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Amiga
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This
is Be Connected. I'm David Clements. Think
back a few years in home computers to when Commodore
was king. Most people are familiar with the C-64,
but perhaps you remember the Commodore Amiga as
well. The Amiga was the first personal computer
that could be considered a true multimedia machine.
When the Macintosh saw only black and white, the
Amiga saw full motion video. Despite the computer's
merits, major development of the Amiga stopped roughly
8 years ago. Amiga's current CEO, Bill McEwen, attributes
this largely to Commodore's decision to spend money
building IBM clones, rather than paving new ground
in the home computer market.
"I don't think Commodore understood what they had.
I mean multimedia wasn't a phrase that we used back
then. The idea of full motion video was foreign
to so many, great it does it, but what does that
mean? They were not out evangelizing; they were
not out getting developers. Developers came because
of what the system could do, not because Commodore
said, 'Hey, let's go do this.' " :21
Since Commodore's demise, several companies including
Gateway have
held on to Amiga's Operating System and technology,
promising that the computer would return again.
Those dreams never quite materialized. Now with
the support of TAO
Group, Sun Microsystems,
Redhat and some
other major industry players it looks like the Amiga
may finally return, but in a slightly different
form.
"The new Amiga OS is processor independent. We right
now go from a cell phone all the way up to a multiprocessor
server. So we have huge scalability that other systems
can't offer. Literally, the same operating system
that resides on the cell phone can reside on a multiprocessor
computer and the chips can be different."
What this means, is that Amiga is officially out
of the hardware business much to the chagrin of
die hard fans, but without proprietary hardware
to get in the way and an Operating System that they
claim, weighs in at only 6MB, virtually any computer
or handheld device, will be able to run Amiga software.
For Be Connected, I'm David Clements.
To find out more about Amiga, check out their site
at:
http://www.amiga.com
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