A bright and rosy future for the Amiga, or its death knell?

As you will have no doubt read in the magazine, and have probably seen on the net, the weekend of May 15th-17th was a very important one for the Amiga. I'll be talking all about how the changes we were told about will affect you all in the mag, as usual, but I wanted this spot on our CD to talk to you of my feelings for the whole Amiga market and most particularly, the coming years.

I've been an Amiga user ever since the A500 came out (I was too poor to buy an A1000 - aaahh!), and I've been working in the Amiga industry for ten years or more, watching it rise and then slide down what might be called a slippery slope to obscurity and oblivion. Here I sit at Amiga Format trying to keep a happy face on while I see the machine I've spent my working life on get more and more marginalised, and yet I hang on. I don't want to work on a PC particularly, although some of the more hotheaded net users have been saying that they would rather die than use a PC, I don't view the situation with such passion. But I would really like the Amiga to gain back some of its status, some of its esteem, and most importantly some of its original market, and more.

Amiga Inc's new plan for the machine is astonishing. If it's all true, it will sidestep the problem of how to compete in an increasingly Intel/Microsoft-dominated world, and it will blow people away. There's much that I've promised not to talk about on the net, or in our magazine, but the looks on the faces of the people presenting us with details of this new machine - people like Joe Torre and Allan Havemose - had the kind of gleam in their eyes that only a true zealot gets, and RJ Mical and Carl Sassenrath were both equally impressed and said it was where the Amiga was aiming for when it was still in its ascendancy - a machine that would not only appeal to computer users, but also to real people.

Part of the problem right now is that non-computer users are somewhat scared of the current computer market. They hear us using words like "SCSI", "Direct Memory Access", "Extension" and "IRQ" and, quite rightly, they get worried about just how much they are going to have to learn to get on the net, or use a Bridge program. However, this new machine is designed to really be all things to all people. It will be even easier to use than our current machines (although it will be complex enough underneath to satisfy all the propellorheads, like you and I) and it will be so omnipresent, if all goes to plan, that people will learn how to use it once for their games console and be able to apply all that they've learned for a whole host of other things, from videos and digital TVs, to high end graphics machines - truly what computers should have been all along.

There's a brave new world just around the corner and really this couldn't have happened at a better time with Millenium problems liable to affect an awful lot of home PC users whose machines won't be able to cope with the turn of the century and looking for a cheap and reliable replacement that's still powerful enough to impress. Maybe the original Amiga was just the starting point. Perhaps it was ahead of its time and that's why it didn't continue to dominate the way we all think it should have. One thing's for sure. If what I have been told this weekend just gone is what's actually going to happen, the next century is going to be sooo good for Amiga users.

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