Amiga Mentioned in PC Magazine

We're hoping the big wigs at PC Magazine don't get upset if they find us quoting noted columnist and sometimes acerbic pundit, John C. Dvorak from their latest issue here. It's just that we were so taken by an actual, positive mention of the Amiga in an otherwise Wintel-centric publication that we were compelled to purloin a line or two for the Amiga Web Directory. By the way, the boldface is from the original article.




From PC Magazine, October 22, 1996
Inside Track
By John C. Dvorak
Used Without Permission

(Boldface from the original.)

The Jinxed Machine Rises Once Again, Maybe, Dept.: The hapless Amiga, a machine a decade ahead of its time (there's a lesson in there somewhere) was sold by a bankrupt Commodore to Germany's Escom AG two years back. Users hoped the sale would signal a revival, but Escom AG couldn't do anything with it and went bankrupt in July1995, leaving the Amiga in shambles. Now the machine's design has been sold to VIScorp, a Chicago-based set-top-box maker. Meanwhile, as a result of the bankruptcy, numerous companies are claiming rights to the machine.

No matter. VIScorp plans to revive the machine. There is some talk about porting the Amiga's OS code to the PowerPC, which would probably be a great idea, since the Amiga OS remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capability the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the Amiga OS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 256K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging, CD-ROM loading OS can do that the Amiga can't. Tight code--there's nothing like it.

I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. It's amazing! You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of the thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant--albeit cultlike--community, not unlike that which you have with Linux, the Unix clone. Expect to see VIScorp release a 68060 upgrade board for the machine. Amazing how high-quality machinery never dies an easy death.


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