Labels:text | font | letter | black and white | paper | document OCR: SENDER: 31.05.95 02:47 NR. 13 AMIGA III Technologies frequencies typical for video, as well as its ability to get genlocked. Every Amiga from the low-end to high-end provides this feature. Many video and TV studios use the Amiga as an integral part of their equipment. To show more concretely where the Amiga comes from, here is a picture of the genius behind the Amiga Custom Chips, Jay Miner, who passed away last year. The breakthrough for the Amiga came in 1987, when the first Amiga 1000 was followed by two successors, the Amiga 500 as a dedicated home computer and the Amiga 2000 as a professional workplace computer. The A500 became immediately the star of the home computer scene and dominated it for several years, so that Commodore nearly gained a monopoly in this low-cost market. On the other end, the A2000 featured the Open System Architecture, so that add-on vendors could offer everything from an external video digitizer to a turbo board with a bigger processor. One other unique Amiga feature helped here, which is called "Autoconfig": You can just plug in cards and don't need to bother for DIP switches or jumpers, a feature that's only now slowly emerging as "Plug&Play" also on PCs. The year 1994 brought the breakdown of Commodore, after the financial reserves had been exhausted by some fatal management decisions. The liquidators tried to sell the company, but only in spring 1995, on the auction of April 20th and 21st in New York, the german company Escom won and took over Commodore completely. Under the wing of Escom AG, Amiga Technologies GmbH will concentrate exclusively on the Amiga, to restart its production and develop it further. The current Amiga generation offers a full palette from the absolute Low-End - the Multimedia Game Console CD32 - over the full-featured home computer A1200 up to the High-End with the A4000 Tower. Concurrent platforms try to state it as normal that you get a trade-off between enhanced features and speed. But the Amiga shows that this has not to be the case for a really modern operating system. The professionality of the Amiga's video features shows up frequently in the recent past, in that several TV series in USA are now produced completely on Amigas for their video effect parts. Two examples are SeaQuest DSV and Babylon V. After the takeover the new company is conscious of the necessity to further develop the Amiga platform, as the competition has not stood still. The new Amiga company will therefore install an engineering division that can make the transition into a new generation happen. In the mid term future this will lead to stronger processors and otherwise enhanced versions of the current models. The big perspective for the future consists in a port of the Amiga architecture to a RISC platform, to assure the awaited power for the future. The very first task of this new engineering division
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