At the Melbourne Amiga User Group meeting on Thursday night, I was introduced to two videos that I didn't even know existed. Both of the lengthy videos concentrate on Bill McEwen who talked about Amiga at the Amiga Computer Expo 2000. The videos were posted in 2012, but only 176 people have seen them so far!

You can see these now historical videos at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4e05Oq5pRE

and at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG4i4rYEIbk

Writing from Sydney, Australia,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
April 25-26 Commodore Los Angeles Super Show - http://www.portcommodore.com/class

@RobertB
What does Bill McEwen do?
Cheat old ladies?

@RobertB

What relevance did anything he had to say have for the Amiga platform? DCE, Phase5, Eyetech heck even Petro made more contribution. It was all T-shirts, pre-order coupons, aborted sports stadium sponsorship deals and Christmas Card Makers by then! I'm not surprised no one wants to watch a video about anything to do with Amiga Inc.

Last edited by BigD on 06-Mar-2020 at 02:00 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

I have been corrected. There is a third video at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6hju93bT2Q

Writing from Sydney, Australia,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
April 25-26 Commodore Los Angeles Super Show - http://www.portcommodore.com/class

@BigD
Yes, Petro the t-shirts man and other merchandising to get money for his retirement, but little more he did.

@RobertB

A fascinating piece of history. He's a rather good salesman. I can understand why it "worked" for a short period, given the times, all the money being thrown around and so on. Thanks for sharing.

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@BigD

I never got my t-shirt. It is experiences like that which make me wary of "early adopter" schemes.

_________________
I sold my SAM460ex lite... waiting for money to buy a Raspberry Pi... or a Classic A1000 with Buffee... or an A1222... and OS4.3 FE update 11

Thanks for sharing, these videos.

Bill McEwen sure talks a lot... Funny to see today but trying so hard to please the community with their probably pretty limited budget was impossible.

Both QNX and Intent was interesting ideas though. They could have had an Amigaized QNX product out the door in no time (in amiga time at least) if it wasnt for our rage against anything x86

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@Templario

Quote:

What does Bill McEwen do? Cheat old ladies?

But ... but ... but, that was the time when Bill gave Hyperion the contract for AOS4, you should all be thankful to him otherwise there would have been nor AmigaOS4 by Hyperion, no AmigaOne ...
*/irony*

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 12-Mar-2020 at 10:15 PM.

@Troels

Bang on.
Totally agree.

There's another oppertunity with ARM right now though.
Apple is about to cut over to it for some of their lineup.

_________________
It's not the question that's the problem, it's the problem that's the question.

@OneTimer1
And leave to Haage&Partner when they had the hope to develop the OS4.
He was si good for the Amiga like the people think.
And It is not an irony, is a misfortune to Amiga stop the OS3 updates until now...

Last edited by Templario on 13-Mar-2020 at 09:46 AM.

@Templario

Haage&Partner were great and I love OS3.9 and OS3.5. It's such a shame that the Eyetech AmigaOS experiment took soooo long to materialise and the hardware was actually unavailable to buy by the time the OS was ready! Let's hope the A1222 gets into an "in stock" status in 2020 with a fully functional OS with sound and ethernet.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: ... and the hardware was actually unavailable to buy by the time the OS was ready!

No not really, they sold the first AmigaOnes with Linux instead of AOS4.0, because the OS was not ready:
Quote:

The first AmigaOne motherboards were released in 2002, but there was no OS4 to go with them, so they shipped with Debian PPC Linux instead.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2005/01/amiga/


AmigaOS4.0 stayed a in a pre release state until the final release in 2006:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4_version_history#AmigaOS_4.0_(The_Final_Update)

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 13-Mar-2020 at 06:46 PM.
Last edited by OneTimer1 on 13-Mar-2020 at 06:38 PM.

@OneTimer1

Yes, and people that wanted to wait for AmigaOS 4.x to be available PRIOR to buying an AmigaOne were out of luck because they had ceased to be produced by the time it was released!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

Amiga Inc provide something that has nothing common with Amiga except name.
It was less advanced than win/lnx and less popular than win/lnx.
So no suprise everobody switch to win/lnx instead of Amiga DE/something with QNX.
Amiga Inc should do exactly what Apple do.
Not what some PPC haters clowns think Apple do but what Apple really do.
No revolution but evolution.
Apple first change transition to ppc.
After transition to ppc Apple did transition to unix on ppc.
On unix on ppc Apple solve all problems with memory protection, drivers, and made os hardware independent.
Then after solve all problems on unix on ppc Apple do transition to x86.
No revolution but slow evolution was Apple key to success to transition to x86.

@ppcamiga1

No, Apple's success came from making people crave smart phones. They have close to zero interest in computers now. They've just released a server rack mounted version of the Mac Pro which doesn't even attempt to compete with other 'proper' servers. Not enough cpus, not enough gpus and not good enough connectivity. Basically, if you've got an empty rack system right next to your desk and want an expensive cheese grater and a hole in pocket buy your computer from Apple!

... most of their growth is now in cloud services which don't even use their hardware. Their computer division is anything but a success. It's electronics marketed as jewellry where the mission is to sell ever thinner, lighter jewellry with less features/ports compared to the previous generation for more money. You could put a MacOX wrapper over Linux on the machines to implement that business model! But they don't need to do that as they can demote macOS and get iOS on Arm laptops and quitely kill the Pro machines.

Last edited by BigD on 14-Mar-2020 at 11:57 AM.
Last edited by BigD on 14-Mar-2020 at 10:40 AM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Do you know about the odyssey?

2004: The year of the OS


I got an earlybird AmigaOne XE and yes it came with Debian. However, OS4.0 was released publically in 2004 as a developer pre-release. Never mind the title, it was fully functional, with some slight bugs. You didn't need to be a developer to use it. I prompty retired my Debian volume after installing OS4.0.

So, it was available in 2004. I don't recall if there was some restriction on who could purchase it. But every A1 would include OS4.0. And the µA1 followed the XE in 2004 also.

I watched a Dan Wood video on the AmigaOne. IIRC he was installing FE. But he said the AmigaOne XE was a developer system that shouldn't have been sold to the public. I don't recall this being the case. I know there the original was the SE which was the developer board that certainly shouldn't have been sold to the general public. Even though some were sold as a general board and I some I heard advertised on eBay as an XE. Which gave the AmigaOne a really bad name. But the XE model was certainly desitined for public consumption. Not perfect, but this was the public model.

@Hypex

The final (non pre-release) came in 2006 at a time the AmigaOne boards were no longer available. From a marketing perspective that is a nightmare whether the OS was functionam in 2004 or not.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

But now in seriously, this man, Bill, What do he does now?

@Templario

Quote:

Templario wrote: But now in seriously, this man, Bill, What do he does now?

He's a secretary for C-A Acqisition Company. A company owned fully by Mike Battilana, the founder of Cloanto.