Deja Vu
by Ronald Schwartz
AmiTech-Dayton Gazette
I recently happened to look at a column I wrote about a year ago. I could be lazy and reprint it today and you wouldn't know it wasn't just written. The column, which was written last summer said, "We were promised that the new Amiga systems would be available this July, but apparently now it has slipped to October." Remember, this was summer 2001. Since our last issue, the promised release date slipped about one month per week. We were being promised the new systems, OS-4 and the Amiga One boards would be available this month, July. Over a three week period that slipped to August, September and finally October. Now don't get your hopes up because I said finally. That just refers to the last prediction as we were going to press. Apparently the Amiga One boards have been ready for a while, but the real holdup has been OS-4. In fact, there were reports on the net that the boards were being demonstrated somewhere in France recently running Linux. Do you got the distinct feeling that a good part of the development being done that is aimed at the Amiga Community will end up ultimately benefitting the Linux Community?
Time is, obviously, of the essence. I have been detecting a growing tendency for the long-term Amiga Hangers-on to, at least, be considering changing platforms. In my own case, as I have often said before, as long as I can do what I need to do, and speed is not a controlling factor, I will continue on as I have. So far the biggest problem that I have is that apparently a lot of commercial printers want print jobs given to them in Microsoft Word. It is hard to believe, but I have experienced this on three or four occasions. I would think that this is a trend that would have the makers of the real desktop publishing programs for the PC world up in arms.