Article:
Calm Commentary on the Big News?
Chris Hanretty always turns to philosiphy when faced by difficulties.
|
Nope.
"Life can be broken down into moments of transition, and moments of...revelation. This had a feeling of both..." -G'kar, Season 3 finale of Babylon 5 I chose to begin with this quote, because it's quite apt, even if you do forget many Amiga owners are fervent B5 fans.The moment of transition was what the Amiga scene had needed for a while - the break from 680x0. The revelation, and indeed, it was that, was how we're gonig to get there.
As I write this, people are still going mad on Amiganet #amiga. Jason Compton is being called a big meanie, or a wee meanie. RMerlin's hoping someone attacksMy parents recently went to the Spanish GP, and they thought it was brilliant. The irony was of course, that they would have been able to see the race better if they'd stayed at home and watched it on the television.
It was almost the same with woa. Obviously it wouldn't have been as good as being in the DevCon: who knows what secrets were revealed there? But on IRC there were a great many knowledgeable Amiga folk that were talking, for the most part, sense.There's a great deal of trepidation, especially over the use of x86 processors. One article I read just about portrayed the whole platform moving lock stock and barrel to Intel hardware.
I haven't really heard that many people shout on behalf of The Plan(tm), but I think we came close to that on #woa98 when we started the "Amiga is dead, long live the Amiga" campaign.Well, we have our Phoenix plan, and we don't like it. I can't help wonder how this transition would have been handled in Commodore days - would we have turned up at Woa99 to hear of a new Amiga, ready? This openness, and declaration of where we are going is a new thing to Amiga owners, and the least we can do is be thankful they're telling us this.
On IRC, there was someone quoted as saying Dave Haynie was "excited", and that had converted a lot of people round to this new way of thinking.The most worrying aspect of The Plan is that it'll be almost eighteen months till a viable consumer product. And in that time, what are the Amiga users who aren't developers supposed to do? Pay through the nose for an unstable developer box which is ! a PC HYBRID !
Where does the current Amiga, now referred to as a Classic Amiga, proceed from here? One person made the comment that the PC market is faced with obsolescence, but at least they knew that the current processors would run the new software, albeit slowly.There's not much I can comment on: the success and people behind this SuperCPU need to be known. If it works, it will be amazing. And I think these people have just the balls to do it.
On the plus side, it did neatly sidestep the Phase 5 / Haage and Partner débacle!