By Sam Ormes, Senior Editor, s.ormes@genie.com
This correspondent pleads guilty.... of having communicated a lot of "doom and gloom" over the past couple of Amiga years. It wasn't my intention to be a "nattering nabob of negativism" ... just trying to communicate a realistic view of the situation as I saw it from my vantage point.
On reflection, the nadir was reached with the following comment from the Sam Report of September 9, 1995:
"CEI's neighbor to the East on busy Flagler Street is a large cemetery. I suspect that the Amiga (as a consumer computer in North America) was buried there by Escom on April 21, 1995."
As much as I hated to write that (and you hated to read it), subsequent events confirmed the worst as Amiga Technologies fumbled in its valiant attempt to revive the platform and Escom eventually went belly-up after selling out to the highly dubious Viscorp. The interim illusions of promises by such names as SMG, QuikPak, phase5, PIOS, etc. fell well short of credibility. To some, even the old days of Commodore started to look good!
It is time now, my fellow Amigans, for a reality check. The glory days of Babylon5, etc. are long gone and anyone who reads the video trade mags knows that other, more sophisticated platforms have replaced the Amiga as an industrial tool. If we were ever in the Major Leagues (debatable), we are certainly now ....buried deep in the Minors.
Gone are the good old days of the Tenax catalogs 4 times a year, the thick Amiga Worlds with 7 page Creative Computer ads, gone are those fascinating purple Grapevine offerings. Gone is my beloved CEI next to the cemetery. NewTek and Scala are PC people now. Most ex-Amigans are PC people now!
So where are we in this so-called "reality check" ? Certainly not where we used to be, or would like to be, but still alive! We've got our fine machines that seem to last forever, we have all that great new industry-standard hardware that easily configures onto our aging boxes (Zip Drives, CDROMs, etc.), we have some software folks who (bless them) keep cranking out new things, we have firms like Software Hut and Safe Harbor who keep hanging on, we have the Europeans who seem to never say die, and lastly... we have the example of those tenacious C64 folks whose example should be increasingly relevant to us.
Bottom line....hang in there Amiga-guys. We still have a lot going for us and... who knows? ....a miracle could happen!