A Letter To Joe Torre
Jerry Everett

After reading many interviews, speeches, and posts, I am still unclear as to what Amiga Inc. is, and what the future of the Amiga is. Consequently, I want to give Osumi idea, as to what I think they could become.

I have a small business "Astoria Video Solutions" here in New York, and I use an Amiga 4000 Toaster in my work. I have been playing around with computers since the Timex Sinclare Z80. I have used the CBM Vic20, C64, C128, Amiga 500, Amiga 2000 prior to the 4000. I also use MAC emulation on my Amiga, and I have a Wintel machine. So my computer interest has grown with the computer industry, and has a base in both the hobby and commercial camps.

I am 50, and have seen a bit of technical history. I see the Amiga as still having a role in bringing people into the world of computing. I would urge you to consider a one chip design for a severely cost reduced version of the A1200, primarily for sale in the developing world. I think a market study would show good profit in this. I notice Amiga International just made a sale to the Indian Telecommunications industry, and I think there is much more to be got on the low end if you start the cycle of development and sale that occurred in the industrialized world in the 70s and 80s. The Amiga is inherently more efficient than the MAC/Wintel architectures not only due to the small, efficient, multitasking OS, but also to the distributed processing hardware. This latter is often overlooked.

As to the development of future High End systems for the industrialized world, I think it would be a good Idea to look at one of the many paths not taken by CBM early on. One of the bits of intellectual property that GW2K got is a little known CBM project that never got beyond the development stage, but showed much promise at the time. The Amiga Transputer, was a development project of the West Germans. While the original specs sound quaint by today standards, an updated version could allow the use of multiple low cost processors to give you an aggregate processing power faster than any single or dual processor now or in the near future. It would give you the great leap forward that the original Amiga was over the MAC/IBMs of the time. More importantly to me, It would give me as a low end 3D animator/ video producer a cost effective tool, to advance into the high definition era of video production with the big boys. I recall corresponding with Carl Sasenrath about this once, and I believe he commented that one of the reasons he left CBM was that they did not want to take this kind of approach to future development. You might want to get his input on the idea. Another person you might want to talk to is professor Mark Brown in the computer science department at Iowa University. He reported on the Amiga Transputer when he was the technical editor for Info. Magazine, back in the 80s (MBrown@icaen.UIowa.edu).

What I know of the transputer is that it was demoed at the spring 1988 developer's conference in an off the shelf A2000. The board looked very clean and neat. There was only one hand wired jumper on it, so the project must have been fairly mature. It had a 32bit IMS T-414 or T-900 transputer chip running at 15MHz (10 MIPs), with 2k of on-chip RAM and one to four megabytes of external on-board DRAM. It communicated to other transputers via four on-chip serial links. In a 2000 you could have up to 4 other transputer daughter boards with 4 transputer chips on each. The on chip links could be used to connect to other transputer equipped 2000s to create a Lan without the need for a network controller card. The practical limitation was on the order of 500 transputer chips. The OS they were using was a partially com- pleted version of "Helios". The only thing they could demo was a Dhrystone test. It was very impressive for the time, and not bad even by today's standards. I was really pissed when CBM just dropped development (why spend money on something more advanced when you could make money selling what you had in hand). Last I heard the Inmos technology was owned by Phillips, I don't know what they did with it.

I hope this has peaked your interest. Computing is an ocean, and the Amiga only a current in that ocean. If we look at peoples lives, and what the computer can do to help them live better ones, we can see that we have only scratched the surface (how about a cheap machine that can listen to the sounds of a household and tell if a baby' cry is from hunger or pain, or if that crackling sound in the middle of the night is a fire, a mouse, or a burglar? How can we give ordinary working class people the machines for that?) The Amiga architecture is still relevant to meeting those needs. But to be all that the Amiga can become, it must merge with other currents in the ocean. 

From the Feb 98 "Queens Bits"