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From: hal@hpsciz.HP.COM (Hal Work)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: TOASTER Debut
Message-ID: <1450003@hpsciz.HP.COM>
Date: 3 Oct 90 14:17:14 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Santa Clara, CA
Lines: 27

I attended the FAUG meeting last night for the debut of the TOASTER from
NewTek.  Jay Miner, Dale Luck, and other Amiga dignitaries were in attendance

Things started late as usual.  California Dreams was the opening act for
the Toaster.  The highlight of their presentation was the "Bodega Bay", a
console for the 500 which can use 2000 boards and lots of drives (new power
supply, too).  They tried to demo three games.  Only Blockout worked.
Tunnels of Armageddon had a read/write error on the disk and Street Rod had
a problem equally as embarassing.  During the unfortunate bits, the crowd
of several hundred were chanting, "TOASTER!, TOASTER!, TOASTER!".  The CD
people were pros and carried on.

The TOASTER was awesome!  Not only does it do all the fades, wipes, and
zillions of special effects but incorporated is a 16M color paint program,
3D renderer, character generator, and oh so much more.  List price is $1595 
and it IS shipping.  The hardware portion of the Toaster is a piggybacked
board.  350,000 lines of "Cool Guy from NewTek" code went into the software
for it.  One of the things that struck me about this product is that the
guys putting it all together were having fun.  It was clear that they had a
vision and knew what they wanted.  They didn't care if the product was years
late to market if it wasn't what they wanted.  I almost forgot ... I don't
know what it's called, but one of the features that got great amounts of
applause did wonderful color/luminance(?) effects.  I think this was developed
for NewTek by Elan(?).  Almost eclipsing the Toaster was Kiki, a NewTek babe,
in her delightful(read small) cocktail dress.  All in all, the NewTek guys
did it again with another great product.  Ooh-ooh, and then there was the
Penn & Teller NewTek video.  These guys are the perfect front for NewTek.