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Gareth Knight
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From: Wolf Dietrich <wd@gf.phase5.de>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: JoeCard G3 now for AMIGA
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 15:52:49 +0100
Organization: phase 5 digital products
Lines: 64
Message-ID: <37038825.7ED6FBBC@gf.phase5.de>
References: <damocles.jf31@nostromo.gate.net>
<3700E9E8.C927901D@gf.phase5.de>
<aTmosh.0a52@amiga.cistron.nl>
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To: Thomas Tavoly <aTmosh@amiga.cistron.nl>
Thomas Tavoly wrote:
> Can you tell us what the status of pre/box, A\box and
Caipirinha are?
> (I do seem to remember that when the pre/box was announced the
A\box was
> discounted in importance if not cancelled in so much words)
If, as I
> presume, they have been completely cancelled, why has there
been no update on this
> on the phase 5 webpages, or some kind of press release?
The A\box and Caipirinha was a great vision, and while it would
need to be updated
today, the concepts behind it are still absolutely valid. Things
like e.g. the Altivec
in G4 CPUs are - of course even more complex and now a reality -
very similar to what
we had planned for the Caipirinha. Other products integrate other
ideas we wanted to
realize. And when you look at the original specs of 1996, they
would still be
up-to-date today (and also next year) if you add some decent 3D
hardware (of course,
today for the same price you'd have 400MHz G3 instead of 150MHz
604, 64MB RAM instead
of 16, and 12 GB HD instead of a small one).
But yes, we have failed to realize this project, this is true.
Remember, at this time
back in the past, we (that means the players in the market) were
fighting a war of
words in that market - many companies trying to become the
successor of Amiga,
announcing lots of products which never made it to reality. In this
overall situation,
we have not been able (especially in 1997) to realize the
additional growth for our
company in the Amiga market, which would have been necessary to
realize the A\box;
while we were actually strong in the market, shipping real products
and providing
technology to the users, we were not strong enough to avoid that
other companies have
drawn away attention and support to other announced projects. And
yes, the A\box
project was demanding enough to require the full, (nearly)
undivided support of an
Amiga community looking for a successor of their exisitng machine.
We still have
technologies and building blocks of it at our hand, but we can't
see a way to make the
A\box a phoenix.
The pre\box has not been realized 1998, but been put back
into the drawer. But
actually, this product could still be realized (in afct, we
continued with the design
core of this product, in a different form and targeting a different
vertical market,
and we are actually protoyping this other product these days). The
big question for
the pre\box is the software, and while we got our OS3.1 license
from Amiga last year,
the whole confusion (as we have seen it from the point of a
commercial developer)
around OS3.5-5.0, PowerPC or not, and the magical mystery future
after the WoA London
98 have been reason enough to put development on hold.
Well, maybe we see better times at last...
> I have no trouble understanding why they have been cancelled
or even the
> need not to brag about it, but quietly shuffling previously
widely
> publicised projects under the table does not instill
confidence in future
> announcements (even if a G3 card is more realistic).
This may be right, and we apologize for that by all our supporters
who are disapointed
by that. When we have changed a lot of things last year, and also
had to put
additional markets into our focus, we simply didn't find the
time to communicate the
changes in an adequate way. It is easy to cancel a product, but
very difficult to
cancel a vision completely. And yet, we still have that vision in
mind, although it is
a dream which's realization would require surprising changes which
we can't expect to
happen - and which are outside our control.
Regards,
Wolf Dietrich
---------------------------------------------------------
Wolf Dietrich, GM phase 5 digital products
wd@gf.phase5.de http://www.phase5.de
---------------------------------------------------------
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