amiga-news.de - Gateway Show Amiga 2001 - Report by Markus Nerding

01.Apr.2001
Markus Nerding via E-Mail Gateway Show Amiga 2001 - Report by Markus Nerding
Markus Nerding promised us to send us a live report from the fair if he had the opportunity. He kept his promise and sent us the following report:

As during the previous years, the hosts of the the fair, Bob and Diana Sharp have created a magnificent ambient for the biggest of the US fairs.

In the celebration hall of the Sharaton hotel, all the famous retailers, manufacturers and Amiga User Groups were present. There are not too many news from this side, so everybody was waiting eagerly for the announcements Amiga Inc. had planned to make at the banquet on Saturday evening.

However there were some things to see, and most of all different softwares and hardwares to buy. One novelty was the presentation of the VarIO-Borad by Jens Schönfeld - a multi-IO-card with serial, parallel and PS/2 Port. Grasshopper showed version 4.0.9 of PageStream which is available since last week. At Mr.Hardware there was a PC expansion card that allows full access for the Amiga. The by far biggest stand was owned by Merlancia Industries who had planed to present a PPC-board, but there must have been some obstacle to this. Not present, for the first time in years, was BoXer who had formerly always been praised by AntiGravity, but who had even failed to present a prototype the previous years.

At noon on Saturday, Petro invited all Amiga-fans for a pizza. The hotel brought so many Pizza Hut boxes that even hours after that there were still some available. In addition to this, beer was free too: Budweiser and Bud Lite - it is weird that I must think only now about the fact that Dave Haynie was present too. As well as Joe Torre who entertained us once again with uncountable stories. I think he is almost a better entertainer than a hardware developer ;-)

Like the previous years, there were a lot of interesting seminars. Gary Peake and Rudi Chiarito talked about the subject "Where we are today" and showed the actual status of the AmigaDE-Developer System. Further seminars talked about ImageFX, PageStream, hardware design, Amiga Forever and some different subjects. We held a seminar about StormC and of course AmigaOS 3.9, where there were of course many questions asked about the future.

Saturday night - Petro's Farewell-banquet - first plank: "Petro's Roast". Here people were allowed balance their accounts with Petro and some speakers really invested themselves in this ;-) A very funny matter which ended with many presents give to and by Petro. Petro himself the summarized once again the history of Commodore/Amiga - of course, after 20 years he had a lot to tell. He emphasised however that he will not be definitively gone and that he will attend to one or the other event.

Then it was Bill McEwen's turn. By now it was late but he once more was able to wake up the people. The AmigaONE by Eyetech, AmigaOS 4.0 and the use of AmigaDE on the new Zaurus PDAs from Sharp were announced. These were of course the subject Amiga users had been waiting for.

The CEO of Eyetech, Allan Redhouse, could already show a fully featured card of the AmigaONE, which however still had some electric defect. However first developer boards should be ready soon and the shipping to the customers will start end of June (2001 of course ;-)).

Matched to this was the announcement of AMigaOS 4.0 which will now at last bring the long awaited PPC version of the AmigaOS. The port will be done by Amiga Inc. in association with Haage&Partner and other developers. Details about this will follow soon, however the project is on its way and a high priority to Amiga Inc.

The next climax was Bill's presentation of the Zaurus, the new PDA from Sharp, on which ran the famous Boing-Ball-Demo of the AmigaDE. There is a deal with Sharp so in short, it will run on billions of devices. Bill also talked about Psion, who want to use AmigaDE on the laptop-similar Netbook and also about the possibility to use it on any Windows-CE device. All in all an interesting view of the big distribution of the AmigaDE, which will be done in parallel with the AmigaOS 4.0 development and which should merge later on.

To sum up, one can say about the fair that there have been for once really interesting news whose repercussions could be fundamental. Obviously, Amiga Inc. is concentrating more on its roots and kernel, which they own, the AmigaOS. All this is looking good, however now it will show in which time these things will become reality for the developers and users. We are very curious about it...

We thank Markus Nerding very heartily for this detailed insight and wish a nice Sunday to all of the visitors.

[News message: 01. Apr. 2001, 19:42] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

< Next message

Prior message >