I was sitting in the bath on Sunday night having my usual soak-and-think and I thought about the next Amiga, coming sooner than you might think, and how it would change the way we use and view computers if the whole thing is as successful as it possibly can be.

The first thing that would change is whether or not your family has a computer. Even with the penetration that today's computers have into households, they are still an expensive, rapidly obsolete item, unlike your fridge, TV set or hi-fi. So you'll have to imagine a world where the computer can be treated the same way. Sure, it might be expensive, in the same way that the aforementioned fridge TV set and video can be, but it will also be available to people on a budget, who will happily settle for what they can get, as long as they can be assured that it will behave in the same way as its bigger brother - which is the Amiga's current problem. You might not remember this, but cast your mind back to when you didn't know anything about computers, hadn't got one, didn't even intend to. You probably thought that a) computers were the answer to everything, and b) they were pretty much of a muchness. You've discovered the truth about these two ideas over the time you've had an Amiga and had to wait for the software to drive your printer, digital camera and scanner properly while others plug and go and the like, but it's pretty much the same for anyone else, whether they have a PC, Mac or Amiga. What the world really needs is a system where these names are merely brands, the same as with cars or washing machines - sure, some might be better than others, but they all do the same thing, the same way.

After this extensive preamble, now imagine your house, ten years into the future (cue wibbly-wobbly effects), with a touch screen in the kitchen that selects among your purchases to give you interesting, balanced meals and might even make suggestions on what to buy. Moving into the living room where you draw the LEP curtains and make your TV screen which gives you a menu of the 500 channels of digital dross that are now available and asks you to make a choice, so you move into your study and power up the machine that's there... The funny thing is that although they might not look like it, they are all Amigas.

Being in the position of privilege I am, I can tell you that the face of computing gaming will change - imagine buying a computer and having every single game you'll ever play on it built-in, kind of. Not a Binatone dream of a dial between different single pixel games, but your fully immersive 3D realities. Imagine, instead of having a TV tuner card in your computer, having your computer as a TV. The new Amiga will be capable of acting as a home cinema box in its own right. Imagine never having the confusion of which plug goes in what socket - it won't matter as they'll all be the same, from keyboard to scanner, from Zip drive to monitor - just plug and play - the way it's meant to be done. Imagine, not plugging your phone into your computer so you've got a modem, but having another Amiga acting as a videophone, conferencing system, whatever.

Now that's a lot of imagining I'm asking you to do, but it's not too far-fetched, if you're in the know. Best of all, you won't have to wait for it to coalesce from dreams in to reality, it's starting now, will be made partially flesh by a clunky PC simulating some of what it will be able to do, available this November, hopefully by next Christmas the inklings of what will happen will begin to emerge as the first of the new machines becomes available, and perhaps in ten years' time people will remember Microsoft in the same way that they remember the Spectrum today...