Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!jade!eris!mwm From: mwm@eris.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Computer Faire (+ note on Amiga WordPerfect) Message-ID: <2972@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 06:46:45 EST Article-I.D.: jade.2972 Posted: Mon Mar 30 06:46:45 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 2-Apr-87 00:49:20 EST Sender: usenet@jade.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: mwm@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike (My watch has windows) Meyer) Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 49 I spent a couple of hours wondering around the floor on the Nth (for some N) Computer Faire. General impressions: Lots of IBM PC stuff. Dull. Not quite so much mac stuff, including a color enhancment. Not quite so dull. Some Atari stuff. Not bad. A little Amiga stuff. Dull. Almost no - wait a minute! DULL Amiga stuff?? Right. The Atari ST crowd was running lots of animated displays, including some fast Mandelbrots, and a lot of demos for a 3d cad package. The Amiga crowd (what little there was) had lots of static displays using digi-view & similar hardware, plus one genlock demo. The most graphically exciting Amiga demo was the ChessMaster 2000 board. No animation at all. Very little of anything at all. If I had to make predictions on the future of the Amiga from that, I'd be predict that it's going to vanish in the near future. What's up? None of the Amiga hardware/software vendors thought it was worth showing up? The most exciting thing related to the Amiga as far as I was concerned was the A2000, which was apparently a prototype. The hardware had been yanked from the case, and was sitting on top of it. It is an ugly box. But that's not the kind of thing to make people who aren't interested in the Amiga take notice of the machine. Finally, I saw a copy of WordPerfect running on the Amiga, in beta test. It works correctly in the multitasking environment, runs on the WB screen, and fits well into the intuition environment. Asking if there would be an interlaced screen available drew a "don't know" response. It used the Amiga fonts for italic/bold/underscore, and played wysiwyg with them. Sub/super scripts weren't working. It's not known if more fonts will be used. It is known that the standard printer driver will be an option, but the full set of WordPerfect printer drivers from the PC should be available. Release date is set for May, and you should be able to find it in the stores in June. Of course, mg1b will be out before then :-). If I hadn't found lots of cheap 3 1/2" disk storage, the show would've been a total loss.