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Amy Today Volume 05 Issue 03
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Amy Today
A text-file magazine for all Amiga lovers
Volume #5, Issue #3, November 30th
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Editor : John Rydell
Writers: Bob Bliss (Yes, he has been included once again!)
Address all correspondence to: "Amy Today"
C/O John Rydell
GEnie address: J.Rydell1 640 Willowglen Rd.
(#54790) Santa Barbara, CA
93105
Plink address: J*Rydell
GEnie discussion in category #2, topic #29
Plink discussion in Section #2
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Contents:
1. A Message From the Editor John Rydell
2. Distributing "Amy Today" John Rydell
3. Amy Input Our Faithful Readers
4. Amiga Happenings John Rydell
5. What's NeXT? Bob Bliss
6. Fred Fish 163-172 John Rydell
7. Trading Galore!! John Rydell
8. Newsletter Trading John Rydell
9. Advertising John Rydell
10. In the Future John Rydell
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A Message From The Editor:
Amy Today is changing. When I first started the magazine I wrote
almost every feature article myself. But I started to run out of
things to write about. I certainly don't have the money to buy
every new piece of software and review it.
Because of this, I tried my hardest to find other users who were
willing to submit articles specifically for Amy Today. What I
learned was that, for the most part, people were not willing to
write articles that they were not paid for.
These days most of the articles you read come from newsletters
that I am trading for. I allow the editors of these newsletters
to use anything they want from Amy Today and, in turn, I use many
of their articles.
I am not completely happy with this. I think it would be
wonderful to have some authors who contributed to Amy Today on a
consistent basis. Maybe once every month, or even once every
five or six issues I could publish their article. Then people
would have their favorite columns to look forward to.
I'm interested in hearing from everyone! I sincerely mean that.
Write me a letter. Send me a disk. (I'll send you something fun
back!) Just get in contact with me and tell me what you think of
Amy Today. It takes a LOT of my time to put this magazine out
and I would like to know what people think.
Please contact me about any new game you've played and liked (or
hated). Just give me information. Anything at all that I can
use in the magazine or that will help me make a better magazine.
Thank you and remember to please upload Amy Today everywhere you
have a chance. (Is it even being posted to CompuServe?)
On another note, an index has been included with this issue to
help you find the Amy Today articles that you want to read.
John Rydell
(Editor)
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Distributing "Amy Today":
Amy Today is file-based magazine which has been copyrighted by
John Rydell. I am allowing everyone to freely distribute it as
long as they give credit to Amy Today for anything taken from the
magazine. I also request that the magazine, itself, remains "AS
IS" when being distributed. Please do not modify it in any way
if you are going to distribute it.
About Distributing: Please upload Amy Today EVERYWHERE! This
magazine simply will not flourish if it is not uploaded whenever
possible. Every issue is kept near 15,000 bytes ARCed so that
upload/download time should never be a problem. So, please, if
you have the chance spread the magazine around the country! Give
a copy to your friend! Keep Amy Today alive and going strong!
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Amy Input:
Dear John Rydell,
I would just like to relay to you my support of Amy Today. I
operate a BBS in San Antonio, TX, and on-line I am running a
complete <A>my Today section from the Main Menu. I will have all
the latest issues on-line starting from the 10-Nov-88 issue (5.1)
for text reading.
If you would care to leave a note to the users of my system who
read the Amy Today issues, please let me know!
Thanks, and keep up the good work!
Patrick Vick
Sysop: The Jack Daniels Field Testing Station
(512) 822-4732 San Antonio, TX
300/1200/2400 Baud 24 Hours
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Dear Patrick,
Thank you for the letter. It is good to know that Amy Today is
being read all throughout the country.
If anyone would like to obtain a disk with every issue of Amy
Today just drop me a disk for the my "Amiga Trading Galore" and
ask for a back issues disk.
Once again, thank you and keep up the good distribution!
John Rydell (Editor)
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Amy Input is a column where our readers have a chance to express
themselves. All submitted "input" will be considered for
publication. Letters are sometimes edited slightly for the sake
of space but no opinion or information will be modified in any
way.
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Amiga Happenings:
(John Rydell)
Fred Fish-
Disks 163-172 have been released into the public domain. There
is more information later in the issue.
LS-
The new version of this directory/list replacement is now
available for downloading from GEnie and Plink. Some people will
really like the format of this command. Then again, others
won't.
Commodore-
In an attempt to sell more Amigas, Commodore has created seven
new advertisements to be shown about 1000 times during the
Christmas season on MTV and VH-1. The advertisements were all
created by Amigas keeping the cost of all seven to only $75,000.
I've heard that seven such ads would usually cost near a million
dollars. Let's hope the advertisements work!
Amiga Happenings is a column dedicated to giving you information
on what is happening in the Amiga community. Some of the
information could possibly be wrong due to the fact that I am
trying to get early information. I do not in any way guarantee
that the information will be accurate although I will try my
hardest to protect the innocent.
>>If you have some new information you would like to share please
submit it to Amy Today.
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# Amy Today Trading Galore! Trade public domain or shareware #
# software with Amy Today. Look for more information later #
# in this issue. --The trade is going strong...participate #
# today! #
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What's NeXT?
(Bob Bliss)
<Reprinted from the November 1988 issue of The Knightly Knews>
For the personal computer industry, the only place to be on
October 12 this year was in San Francisco. That was where Steve
Jobs formally showed what he had been up to since being forced
out of Apple in 1985. To much applause from the standing room
only/by personal invitation only crowd, Steve put the NeXT "cube"
(the main box is 1' x 1' x 1') through its pre-planned paces.
I will not go into details about the cube, as you would have to
be in Mongolia not to have read about it in the cover story of
Newsweek or as a front page article in every paper from the Wall
Street Journal to InfoWorld. Instead, I want to explore what the
NeXT cube and its technology might mean to the Amiga community.
The first thing I must confess is that I have an optimistic view
of diversity in computing. When I see a manufacturer bring out a
hot new computer at an aggressive price, I know that means that
ALL computer manufacturers must respond, by either lowering their
prices or packing more power into their machines. Yes, I want to
have many more people buy Amigas to increase the market for new
Amiga-oriented hardware and software, and true, some potential
Amiga buyers will instead buy the hot new competitor. But that
is only one aspect of the situation. At the same time, Commodore
must respond by improving the price and/or performance of its
products, including dear Amy. I am a free market capitalist to
the bone, and remain convinced that the way to get Company A to
produce better goods is to have Company B offer stiff
competition. There have been truly significant improvements in
the cars Detroit has built over the past few years; do you think
that would have happened without the intense competition from
Mazda, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, and even Hyndai?
My second reason for optimism over the introduction of the NeXT
cube is that there is another revolutionary product to challenge
the brain-dead view of personal computing that IBM puts forth.
Let's face it: despite the large number of PCs that IBM has sold
since 1981, IBM remains predominantly a big iron company,
dedicated to the proposition that it ain't a computer if it ain't
got its own army of support troops feeding it software, paper,
and tape. The buzz words in that community are networking and
connectivity. "Sure, you can have a terminal on your desk, and
you can do some real computing with it if it's hardwired to a
real computer." (In their view, any box smaller than a
refrigerator is just a terminal, even if it has 10 MIPS of
power.)
Well, that's not MY view of personal computing. In MY world, the
"real" computer is the box on my desk, which I control
ABSOLUTELY. The big iron is nothing more than a source of data
which I will access if and when I happen to need that data or
want to pass along some of my data to someone else. And if the
data I need is rather static, I'd just as soon have a CD-ROM,
thank you very much, good day.
Apple began as the rebel's computer company; remember that Steve
Jobs used to sell devices to allow people to make long distance
phone calls for free. Apple users challenged the IBM mindset by
sneaking Apple IIs into the company through the back door and
actually doing real work with them. After IBM muscled the Apples
out of the company and replaced them with MS-DOS machines, Apple
fought back with ease of use in the Macintosh line. And this has
been successful. Apple remains dedicated to the idea of power on
the desktop; it has struck up alliances with the likes of DEC to
make certain it's a player in all of this networking/connectivity
game. But even without Steve Jobs, the company's vision remains
one of providing real power and ease of use to the individual
user.
The Amiga is clearly designed for the individual user to have the
tools he needs to go in any direction he wants. If he want to do
conventional computing such as spreadsheets and word processing,
these are simple tasks for Amy. If he wants to be creative in
the visual arena, he has the color graphics tools he needs. If
he wants to be creative with sound and music, the tools are
there. If he wants to enter the Amiga-created world of desktop
animations, the tools are there. And if he wants to put on his
three piece suit and do "real" computing, he can fire up the
modem and talk to a "real" computer. (I have used my Amy to read
my IBM PROFS mail on a base computer; believe me, PROFS is still
brain-dead, even when accessed from Amy. The GOOD thing is that
with Amy as my terminal rather than an IBM machine, I can enjoy
Bach at the same time, and when PROFS takes forever to respond,
as it frequently does, I can go to another window and do
something else rather than just sit and twiddle my thumbs.)
So where does the NeXT cube fit it? It validates the value of
several of Amy's capabilities, such as her sound and music
potential. Part of the NeXT show was a musical duet performed by
a concert violinist and the NeXT cube. This is not the kind of
demo the Big Blue crowd even understands. "Sure, that's nice
music ya got there, boy, but how many transactions per second can
the violinist do?" Some of us realize that the future of
computing is not just in counting dollars and processing sales
invoices; but this is a broader view of the uses of computing
than the IBM world understands.
In designing the cube, Steve Jobs had to make a great many
decisions. One of those which I really like was the decision to
use a version of Unix as the main operating system. Unix is
controversial in its own right, but as far as I am concerned,
it's the operating system we micro lovers should support. If you
think OS/2 was designed to allow you to gain more power on your
desktop and control over your computing future, you simply have
not been paying attention. The key to OS/2 is its interface with
big iron; it is designed to handcuff your PC to big blinky. It
also is very tightly coupled to its own Intel 80286/80386/80486
hardware. Unix, however, is both flexible and portable. It can
run on almost any processor and be tailored to whatever you want
it to do. Commodore is now offering Unix as an Amiga option.
Unix runs just fine on Motorola chips. Or intel chips. Or a
wide number of other chips. Remember, Intel does not second
source the 80386; you pay their price or you don't buy the 80386
at all. So if you want competition to drive down the price of
the machines you buy, stay away from OS/2 and the absolute
requirement to buy Intel's chips.
Unix is definitely a part of your Amiga future. You WANT people
to program in the Unix environment. You do NOT want people to
program in the OS/2 environment. So with another major computer
platform, the NeXT cube, supporting Unix, there will be still
more programmers writing neat software in the Unix environment.
The result will be more neat software that will run on your Amiga
without tricks such as the Transformer or hardware kludges such
as the Bridgeboard.
Not to be overlooked is the very idea that there can be an
alternative to work for the Apple crowd to convince enough people
that the Macintosh was a viable platform for business personal
computing. "Is it IBM-compatible?" has been the only question
which literally millions of computer buyers have asked when they
looked for a computer. Now they realize there is an alternative,
namely the Apple Macintosh. Soon they will realize there is a
third alternative, the NeXT cube. Once they have acknowledged
the possibility that non-IBM-compatible computers could actually
be useful, they will be more receptive when some friend mentions
the Amiga.
These are some of the reasons I welcome the entry of the NeXT
cube into the world of personal computing. If you think the NeXT
cube represents more of a threat to the Amiga community than I've
indicated, we'll be glad to print your opinions in next month's
Knightly Knews. (Or, of course, in Amy Today. --Ed)
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Fred Fish 163-172:
(John Rydell)
Yes, once again Fred Fish has released more disks into the public
domain. I am going to go over disks 163-172 in the following
manner: I will print the names of all of the files on the disks
and then talk about the files that seem the most interesting.
This way the article will not take up too much space yet it will
contain most of the information that the reader would like on the
disks.
Disk 163--> Bankn, FiveInLine, MachII, MemTrace, PcPatch,
ReadmeMeMaster, and View.
MachII is an update from disk #130. This version is 2.4c. I use
MachII all of the time. I keep it in my startup-sequence because
it adds features like hotkeys, popcli, a clock, and clicktofront.
View is a text-file reader that supports the mouse. (Very handy
for reading Amy Today!)
Disk 164--> C-Functions, DiskSalv, Hed, Newton, NewZAP, PcView,
PolyRoot, PrtDrivers, and Zoo.
DiskSalv is a disk salvager used to recover files that get ruined
on your floppy or hard drive. This is an update to the version
on disk #20.
Zoo is a file archiver like arc. This is an update to disk #136
and this is version 2.00.
Disk 165--> Conman, CPM, Parsnag, PlotView, RamCopy, and
SPUDclock.
Conman is a program which allows you to do command line editing
while using the CLI. This program will lose some of its
usefulness because WorkBench1.3 has the most of the advantages
built in. This is an update to disk #133.
RamCopy allows users with a megabyte or more of memory to back up
floppies with one pass.
Disk 166--> AutoGraf, Cref, MultiCalc, and Stevie.
MultiCalc is a graphic calculator with huge precision. It has a
48 digit display and has a 3000 digit precision or something
incredible like that.
Disk 167--> CDecl, CLIcon, CloseMe, DSM, MrPrint, Smus3.6a, and
Sounddemos.
CDecl is a program that allows you to translate English into the
C language and C into English. This program sounds like it could
REALLy help when learning C. But I have never used it so I don't
know how well it performs.
SMUS3.6a is an smus player that allows you to play your music
files. It is an enhancement from disk #58.
Sounddemos are a group of sound demos to show off the Amiga with.
Disk 168 and 169--> These are special disks which contain
Matthew Dillon's latest software. Most of these programs are CLI
aids: Config, Clock, DME, Dmouse, Backup, Suplib, Libref, Dres,
Dasm, FToHex, Files, Shell, Findit, Libs, Addcr, Remcr, and Cmp.
Disk 170--> Aftterm, Dis6502, FastText, MrBackup, PtrAnim, Surf,
and Turbo.
FastText is a program that speeds up text printing.
MRBackup is a hard drive backup utility. It uses compression
techniques and takes quite a while to backup the hard drive.
VERY reliable and useful, though.
Disk 171--> AZComm, Maze, Sozobon-C, and Xoper.
AZComm is a take-off on Comm1.34. It includes ZModem.
Disk 172--> DataToObj, Handshake, MFix, PopInfo, ProCalc, and
Spiff.
Handshake is a terminal that supports VT52, VT100, VT102, and
VT220 terminals. This is version 2.12a which is an update from
disk #60.
MFix is a program which speeds up Marauder II by turning off the
color-cycling during the copy process.
That's it for this batch of disks. For ordering information
consult back issues of Amy Today. Usually, local user groups or
local members have copies of Fred Fish's disks. Please try to
obtain a copy locally rather than going through Fred. He seems
to be copying enough disks already!
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Trading Galore:
First we had a picture trade. Users were urged to send in a disk
full of pictures and, in return, were given a disk full of the
best pictures that had been collected so far. The picture trade
was, and will hopefully continue to be, a GREAT success!
Because of this, I have decided to open up a new trade which
allows everyone to participate--not just those of us with
pictures. Send me a disk full of anything you want. (Music,
Art, Animations, Sound files, and Public Domain/Shareware
software...anything!) Include a SASE (please remember the
stamps!), and I will send your disk back to you filled with
whatever you want. Just tell me whether you want music, art,
software (you can even specify a specific pd/shareware program
but I can't guarantee that I have it), and I'll send it back. On
request, I'll even send disk copies of all issues of Amy Today.
The disks currently copied and ready to be traded are:
1 - Amy Today Picture Disk #1
2 - Amy Today Picture Disk #2
3 - Amy Today Animation Disk #1
4 - Amy Today Back Issues #1
5 - Amy Today Music Disk #1**
6 - Amy Today Picture Disk #3**
**Both of these coming soon.
Send your disk and a SASE to:
Amy Today's Trading Galore
640 Willowglen Rd.
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
<<Any requests or submissions of illegally copied software will
be burned!>>
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Newsletter Trading:
(From Issue 1-1)
I am looking for Amiga user groups who would like to trade
newsletters with me. Every month I will send you three issues of
Amy Today and, in return, I would like a copy of your
newsletter. I know a lot of this trading takes place and would
love to get involved. The more articles and information that I
have about the Amiga, the better I can make Amy Today. If you
are interested please drop me a line on GEnie, Plink, or by mail.
I would really appreciate a sample newsletter and will mail you
Amy Today in return.
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Advertising:
Amy Today is open to advertising at VERY affordable prices.
Large and small companies both have a great opportunity for
quality advertising while supporting a public domain Amiga
magazine. If you are interested please write to:
Amy Today
ATTN Advertising
640 Willowglen Rd.
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
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In the Future:
A review of Modula-2
A review of a CLtd 33 meg hard drive
An interview with a shareware programmer
Maybe even more interviews, also
And hopefully numerous articles from you--the readers.
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"Amy Today" is copyright 1988 by John Rydell. Portions of
the magazine may be reprinted but the content of this magazine
may NOT be changed without the expressed consent of John Rydell.
Yet everyone is encouraged to distribute it AS IS. Please give
credit to "Amy Today" as well as to the individual author when
reprinting material. "Amy Today" as well as any of its authors
are not responsible for any damages that occur because of errors
or omissions. Articles reprinted from other newsletters, as
noted, are not property of Amy Today but are under the control of
their original authors.
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