Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
Amiga Update (1996-05-23)
-=========================================================================-
_ __ _ <>_ __ _ ||
/\\ |\ /|| || / ` /\\ || Amiga Update -News and Rumors
/__\\ | \ / || || || ___ /__\\ ||(A Very Occasional Newsletter)
/ \\_ | \/ ||_ _||_ \__// / \\_ ||
BACK FOR THE FUTURE ||
-=========================================================================-
AMIGA and the Amiga logo are trademarks of Amiga Technolgies, GmbH
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
960523
F I R S T N E W S F R O M T O U L O U S E M E E T I N G
S A F E H A R B O R A S S U M E S D I S T R I B U T O R S H I P S
About this issue:
We have acquired the first information we know of (in English, anyway)
from the past weekend's important Amiga meeting in Toulouse, France. It's
in the form of a speech presented by VIScorp's CEO Bill Buck. What we have
is a transcript obviously written "on the fly" as he spoke and so a bit
hard to follow in places. However, we think you'll find it fascinating.
There are definite statements about plans for the future, hints about the
recent layoffs at AT, and much else. Even the mighty Alpha chip is
mentioned.
We were not pleased to read that the Walker likely won't be available by
Christmas time but given how late in the year it is and the changes of
ownership, it's not surprising. We assume Mr. Buck's reference to
"companies on the high end ... porting ... to another processor" refers
to Phase 5 (see last issue.)
Wisconsin and German companies other than AT are in the news also. We've
reported recently on MacroSystems, now we discover Safe Harbor is the new
North and South American distributor for many of their products, as well as
distributor for the products of Syndesis (just down the road from us in
Jefferson). Full details follow.
Brad
V I S C O R P C E O B I L L B U C K
S P E A K S A T T O U L O U S E
Speech presented by William 'Bill' Buck, CEO, VIScorp
Bensheim 05/21/96, Toulouse 05/19/96
Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to the Toulouse-Show. I want
to emphasize that this Press Conference is a working conference. We asked
you in the world of AMIGA shows to give us your ideas and your initiate us.
We`ve had so many ideas that we've put in on the web site, and we had even
more ideas. We had over 2000 e-mails that have been provided by users for
the future of AMIGA. What we want to do here today, is we want to map out
a strategy to you and we think the future of AMIGA to be and we want to
make sure that you understand and we want to hear your ideas and your
opportunity to participate in that future. So, I want to say before we
began too much that excuse me for not answering, excuse us for not
answering all your e-mail. You can imagine that we had millions and
millions of e-mail messages that if there`s something that you would like
us us to respond to that we haven`t responded to yet. You can be sure that
I am responding to my e-mail as well as the rest of us now. In some cases
Eric as an example has done a fantastic job, he personally answered over
2000 e-mail messages himself and Carl was probably on the record for good
1000 himself as well.
I will try to speak slowly, I know I have got a funny American accent but
so, I try to do that. First, I do apologize for the confusion about today.
In the world of AMIGA show we`ve said that we will have a press conference
in Germany around the end of the month. Because we had so many ideas come
from you, in a community as a whole that said this kind of thing might be
better, because we want to show the people and the press that we talking
about what we are doing and we are doing what we`re doing. And so somehow
on the process of that information I think we got a little confused and we
still had some information on the AMIGA Technologies web site that was
different than ours and I apologize for that, especially to the people on
the German AMIGA community who I don`t want to feel excluded at all. We
try to answer a lot of questions before we came here about what our
intentions were for AMIGA. It`s our intention today to try to answer all
the rest of the questions that you might have.
So I`d ask out of respect for everybody in the world to hold their
questions until we get to that point of the presentation today. We want to
give you as much information as we can, when I finish my conversation
Raquel Valesco will give you the high points in French and in Spanish.
Raquel stand up please. Raquel has been the driving force behind this
conference that was her idea and the way it was organized and we proceeded
was to her credit.
We also have Eric Laffont, Eric stand up please. Eric really is an
employee, he has business cards and please take one from him. And Eric
really is the man who devises the survey and who implemented it and he did
such a fantastic job answering all the e-mails. Thank you Eric. In
addition to that, there was a staff of people very nervous who also helped
physically support today .I really appreciate what they did for us. We
have the rest of Viscorp Team here, we start here with Don Gilbreath, Carl
Sassenrath, David Rosen and we have Curtiz Gangi, so here he is, and we
have Petro Tyschtschenko and Stefan Haas. Okay .
Let`s talk first about the AMIGA transaction. Okay, Bill Buck and Helmut
Jost made a deal. It`s based on trust, it`s based on a handshake and it
will probably based on this much paper when it`s all finished. Okay, It`s
not finished. Okay, Bill Buck and Helmut Jost have a deal , and it`s done.
Viscorp will be the owner of AMIGA. One more thing I like to say about
this. Raquel and I last week were the guest of the New York Stock
Exchange. And we stood in the member`s gallery with the treasury and the
secretary of the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest capital market in the
world. He told us that the reason why the Stock Exchange works is because
two people have a trust. And trust is based on a "purple" agreement and
for three days there`s nothing written. There`s no transaction. This
agreement that Helmut Jost and I have at this point is we`ve waiting for
this is based on trust and that's why we don`t feel uncomfortable with this
meeting today, and that`s why I'm sure that this transaction will be
completed.
The second thing I like to say for the record is that Viscorp is committed
to the future of the AMIGA computer. We`re committed to the AMIGA computer
because we think the AMIGA computer represents a valuable choice to the
market place and we believe it can be a profitable business. We think that
means that we're gonna have to make some changes. We're gonna have to
lever up the good things that have happened in the past and try to step
beyond the things that everybody doesn't agree about. The difficulties
that the platform has had in general don`t and we think we can do that and
I will come back to that in a minute. Certainly, we believe in the
operating system. We licensed it in December because we believe in the
operating system. The fact that this opportunity was created for Viscorp
because of the difficulties of ESCOM have anything to do with our believe
in the operating system. We believe in the operating system. We think it
still lives. The only multimedia and multitasking operating system in the
world in our opinion.
and probably the most important thing is we believe in you. We believe in
the community. Without a community of people like AMIGA has AMIGA will be
just like everybody else. You guy are fanatics ! You can believe the
thousands of e-mail messages I got. We asked you for your ideas at the
AMIGA show and we were amazed by how many ideas came back to us. It was
overwhelming. So, what we realized is that there is a future for AMIGA
that absolutely no doubt about it like any development community. There
had to be support, but this was going to be a little different in this
case. Your ideas from everything you can imagine and we`re gonna take
advantage of all those ideas. The first step we wanna make to you, the
community, is that we are ready to listen. We think we demonstrated that
we have the capacity to do that and that it's not our intention to change
in that respect at all. The second thing we want to share with you are the
results of our survey. We think it`s very vital information and we intend
to do that on our website. That's in fact how we intend to get a lot of
information to you in the future. We hope in the next few weeks to post
documentation on the website that will support you. We know that there are
people who can`t find this vital documentation that they need to do the
things they want. We`re gonna try to get back and use our website as our
best means of communication to the community. You can't imagine all the
different places in the world that we're talking to people about us.
We have a clear vision for what we want to do in the future and we believe
we can support that vision. Let me just say from the outset that we think
that in 1997 there will be more AMIGAs sold than we ever had been before.
Most of those AMIGAs are gonna be our products and in products. It`s not
gonna happen because little Viscorp makes them, it`s gonna happen because
big companies decide to license the technology and put technology into
existing products that they have. In the next few weeks there will be an
announcement from us about a big company that makes TV-sets. We`re gonna
put these things inside the TV set. First, as we get ready to talk about
the ED and I'm sorry to say that we just have the ED in NTSC-version today
because we had to develop our own operating system in the beginning which
Carl wrote too by the way. It only works in this environment right now.
That`s the great thing about AMIGA, it works in all the other environments.
You`ll be able to see that product very shortly, but today we want to show
you our ED, in black and white only, sorry.
Two things to remember here: The first thing is with all you AMIGA guys,
we know you have a great imagination, so pretend it`s in color. The second
thing is that television technology hasn't changed in four years. It's a
great thing about what we are proposing to do. The computer changes every
week, there`s a faster processor, there`s more memory and there`s a new
version of windows 95, it takes 95 megabytes. There`s lots of different
things that are happening. This environment hasn`t changed. It`s a stable
environment. It`s a very fertile field for us to do something, fantastic
things. One thing I would like to say before I get into the little
demonstration of our ED. The past is the past, okay, I don't care about
what happened before. This is a new deal. Don`t whine on me about this or
that. Look, I know that I`m not talking to you people because you are here
on sunday morning but there are a lot of people in the community that are
still upset about things that happened before. This is something new.
We`re going forward, we`re going to demonstrate it every step of the way
we`re going to go. That as an example that there are specific things that
when we know we`re gonna do we will tell you.
I can tell you right now a walker before Christmas, I don't think so,
okay. I think there may be some other company that may decide: It was a
good idea. Okay, we don`t have a power PC port ready for Christmas. We
got to do something, we have parts and hardware that can take advantage of
the OS. We got to show these people that we are moving Great idea, it`s a
prototype. Somebody wants to pick up the ball and run with it. We`re
ready to try to support that person. And in the same way, still even this
month there were people at AMIGA Technologies that were talking about the
walker being introduced this year. All I can say is that this person in
particular doesn't work at AMIGA Technologies anymore. There are a lot of
people that don't work at AMIGA Technologies anymore. The ones that we
feel have something to add to what we`re doing in the future are still
there and work silent about then. And we have to put all that stuff behind
us. That was just a little example.
Now what is Viscorp going to do for AMIGA? First thing is, we're gonna
introduce a new operating system by the fourth quarter. If there are
companies on the high end that have an interest in porting over the AMIGA
OS to another processor, maybe the power PC. We're happy to support those
people. No problem. We think there's another solution to this. We've
been in conversations with DEC about the Alpha Chip, that can do 300
megahertz right now. We think that might be the right way to really boost
the video. I think that`s something that we are going to be working on and
you might see something about that in the middle of 1997. Also on the low
end we have our products. Our products are ready. We're gonna talk to you
about them later. These things can be adapted in certain ways that can add
new functionality to the A1200 level products. And we think there are some
ways so that we can tweak the A1200 too. Or we can speed up the bus or
something like that to help us get the chipsets to work a little faster.
We think we can do a lot of things and that's why we wanna hear from you
people because we think you might have ideas we don't know about. And we
want to leverage off those. We're happy to let you participate in those
idea`s success.Okay. So, before I start talking about the ED, I`m going to
ask Raquel to cover the main points in French and Spanish, just to make
sure we're all together before we go to the next step. Raquel, please.
Thanks very much to Simone Pawletzki for listening very carefully to the
tape and typing it all. Thanks to Christoph Guelicher for helping,
deciphering, guessing and contributing to the missing parts.
CONTACT:
www.vistv.com
Amiga is a registered trademark of ESCOM AG
Return to the Amiga Web Directory
Champaign-Urbana Commodore Users Group / cucug@cucug.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
S A F E H A R B O R B E C O M E S D I S T R I B U T O R
F O R M A C R O S Y S T E M . . .
Press Release: MacroSystem Distribution
Safe Harbor assumes distributorship of select products
from MacroSystem Computer GmbH
Transfer from DraCo Systems, Inc. of Lafayette, Co, effective
May 10, 1996
Safe Harbor Computers has purchased the rights to distribute MacroSystem
GmbH's line of Amiga products and upgrades for North and South America,
effective immediately. Distribution was managed by DraCo Systems, Inc.
(formerly NoahJi's), of Lafayette, Colorado. DraCo Systems shall continue
to provide distribution and support for the DraCo line of nonlinear
equipment from MacroSystem, GmbH.
The newly acquired product line includes many well-known products from
MacroSystem including: the award-winning V-Lab Motion nonlinear video and
audio editing card, Movie Shop editing software, the Retina 24-bit graphics
card, V-Lab Y/C digitizing products, and Tocatta 16-bit audio digitizer
board. Safe Harbor Computers has served its customers for eight years,
providing high quality desktop video software and hardware for nearly every
level of consumer: home-based, semi-professional, professional, cable
television, network television, Hollywood production, schools, and
government agencies. "Although we've sold MacroSystem's products for
years, we are rejuvenated with the prospect of this increased opportunity,"
says Mary Hoffman, Vice President of Safe Harbor Computers. "DraCo Systems
has done a commendable job in the past in their handling of the product
line, both in distribution and support. We have a solid tradition to
follow, but our goal is to increase past sales figures through aggressive
pricing, national advertising, and quality support."
Contact:
Mary Hoffman
Safe Harbor
W226 N900 Eastmound Drive
Waukesha, WI 53186
(414) 548-8120
(800) 544-6599
www.sharbor.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
... AND FOR SYNDESIS
Press Release: InterChange Plus
Safe Harbor Computers acquires distributorship of InterChange Plus
I'm happy to announce that Safe Harbor is now the exclusive distributor of
InterChange Plus for the Amiga, Syndesis's 3D file format translation tool.
Amiga dealers will purchase InterChange Plus from Safe Harbor instead of
Syndesis, and customers will benefit from promotions and special pricing.
InterChange Plus converts between LightWave objects and scenes, 3D Studio,
Wavefront, AutoCAD DXF, PAGErender, Sculpt, VideoScape, Imagine and Turbo
Silver formats, imports Vista DEMs and CAD-3D, and exports to ProDraw and
Aegis Draw. We've also included the Stereolithography converter, formerly
sold separately for $150. InterChange also includes InterFont, a system
for making 3D text from outline fonts, an outline font editor, and 72
pre-made fonts.
For a limited time, we're including a free copy of the Syndesis Avalon
CDROM in each package of InterChange Plus for the Amiga. This CDROM
contains an archive of the Internet's most popular 3D repository. It
contains more than 1,200 3D models in various formats. If your CDROM
driver is "Rock Ridge" compatible, then instead of DOS-like filenames,
you'll see the original Unix filenames on your Amiga.
The retail price of InterChange Plus for the Amiga has been reduced to
$129.95, from the previous $199.95 price. For more information about Safe
Harbor's pricing, contact:
Mary Hoffman
Safe Harbor
W226 N900 Eastmound Drive
Waukesha, WI 53186
(414) 548-8120
(800) 544-6599
www.sharbor.com/
For more information about Syndesis, contact:
Tanya Murray
Syndesis Corporation
235 South Main Street
Jefferson, WI 53549 USA
(414) 674-5200
(414) 674-6363 FAX
syndesis@inc.net
www.webmaster.com/syndesis/
SIGGRAPH 96 Booth 2334
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1996 by Brad Webb. Freely distributable, if not modified.
-=========================================================================-
_ __ _ <>_ __ _ || Brad Webb/AmigaUpdate
/\\ |\ /|| || / ` /\\ || webb@malamute.med.ge.com
/__\\ | \ / || || || ___ /__\\ || bandr@globaldialog.com
/ \\_ | \/ ||_ _||_ \__// / \\_ || Portal -- XJumpdisk
-=========================================================================-
