Having read that the Amiga 2000 show in St. Louis was to preview new hardware designs for the Amiga I looked on the Internet for details. It was not easy. The best I could come up with was Amiga Watch at http://tech-head.com/amiga.htm. Communiqué 6 gave some idea of what happened at St. Louis. This pointed me to Amiga World at http://amiga.com Salient points from these areas are summarised below.

• The new Amiga development platform is a software solution which will be licensed to hardware suppliers

• The system will be capable of running on a variety of processors including multiple processor solutions.

• The operating system will be based on Elate, a real time operating system from TAO.

• Elate will run a Java virtual machine allowing Java code to be run. This is a Sun branded version of PersonalJava developed by the Tao Group, called J-Engine. Elate and J-Engine together are called Intent Java technology Edition, (Intent JTE).

• The Amiga development environment will be the Amiga Developer Reference Platform (DRP), a Red Hat Linux-hosted system equipped with a GNU C/C++ development toolset (GCC). GCC, when equipped with Tao Group's portability toolset, gives Amiga developers the ability to generate Virtual Processor code. Native assembler can also be derived from Virtual Processor code. The machine will feature an AMD K6-II 500 MHz CPU, a GeForce Prophet 3D video card, a Soundblaster compatible sound card and 64M of RAM.

• The Amiga environment - presumably the Intent JTE - will be preloaded on the DRP. Only machines supplied by Amiga will be supported by Amiga. This is supposed to prevent pirating.

• While the DRP is hosted on Linux and a X86 processor, Amiga consumer products will often be run natively, not hosted by another operating system. They should run much faster then they do on the initial DRP.

• Corel, who are heavily into Linux now, are regarded as a strategic partner. Amiga's multimedia consumer interface - I presume this means Elate - runs extremely smooth and fast on Corel LINUX OS

• A number of companies were identified as working on software for the new Amiga platform. 117 different software titles was quoted, so there will not be a shortage of software for the new Amiga

• A company called Met@box is developing a card based on the PPC processor for the Amiga 1200. The card, called AmiJoe, will run the new Amiga operating system.

• Amiga is negotiating with a company called Espial is providing a web browser, written in Java, called Escape, for the new Amiga.

• Three animators from Disney, who have used old Amigas a lot in the past, have provided conceptual designs for the new hardware look.

• The new Amiga is nothing like the old Amiga, but then a Y2K PC is nothing like a 1994 PC either!

The virtual processor code is the key to the New Amiga being processor independent. Developers will write for the virtual processor. As new processors come out the virtual processor will be mapped to the specific processor by software. This is certainly a new concept and, if successful, will eliminate such things as the Wintel dependence or the Macintosh - Apple OS dependence.

I have to say that in reading both of the web areas mentioned above there is a lot of verbal diarrhoea amongst the juicy morsels of information. There is also a lot of pretending to provide something new, or denigrating something old, by simply giving it a whole new jargon set. Here is an example from issue 1 of Amiga World.

'Computers are expensive. Computers are complicated. Computers are frustrating. They were built to handle batch files stored in rigid hierarchies using big applications. In short, the digital revolution has outgrown its computer nursery. To understand the Amiga solution for tomorrow requires a paradigm shift, the acceptance of a certain set of core truths. Otherwise, people will just end up trying to smash traditional ideas against a new model to no avail.

AmiVerse

Firstly, there is no such thing as a file. All elements are now just digital matter, a stream of zeros and ones. Second, there are no applications. There are just activities that involve producers and consumers of that digital matter. Third, there is no such thing as an operating system. There is merely a set of services produced by service providers and consumed by service requestors. Fourth, these services, producers, consumers and digital matter exist independently of individual physical devices. ...'

I agree that computers are expensive and complicated and I have stated on more than one occasion that consumers will start to move away from them as dedicated devices appear. However, that is not to denigrate computers. Computers have a purpose in the hands of a power user, not a consumer. I do not want to see computers disappear just because the mass of the population cannot use them. Otherwise we are all reduced to the lowest common denominator user.

Similarly, to say there is no such thing as a file, application or operating system is just simply not true. The writer has just called them something else or misrepresented them. If you wish to store digital data offline you need an operating system to talk to the storage device. A service provider may provide the service of storage online but then you have lost the flexibility of being able to access at your leisure at no cost.

I wish the New Amiga well. Indeed if Microsoft is crippled by the penalties imposed by the anti-trust case, or continues to produce ever more complex software that thinks by itself against my wishes, I may wish a New Amiga machine as my next system. However, I will want a computer with an operating system and applications like word processing and I want to store the results in files. That is efficient and cost effective. Cut the claptrap Amiga and set your mind to producing a really great computing environment.