Things to Come?
Ron Schwartz
AmiTech-Dayton Gazette -- January 2005
Well, here we are. A New Year is dawning. First, I would like to wish everyone a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR. I hope 2005 will be everything you expect, or hope it will be, and that it will be a wonderful year for all. In addition, I know we all hope that this will be the year that both the Amiga people and the Pegasos/Morph people get things sorted out, settled and can proceed to make satisfactory progress and begin to quell the fears of their followers.
Looking back over the events of 2004, it seems to have been a relatively quiet year. Fortunately, any progress on the Amiga side appeared to have occurred independently of Amiga Inc. or its new owner, KMOS. In fact, since KMOS took over they appear to have disappeared from view. Whatever progress there is seems to be solely due to the efforts of Eyetech and Hyperion. Eyetech has developed the miniature Amiga One motherboard to better compete with the smaller Pegasos motherboard. Progress with OS-4 has been slower, as the final release of OS-4 that was promised over a year ago still has not occurred. Successive updates of the Beta are cleaning up the problems but it's still not here. On the Pegasos side things have been pretty stable and they have been working on the updated version of Morph. Of course, Pegasos is supposedly trying to make a concerted marketing effort in the Linux Community, although it appears they are having problems maintaining adequate production of the motherboards to satisfy a major marketing effort. I don't know if it has any significant meaning in the long term, but as far as the members of our organization, we have three Pegasos owners and zero Amiga One owners.
I know that I have said this before, but the beginning of the new year seems to be a good time to reiterate it. In the case of both Amiga and Pegasos/Morph, each company has two products to sell. Initially, the primary market for both was the Amiga Community. This was not a huge market and the two systems proceeded to divide that market. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a tendency among those on the Amiga side to resent the Pegasos users. To get back to the point, each company has two items to market, a motherboard and an operating system. Admittedly, Pegasos has been supplying Morph OS free with the Pegasos, it is still a saleable item if made usable on other systems. Some people from the Amiga Community will buy both systems so they can experiment with each one. The majority will choose one system or the other. However, if both systems could run both OSs, probably a large percentage of buyers would buy both OSs. No matter how good each is on its own the other will undoubtedly do some things better, plus it is always fun to play around and experiment with competing gear. For each company, this policy would likely significantly increase the sales of one half of their product line.
I made one of my rare forays to some of the Amiga web sites recently and actually found a few items of interest. One of the most interesting was about O'Connel Technologies Inc. They have apparently announced they are developing an amazing Notebook Computer that is 68K "Classic" Amiga compatible. The O'Connel 68K TM. They have received positive feedback on the desirability of the project. A Remote Desktop Client has been released for OS-4/OS-3.9 which allows Amiga via a full screen or a window to a Windows XP Pro computer or Windows Server for remote control of that unit. "Tux goes Morph OS" is a project to extend current existing solutions by providing a wide range of application ports from Linux, BSD and other OSs to Morph OS in an easy to install standardized way, to support developers. The purpose is to make tools and libraries available on Morph OS. There are indications AROS has recently gotten increased development support and is making progress, including indications of increasing compatibility with Amiga and Morph OSs.
I know that we all have high hopes that the beginning New Year will see significant progress in both the Amiga and Pegasos systems including increased availability of the systems, OSs and equipment and applications to support them. Well, we can hope, can't we? Anyway, if you are holding your breath 'til it all happens, breathe now and then, just in case.