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Amiga Update (1995-09-29)
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// Amiga Update - News and Rumors //
\X/ (A Very Occasional Newsletter) \X/
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950929
T H E L A T E S T P L A N S R E V E A L E D
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Just picked this off the net last night (Sept. 28) and thought you would
find it interesting. It was accompanied by three jpeg pictures, one each of
what appear to be brochure covers for the new A1200, A4000T and Amiga monitor.
If you want a copy of the pictures, send me either an 800K Amiga formatted
floppy, or a 720K MS/DOS formatted floppy.
Brad
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This is the text of a speech given by Petro Tyschtschenko Senior Vice
President Escom and General Manager of Production on September 21,
1995 at the SMAU computer fair in Milano (Italy).
This text was supplied by Gilles Bourdin of Amiga Technologies.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am pleased to be here in Milano, to have the opportunity to present
you our new company Amiga Technologies. In April 1995, after one year
of liquidation procedures, the rights and patents of the former
Commodore Company could be acquired by ESCOM AG. This was indeed very
good news for the Amiga community, who had been waiting anxiously for
a rebirth of their computer of choice. The Amiga community, which
consists not only of users, but also of developpers, dealers,
distributors and third party manufacturers is very important for us.
It represents a market and also a tremendous creative and productive
potential that revolves around the Amiga platform. These people have
made of the Amiga the most versatile and poweful Multimedia and video
computer available. Our goal now that we are into business again, is
to bring back the Amiga on the market, develop it further and enhance
its presently excellent features.
But what is Multimedia ? This word has been used intensively these
last years by many manufacturers in the computer business. Some say
that a PC with a CD ROM is a multimedia machine.
Some say that you need a sound card, some other say that a video
compatible card has to be installed. The results are various but not
always satisfying. Indeed, what you see is what you get.
We say : You need an Amiga. With this computer, what you WANT is what
you get.
The Amiga is the computer that invented multimedia ten years ago. At
a time when PCs were only able to beep and display monochrome text,
there was a computer that had stereo sound, fantastic coulour
capacities and animation abilities never seen before, all this driven
by a powerful multitasking operating system. These capacities have
been enhanced over the years, making the Amiga a must for
professional video and multimedia useage.
For us, multimedia is not only looking at some boring still pictures
on a CD ROM. We think that multimedia is an interactive experience
where the user can unfold its creativity to easily produce good
looking presentations with sound and animations. The Amiga hardware
provides all what is needed right out of the box. And the software
that is bundled with each Amiga provides the needed applications.
We have a complete plug and play business and multimedia package
called Amiga Magic, at a competitive price that includes a word
processor, a spreadsheet, a database, an agenda, a paint program, a
graphic processing program and a the SCALA multimedia authoring
software.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Amiga has been making multimedia for 10
years. This means 10 years of experience in that business for us.
I will now talk about our operations and objectives for this year.
Our first objective was to get Amiga products back on the market as
fast as possible. To achieve this goal in an acceptable time, we
decided to build the A1200 and A4000T without modifications. There is
a big demand for these machines worldwide and it has to be fulfilled
urgently. Please be aware : If we had decided to make enhancements
immediately, there wouldn't have been machines on the market for the
Christmas season. This decision does not mean in any way that we are
going to stop research and development. Enhancements will be made on
current machines for sure. I'll talk about this again later.
But now I would like to present you the actual status of our
operations.
We are a german company located in Bensheim, 30 miles south of
Frankfurt. Our production, assembling and material providers are
located in Europe and the world is our market. Our team has grown
tremendously to reach 39 people since May 31st, with the new addition
of Virtual Products.
We are a flexible, agressive, motivated, transparent and dynamic
team. We can react very quickly to new situations, we take our
strategic decisions faster than the competition does.
Distribution organisation
The Sino market, which includes mainland China, Hong-Kong, Macao and
Taiwan is covered by our chinese joint-venture.
In North America, we already have installed a dealer network but are
still looking for a potential distributor. Somebody who is willing to
support and invest in our product. We are actually looking for a
partner more than just a distributor.
Let me now present you our european organisation.
Comment worldmap / Amiga responsibilities
Production
We are a young structure but there is already a date that will be
written in the Amiga history : On monday, the 11th of September, the
first Amiga built by Amiga Technologies came out of the production
line. Delivery of the first machines will follow next week. To
celebrate this event, we will hold a press conference on the 10th of
October in Bordeaux at our Solectron plant.
The Amiga 1200 is produced in Bordeaux, France. Our successful
negotiations with Solectron, one of the world leader of sub-contract
manufacturing, guarantees a european high quality standard. Quality
is very important for us, we want to reduce defective returns to a
minimum. That's why we focused on Europe rather than far-east.
The Amiga 4000T motherboards will be produced in the United States,
near Philadelphia. The units for Europe will then be assembled in the
ESCOM facilities in Germany. The american units will be assembled in
Philadelphia.
We have made an agreement with a european monitor manufacturer. He
will provide a monitor especially adapted to be used with the Amiga.
The monitor is a high-quality multisync monitor that can scan all
Amiga resolutions.
As announced at our previous press conference, our plan is still to
build 100 K A1200's and 20 K A4000T's until the end of this year.
These figures are based on existing orders and on customer based
forecasts. I'm quite sure that this gives us the assurance that the
whole production will actually be sold.
Servicing
The repair and spare servicing will be centralized in our
service-centre in Braunschweig, Germany, in coordination with the
representation points in each country. The technical dealer support
will also be handled here, as well as the distribution for computers
and monitors in Germany.
Our service plan is very simple : we don't repair, we only make
components exchanges.
Future plans, developments
As I promised before, I will now tell you about our future plans for
research & development.
First, we plan to enhance current models. We are thinking of faster
processors and chip integration for the beginning. We are going to
integrate the 68060 chip for the A4000T this year. For the
entry-level model, we are looking at an external CD ROM addition and
more RAM onboard the bare units.
We are also planning to use the CD 32 concept for developments of
set-top-box systems. The set-top-boxes will open new markets for
Amiga products. Set-top-Boxes could be produced in variants for
cable-TV, satellite-TV and for telephone line communication and also
be used for home-shopping and home-banking. I'm convinced that this
market is tremendous and will push the Amiga technology into millions
of households. Software publishers should be interested in writing
software for such a widely spread platform. The Amiga architecture is
optimaly suited for set-top-systems because of its low demand for
ressources like RAM or processor power and because of its
multitasking and realtime abilities, in summmary, the Amiga is the
most cost effective platform for set-top-boxes.
It is still under investigation which RISC platform will be used as
basis for the Amiga of the future. At this point, we cannot say more
about this issue, thank you for your understanding.
FAIRS
After the successful show at the IFA fair in Berlin, we continue our
tour in Europe at the ORBIT fair in Basel.
Amiga Technologies will be represented by Promigos, its distributor
in Switzerland at the ORBIT consumer fair in Basel, from the 19th to
the 23rd of September.
The ORBIT is the biggest swiss computer show with an expected
attendance of about 100.000 people. The ORBIT fair will be the
rendez-vous of all computer users who are interested in online
services, Internet, multimedia, animation and graphic applications.
This is going to be the first official appearance of Amigas on a show
in Switzerland since two years.
Ladies an gentleman, I hope this event was informative and inspiring
for you. I will be at your disposition if there are any questions you
would like to ask us. There are Amigas on display for you in this
room.
Thank You for your attention.
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|| Brad Webb - available at:
// Commodore has fallen || webb@malamute.med.ge.com
\X/ and it can't get up || bandr@globaldialog.com
(but ESCOM can - ?) || Portal -- XJumpdisk
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