NAG Is Still Here!!!
by Rick Rudge
The Northwest Amiga Group, as always, has been here for Amiga users. With the announcement from Amiga, Inc. that the classic Amiga platform was basically dead, work was underway to secure support for this new Amiga Operating Environment (now called the Amiga Digital Environment) as well as continuing our own support for the classic Amiga.
After leaving our NAG office, many of our NAG meetings have been held on-line using Internet Relay Chat, with occasional person-to- person General meetings still held at the Bonneville Power Administration building.
During one of these general meetings, we had a speaker phone conversation with the Vice President of Finance for Amiga, Inc., Randall Hughes. The folks at Amiga, Inc. have said that they would like to visit a NAG meeting, but so far, that has not come to pass.
Our club president, Todd C. Gustafson relocated to the East Bay area of Pleasanton, California. With all of his new duties and responsibilities, Todd still continued his position as president of NAG. Todd and NAG vice president, Daniel Reichen have represented NAG at both Amiga2K and AmiWest`2000 shows. Much of our NAG meetings have been "Virtual" using IRC. There has been some frustration using this method so we have slowly moved back to person-to-person meetings with the idea of having simulcast virtual meetings for our non-local members. Our General Meetings are still held on the third Tuesday of every month at the Bonneville Power Administration Building near Lloyd Center, and now, our Board of Directors meetings are held at David Reichen's apartment.
Long-time editor of "The NAG Journal", Dale Pace gave his resignation. Dale has given many years of dedicated service to this publication and to NAG. Todd has taken on this additional responsibility. His computer and duplicating equipment has been able to produce some very professional looking issues.
NAG once again, sponsored a multimedia tent at the Oregon Special Olympics in Salem, Oregon last August. We set up our older classic Amigas for the athletes to play Amiga games on. We also digitized, printed and gave away souvenir posters with the names and pictures of the athletes.
When we heard about the Coz's untimely death, NAG members put some money together and contributed a small amount towards the Robert Cosby Memorial Fund.
As soon as there was an announcement of the OS 3.9 upgrade, NAG members were making arrangements for a group purchase. Many members will be taking advantage of a great users group discount. We have also made this group purchase available to other users groups in the area.
At the time of this report, we aren't sure where NAG needs to go from here. Should we only support classic Amiga users or should we embrace the future Amiga Digital Environment and AmigaOne, or should we do a combination of the two? Hopefully our members will work together towards a direction that will best serve everyone. The rest is in the hands of Amiga, Inc.
