amiga-news.de - Closing report: U.d.N. presented Pegasos in Bremen

12.Oct.2002
Otto Dette for U.d.N. (email) Closing report: U.d.N. presented Pegasos in Bremen
As already reported had the "Users der Nordseeküste" (U.d.N.) shown on October, 5th and 6th 2002 the Pegasos in Bremen at the Videobörse.

We thank the participating companies Vesalia, bplan and MorphOS who made it possible for us to show the Pegasos. On the one hand we didn't want to put the beta testers at a disadvantage but on the other hand we wanted to show the computer to the publicity and we believe that we succeeded. Because of an article in Bremen's biggest newspaper on Sunday we had 5432 visitors on both days. Via the U.d.N. came interested users who wanted to see the Pegasos.

The Videobörse in Bremen was the opportunity for such a presentation, for years we participate there in spring and autumn with our computers. After we had dissolved the A.U.C - HB in the end of 2001 as there were less and less Amiga users in Bremen and founded the party U.d.N. in this we got the promise from the organizers of the show to further use our room in the citizens center for free as we are known as magnet for the event.

The two days have confirmed that our chosen way, a calm juxtaposition of different operating systems, is practicable. It doesn't matter whether it is the Amiga, PC, Mac, Palm, Linux or another system.

The Amiga and new hardware for the Amiga have therefor a platform to show themselves to non-Amigans. Our experiences show that many PC users remember their beginners time with the Amiga at such an event. As the PC users saw the tower with the Mediator board and as such with the PCI slots equipped with Voodoo card, TV card, sound card and Ethernet card they almost couldn't believe that it is an Amiga with a PPC card.

USB on the Amiga? Satellite dish and television? Flat screen? Playing videos and MPEG? What, this all is possible? In the net via PCI-Ethernet? And then online showing the Amiga-News, our Ralf had no break because of all the explanations about his system and his video equipment. At the end the ATARI users being also at the show explained this upgraded Amiga to their friends and afterwards even the Pegasos. Our special thanks go to "Professor Dellert" (we call him respectfully so) of DCE who had taken care for a BRILLIANTLY modified PPC card.

On Thursday, October 3rd, 2002 had two users of the U.d.N. set of from Bremen and picked up the two Pegasos computers, so we had had two days to get to know the computers. Our biggest worry was to put the beta testers who had subscribed an contract at Thendic to a disadvantage. So particular functions of the soft- and hardware of the computers had been locked. We had already before decided to show only those things that don't fall under the beta testers contract. So there was only the version 0.6x of MorphOS shown and Suse Linux was installed in a version 7.x. It would have been a simple thing for our Linux expert of the company SUSE and member of the U.d.N to install the new version 8.1 but this version wasn't officially been released, either. We could have had shown the MacOS, too, but unfortunately only two computers had been available.

So we restricted ourselves to the possible as it was the most important thing that everybody who was interested in the Pegasos could try it himself/herself without the need for us to be all the time at hand. This was accepted this way by the users, they tested and tried to crash the computers. At the end of the show was the Suse Linux in some parts German and in other parts English. From Bavaria, Gera, Halle, Berlin, Hamburg, Flensburg, Osnabrück, Göttingen and from the Netherlands (there were surely still more places) had the users come to see and test the Pegasos. During the two days there had been no need to reinstall the systems from scratch. And this was exactly our goal!

We had been especially pleased that Mr. Michael Garlich from TITAN-Computer came and we could present a video of Motionstudio. Michael had been several hours with us and had given much information to the visitors about the progress of the software. And he took consideration of the beta testers and told only as much about the current version 9.x of MorphOS as he could take responsibility for. Of course we would have loved to see his developers team showing presentations on their systems but this wasn't possible because of existing contracts with sponsors.

On Sunday were Mrs. and Mr. Does of the company Vesalia at the show and gave information to the interested users. As we were already finishing there was still a discussion going on and we could only with smooth pressure move the group along. We were glad when we could hand the Pegasos computers over undamaged.

The Pegasos had been very well accepted by the PC and Linux users, too.

The following excerpt taken from a comment by "mk" from October, 06th 2002 describes exactly what people told us all over again:

»And then it's not only suitable for the living room but even for the bed room. No CPU fan, no fan on the graphics board. Should the fan of the power supply even need to run because of the small power amount of the system it was at least not hearable. When completing the computer you only have to look for quiet hard discs etc. and then you get really problems to tell whether the computer is switched on when you do this by just listening to the system«

But there had been more than the presentation of the Pegasos. On a PC video editing had been shown and explained in a factual way and with much patience. We had been very astonished because of the many questions and often people had told that not even at the specialists they'd experienced that much about editing of videos. That encourages us, of course we will extend this area until the next show in spring 2003. Besides that had our PC experts been pestered to death with questions regarding the BIOS and the hardware.

Reports of single users regarding the event and their experiences at the show can be found under: www.udnimweb.de/News.htm. On our video page you can watch a video of the Pegasos in action. Pictures of the event and of the Pegasos can be found under: www.udnimweb.de/Boerse02.html.

Further images of the event (especially interesting for the people from Osnabrück (Germany)) are on the computer of our Linux expert.

Many questions regarding the new operating system Jaguar and to the upgrading of old MACs to be able to install the OS X were asked our MAC users.

There'll be an comprehensive report in the Amiga Future that'll be written by Rene Stelljes (member U.d.N.) for the magazine. Rene had explained the Pegasos on both days and he had also installed the software.

Two short story alongside the event:

1.) The Atari people had found a power supply at the flea market, connected it to the power point - "PENG" could only a dust cloud be seen, the upper floor had no power anymore. Oh, there's another power point, connecting the power supply with it - "PENG", down in the sales room no power anymore. Oh, one more power point, let's try it there once more - "PENG", that was the fuse of our room. Pegasos, Amiga, MAC and PC suddenly without power while accessing the hard disc, the agitation was very big. After the power was back again all computers booted without any problems. We hadn't seen the Atari people again after this, they left the event very early

2.) Several times people called via the cell phone number we had given, mainly because of price reducing cards or to tell us that the web cam was unusable because of the bad ISDN connection. But one call made us laugh, the person asked indeed whether we'd know where to find a free parking room but unfortunately we really couldn't answer as we hadn't installed a camera outside ;-).

Our result of the event:
It was great, we hadn't expected that much interest in the Pegasos, coming also from people who had heard for the first time about the Pegasos and MorphOS. And the questions we are receiving after the event show us the big interest. 300 visiting-cards were given away, we have two new members since the show. We thank all users who had gone the long way to us we'll certainly see at the next fair. And as always at the end, what comes next after this top event? Ralf and Otis have already something in the planning, more about this in March 2003 when it's time for: "Let's go to the Videobörse to Bremen". Special thanks go to Landshut (Germany) to Markus Bindhammer who came especially to us by plane.

Otto Dette for U.d.N.
(ps) (Translation: wk)

[News message: 12. Oct. 2002, 14:02] [Comments: 0]
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