Some Key Amiga and Amiga Monitor-oriented links:
Amiga Monitor Main Index
Amiga Web Directory
By Sam Ormes, Senior Editor, s.ormes@genie.com
Gateway appears to have bought our Amiga, but now we have to wait another month to find out what they intend to do with it. I think it was Plato who observed that "the most difficult thing to predict is the future" but he also said "in times of uncertainty, people get silly".
It is this latter thought (the one about silliness) that applies best to our current situation. On March 27th, Gateway published a 307-word announcement of the acquisition. This brief posting spawned (at latest count) a reaction approaching 145 million words. This deluge flooded the Usenet newsgroups, the online magazines, and club newsletters. Much of it was downright silly.
Suddenly every Amigan on the planet had something to say about this unexpected turn of events, even though the 307 words hardly provided any meaningful information on which to comment. Many.....confirming Plato's observation..... turned to goofiness. The many "Amooga" postings won the prize for sheer volume but there were many other "cow" creations as well. The "alphabet theory" occupied quite a lot of cyber-space (A-C-E-G-I, the alternate letters signifying Amiga-Commodore-Escom-Gateway-and IBM?).
Eric Schwartz's timely cartoon became the most widely republished piece of Amiga humor/art in history. North Sioux City was inundated with hundreds of thousands of Amigan e-mails, most offering advice to this five billion dollar company. Even the Mac newsgroups got infected by this obsession to say something, no matter how meaningless, about the 307 words (have you noticed that your Mac friends are beginning to look more and more like Amigans?).
Conspiracy theories abounded. One calculated the ASCII values for the letters in certain phrases and concluded that they added up to "666" ! Another had inside information that GW2K was only interested in making a mint from enforcing "patent infringement suits" against the major game-platform companies who supposedly have been using Amiga-patented stuff in their products without paying for it. The rumored buyout of Gateway by Compaq convinced some Amigans that Compaq was only interested in the Amiga patents and would dissolve Gateway once it got them.
In the midst of all this wild conjecture, the 39 California lemmings went off in search of the Hale-Bopp spaceship and Billy-Bob Gates, who had taken a staunch position against the advent of the NC Set-Top devices, bought WebTV for $425 million! In a world gone mad, foolishness sets in.
This reporter however, perhaps inspired by the example of the esteemed Jason Compton, refused to succumb to the almost irresistible desire to post "something" in reaction to the 307 words. But ......and I confess this here publicly.... I did satisfy the desire to DO "something" about the buyout news, - a simple but elegant measure that appeased the need to take action. Using a little program called Desktop Magic, my Amigas now emit a loud "mooooooo" everytime the word "Gateway" appears on the screen. I feel better having revealed that.
In times of uncertainty........
Amiga Web Directory