 1987.) They have the guy who invented CDTV, yes, but then, CDTV wasn't exactly the ultimate product - a 68000 machine in 1991? An Amiga that looked like part of your stereo system? Too powerful to be a TV box, too wimpy to be a game machine, even in 1991.

Now, I could be VERY wrong about either of these points - this page IS about rumors and commentary, remember, take what you read here with a grain of salt.

In any case, Carl and Don aren't setting corporate direction. I still remember the disheartening reports from a few trade shows where Bill Buck got downright obnoxious with someone in the crowd when they asked "So are you going to develop desktop Amigas or not?" - never answering the question. Fresh on my mind is the way Viscorp's policy on "computer" Amigas - i. e. non-ED boxes - didn't seem to be set until they noticed Phase 5 and Pios planning to make their own. Fresh on my mind is the way they capitalized "Desk Top Computer" into three words - much like how companies who don't know anything about the Internet will say "Worldwide Web" or "Inter Net" because they're just buzzwords. There is something definitely eerie about "Desk Top Computers." I don't think we're going to see something crazy like Amigas being manufactured into furniture - "well you said you wanted a desk top computer" - but it does hint that Viscorp and the Amiga community are a few degrees out of phase with each other, or at least Carl and Don are out of phase with Bill.

As to the custom/standard chipset question, the "battle" between Phase 5 and Pios, I believe Phase 5's claim that they can make a really cool chipset with their own design facilities. Such a chipset does not have to be compatible with anything else on the market, as long as they write the appropriate software drivers. And there is nothing to prevent them from using a high-volume chip manufacturer like Motorola or National Semiconductor or TI or Mitsumi or NEC to make the actual chips - thus getting some serious bulk discount. If your OS and software are written right, it doesn't matter what damn video chip set you have.

Meanwhile, I no longer care who has product first - Phase 5 or Pios - because I know at least one of them will have an Amiga-compatible RISC computer before Viscorp. Recall that Viscorp's R&D staff is primarily geared toward ED - in order for them to build a PPC Amiga they;'ll have to hunt down Amiga and PowerPC engineers, which Phase 5 and Pios already have. What I'm HOPING will happen is that the three companies, Phase 5, Pios, and Viscorp sit down and define an Amiga standard, the OS must run this kind of binary, use this kind of hooks into exec.library (or powerexec.library), etc. and then the three companies go off and make their own individual improvements. Software would then be written to run on all three, but use the special features of one or the other - presumably Pios will build a basic CHRP box, Phase 5 will build accelerators for existing AGA machines as well as a custom box, and Viscorp will... well, do whatever they're gonna do. Thus we get competition - each machine has advantages and disadvantages, but can all run the same software (except for the nifty Phase 5-specific eurodemos that you KNOW people will write). Prices go down, speeds get faster, the core OS remains crosscompatible but with cool graphics.library for each box, and Amiga fans are happy - except the ones who can't afford the nifty new toys.

As for me, I want a 603 in my A1200 NOW! NOW! NOW! :-)

Meanwhile, one of my spies had these cool tidbits:

"VIScorp seems to be barking a lot about pirated stuff and doing NOTHING! Well, DEC is archiving the 3.1 Amiga ROMS and VIScorp does not care. Are they aware of it, YES. Have they done anything, NO. Does, DEC know? YES. Do they care? NO. Last I checked they were still store in there in UUENDOCED form. They are labeled well. I guess the only people that pay for the code are the Amiga guys that do not know that they can softkick from them. Hey most of the UAE users do not own the OS or the ROMs, or an Amiga unit. But hey, they value the Amiga."

"Amiga Technologies after a year of thinking it through and analyzing and creating and researching and developing have come up with the most incredible developer program. Yes, they collected a bunch of stuff already available for the last 4 years and put it on a CD. Folks wasn't that worth the wait? No?!? Oh, what you expected, Internet support, a regular CD subscription, newsletters, beta versions of the next OS, new specs for future systems, a help line. Nah that is for winnies that program with those weird OSes like OS/2, Windows, Unix, and other "weird stuff". And what you wanted to be registered? Why? Is not like we are keeping tabs or anything, after all AT is dedicated to be different from Commodore, CBM did lame R&D <> AT decided, forget lame R&D, hey forget R&D. CBM did lame advertising <> AT said forget lame advertising, hey forget advertising. CBM had lame hardware and software upgrades <> AT decided, forget lame hardware and software upgrades, hey forget upgrades at ALL."

"Hmm, is it funny that people talk about PIOS so much when MacroSystems (the DRACO people) and EAGLE are actually making Amigas but they are ignored?"

The source also mentioned the Amiga Project, which we both agree is basically Team Amiga Part II - join Amiga Project and get ignored even louder. But then, I still haven't gotten around to joining Team Amiga. :-) (Why do today what you can swap out to the hard drive until tomorrow?)

Till next time, Rumormongers. Special thanks to all you Squid Spies, keep the goodies coming!