The Sam Report: Not Too Bad For Dead

Despite rumors of death, our vitality as a community is stronger than ever

By Sam Ormes, Senior Editor, s.ormes@genie.com

The assembly lines may not be cranking out many Amigas these days but productivity of Amiga verbage is at an all-time high! Back in the old days when somebody owned the platform and there was plenty of hardware and software being introduced, we only got to read a couple of print magazines with month-old news and one online magazine. Now that we are dead in the water, it is almost impossible for a mere mortal to keep up with all that is being written for and about our Ami. I am beginning to feel like the guy who woke up in the coffin!

If you are reading this magazine, chances are you spend time on the Internet where hardly a week goes by without a new Amiga online publication appearing. To name a few: Amiga Alley, Amiga Report, Amiga World, Amiga North, The Informer, The Lair, and of course our own The Amiga Monitor. Also those outstanding services such as the Amiga Web Directory, AmiCrawler and Aminet keep me busy browsing and reading. Check out another recent appearance, the Amiga History Gallery, which offers photos of all the models and even those rare advertisements. Also, there are literally hundreds of Amigans with homepages which feature our machine and, of course, those time-consuming Usenet Newsgroups.

So far I have only been referring to such proliferation in the USA but maybe you have noticed the Amiga online mags in Czech, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Norwegian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, etc. The British continue to publish those fine, glitzy Amiga print magazines such as Format, Shopper and Amiga Computing.

Once a month I check the last page of Amazing Amiga to see if the sacred 48 page minimum has been repected, and it always is. Bless Don Hicks for hanging in.

It's almost overwhelming to deal with the massive quantity of Amiga material to be read, scanned, browsed, or downloaded. But what is truly frightening is .....by the time these words get published, the Amiga just might have a new, dynamic owner moving at warp speed back for the future.... and then life will be truly unbearable for this compulsive reader and others like him.

Not too bad for dead.