=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Amy Today A text-file magazine for all Amiga lovers Volume #5, Issue #3, November 30th =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Editor : John Rydell Writers: Bob Bliss (Yes, he has been included once again!) Address all correspondence to: "Amy Today" C/O John Rydell GEnie address: J.Rydell1 640 Willowglen Rd. (#54790) Santa Barbara, CA 93105 Plink address: J*Rydell GEnie discussion in category #2, topic #29 Plink discussion in Section #2 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Contents: 1. A Message From the Editor John Rydell 2. Distributing "Amy Today" John Rydell 3. Amy Input Our Faithful Readers 4. Amiga Happenings John Rydell 5. What's NeXT? Bob Bliss 6. Fred Fish 163-172 John Rydell 7. Trading Galore!! John Rydell 8. Newsletter Trading John Rydell 9. Advertising John Rydell 10. In the Future John Rydell =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= A Message From The Editor: Amy Today is changing. When I first started the magazine I wrote almost every feature article myself. But I started to run out of things to write about. I certainly don't have the money to buy every new piece of software and review it. Because of this, I tried my hardest to find other users who were willing to submit articles specifically for Amy Today. What I learned was that, for the most part, people were not willing to write articles that they were not paid for. These days most of the articles you read come from newsletters that I am trading for. I allow the editors of these newsletters to use anything they want from Amy Today and, in turn, I use many of their articles. I am not completely happy with this. I think it would be wonderful to have some authors who contributed to Amy Today on a consistent basis. Maybe once every month, or even once every five or six issues I could publish their article. Then people would have their favorite columns to look forward to. I'm interested in hearing from everyone! I sincerely mean that. Write me a letter. Send me a disk. (I'll send you something fun back!) Just get in contact with me and tell me what you think of Amy Today. It takes a LOT of my time to put this magazine out and I would like to know what people think. Please contact me about any new game you've played and liked (or hated). Just give me information. Anything at all that I can use in the magazine or that will help me make a better magazine. Thank you and remember to please upload Amy Today everywhere you have a chance. (Is it even being posted to CompuServe?) On another note, an index has been included with this issue to help you find the Amy Today articles that you want to read. John Rydell (Editor) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Distributing "Amy Today": Amy Today is file-based magazine which has been copyrighted by John Rydell. I am allowing everyone to freely distribute it as long as they give credit to Amy Today for anything taken from the magazine. I also request that the magazine, itself, remains "AS IS" when being distributed. Please do not modify it in any way if you are going to distribute it. About Distributing: Please upload Amy Today EVERYWHERE! This magazine simply will not flourish if it is not uploaded whenever possible. Every issue is kept near 15,000 bytes ARCed so that upload/download time should never be a problem. So, please, if you have the chance spread the magazine around the country! Give a copy to your friend! Keep Amy Today alive and going strong! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Amy Input: Dear John Rydell, I would just like to relay to you my support of Amy Today. I operate a BBS in San Antonio, TX, and on-line I am running a complete <A>my Today section from the Main Menu. I will have all the latest issues on-line starting from the 10-Nov-88 issue (5.1) for text reading. If you would care to leave a note to the users of my system who read the Amy Today issues, please let me know! Thanks, and keep up the good work! Patrick Vick Sysop: The Jack Daniels Field Testing Station (512) 822-4732 San Antonio, TX 300/1200/2400 Baud 24 Hours ----------------------- Dear Patrick, Thank you for the letter. It is good to know that Amy Today is being read all throughout the country. If anyone would like to obtain a disk with every issue of Amy Today just drop me a disk for the my "Amiga Trading Galore" and ask for a back issues disk. Once again, thank you and keep up the good distribution! John Rydell (Editor) ----------------------- Amy Input is a column where our readers have a chance to express themselves. All submitted "input" will be considered for publication. Letters are sometimes edited slightly for the sake of space but no opinion or information will be modified in any way. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Amiga Happenings: (John Rydell) Fred Fish- Disks 163-172 have been released into the public domain. There is more information later in the issue. LS- The new version of this directory/list replacement is now available for downloading from GEnie and Plink. Some people will really like the format of this command. Then again, others won't. Commodore- In an attempt to sell more Amigas, Commodore has created seven new advertisements to be shown about 1000 times during the Christmas season on MTV and VH-1. The advertisements were all created by Amigas keeping the cost of all seven to only $75,000. I've heard that seven such ads would usually cost near a million dollars. Let's hope the advertisements work! Amiga Happenings is a column dedicated to giving you information on what is happening in the Amiga community. Some of the information could possibly be wrong due to the fact that I am trying to get early information. I do not in any way guarantee that the information will be accurate although I will try my hardest to protect the innocent. >>If you have some new information you would like to share please submit it to Amy Today. ############################################################### # Amy Today Trading Galore! Trade public domain or shareware # # software with Amy Today. Look for more information later # # in this issue. --The trade is going strong...participate # # today! # ############################################################### What's NeXT? (Bob Bliss) <Reprinted from the November 1988 issue of The Knightly Knews> For the personal computer industry, the only place to be on October 12 this year was in San Francisco. That was where Steve Jobs formally showed what he had been up to since being forced out of Apple in 1985. To much applause from the standing room only/by personal invitation only crowd, Steve put the NeXT "cube" (the main box is 1' x 1' x 1') through its pre-planned paces. I will not go into details about the cube, as you would have to be in Mongolia not to have read about it in the cover story of Newsweek or as a front page article in every paper from the Wall Street Journal to InfoWorld. Instead, I want to explore what the NeXT cube and its technology might mean to the Amiga community. The first thing I must confess is that I have an optimistic view of diversity in computing. When I see a manufacturer bring out a hot new computer at an aggressive price, I know that means that ALL computer manufacturers must respond, by either lowering their prices or packing more power into their machines. Yes, I want to have many more people buy Amigas to increase the market for new Amiga-oriented hardware and software, and true, some potential Amiga buyers will instead buy the hot new competitor. But that is only one aspect of the situation. At the same time, Commodore must respond by improving the price and/or performance of its products, including dear Amy. I am a free market capitalist to the bone, and remain convinced that the way to get Company A to produce better goods is to have Company B offer stiff competition. There have been truly significant improvements in the cars Detroit has built over the past few years; do you think that would have happened without the intense competition from Mazda, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, and even Hyndai? My second reason for optimism over the introduction of the NeXT cube is that there is another revolutionary product to challenge the brain-dead view of personal computing that IBM puts forth. Let's face it: despite the large number of PCs that IBM has sold since 1981, IBM remains predominantly a big iron company, dedicated to the proposition that it ain't a computer if it ain't got its own army of support troops feeding it software, paper, and tape. The buzz words in that community are networking and connectivity. "Sure, you can have a terminal on your desk, and you can do some real computing with it if it's hardwired to a real computer." (In their view, any box smaller than a refrigerator is just a terminal, even if it has 10 MIPS of power.) Well, that's not MY view of personal computing. In MY world, the "real" computer is the box on my desk, which I control ABSOLUTELY. The big iron is nothing more than a source of data which I will access if and when I happen to need that data or want to pass along some of my data to someone else. And if the data I need is rather static, I'd just as soon have a CD-ROM, thank you very much, good day. Apple began as the rebel's computer company; remember that Steve Jobs used to sell devices to allow people to make long distance phone calls for free. Apple users challenged the IBM mindset by sneaking Apple IIs into the company through the back door and actually doing real work with them. After IBM muscled the Apples out of the company and replaced them with MS-DOS machines, Apple fought back with ease of use in the Macintosh line. And this has been successful. Apple remains dedicated to the idea of power on the desktop; it has struck up alliances with the likes of DEC to make certain it's a player in all of this networking/connectivity game. But even without Steve Jobs, the company's vision remains one of providing real power and ease of use to the individual user. The Amiga is clearly designed for the individual user to have the tools he needs to go in any direction he wants. If he want to do conventional computing such as spreadsheets and word processing, these are simple tasks for Amy. If he wants to be creative in the visual arena, he has the color graphics tools he needs. If he wants to be creative with sound and music, the tools are there. If he wants to enter the Amiga-created world of desktop animations, the tools are there. And if he wants to put on his three piece suit and do "real" computing, he can fire up the modem and talk to a "real" computer. (I have used my Amy to read my IBM PROFS mail on a base computer; believe me, PROFS is still brain-dead, even when accessed from Amy. The GOOD thing is that with Amy as my terminal rather than an IBM machine, I can enjoy Bach at the same time, and when PROFS takes forever to respond, as it frequently does, I can go to another window and do something else rather than just sit and twiddle my thumbs.) So where does the NeXT cube fit it? It validates the value of several of Amy's capabilities, such as her sound and music potential. Part of the NeXT show was a musical duet performed by a concert violinist and the NeXT cube. This is not the kind of demo the Big Blue crowd even understands. "Sure, that's nice music ya got there, boy, but how many transactions per second can the violinist do?" Some of us realize that the future of computing is not just in counting dollars and processing sales invoices; but this is a broader view of the uses of computing than the IBM world understands. In designing the cube, Steve Jobs had to make a great many decisions. One of those which I really like was the decision to use a version of Unix as the main operating system. Unix is controversial in its own right, but as far as I am concerned, it's the operating system we micro lovers should support. If you think OS/2 was designed to allow you to gain more power on your desktop and control over your computing future, you simply have not been paying attention. The key to OS/2 is its interface with big iron; it is designed to handcuff your PC to big blinky. It also is very tightly coupled to its own Intel 80286/80386/80486 hardware. Unix, however, is both flexible and portable. It can run on almost any processor and be tailored to whatever you want it to do. Commodore is now offering Unix as an Amiga option. Unix runs just fine on Motorola chips. Or intel chips. Or a wide number of other chips. Remember, Intel does not second source the 80386; you pay their price or you don't buy the 80386 at all. So if you want competition to drive down the price of the machines you buy, stay away from OS/2 and the absolute requirement to buy Intel's chips. Unix is definitely a part of your Amiga future. You WANT people to program in the Unix environment. You do NOT want people to program in the OS/2 environment. So with another major computer platform, the NeXT cube, supporting Unix, there will be still more programmers writing neat software in the Unix environment. The result will be more neat software that will run on your Amiga without tricks such as the Transformer or hardware kludges such as the Bridgeboard. Not to be overlooked is the very idea that there can be an alternative to work for the Apple crowd to convince enough people that the Macintosh was a viable platform for business personal computing. "Is it IBM-compatible?" has been the only question which literally millions of computer buyers have asked when they looked for a computer. Now they realize there is an alternative, namely the Apple Macintosh. Soon they will realize there is a third alternative, the NeXT cube. Once they have acknowledged the possibility that non-IBM-compatible computers could actually be useful, they will be more receptive when some friend mentions the Amiga. These are some of the reasons I welcome the entry of the NeXT cube into the world of personal computing. If you think the NeXT cube represents more of a threat to the Amiga community than I've indicated, we'll be glad to print your opinions in next month's Knightly Knews. (Or, of course, in Amy Today. --Ed) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Fred Fish 163-172: (John Rydell) Yes, once again Fred Fish has released more disks into the public domain. I am going to go over disks 163-172 in the following manner: I will print the names of all of the files on the disks and then talk about the files that seem the most interesting. This way the article will not take up too much space yet it will contain most of the information that the reader would like on the disks. Disk 163--> Bankn, FiveInLine, MachII, MemTrace, PcPatch, ReadmeMeMaster, and View. MachII is an update from disk #130. This version is 2.4c. I use MachII all of the time. I keep it in my startup-sequence because it adds features like hotkeys, popcli, a clock, and clicktofront. View is a text-file reader that supports the mouse. (Very handy for reading Amy Today!) Disk 164--> C-Functions, DiskSalv, Hed, Newton, NewZAP, PcView, PolyRoot, PrtDrivers, and Zoo. DiskSalv is a disk salvager used to recover files that get ruined on your floppy or hard drive. This is an update to the version on disk #20. Zoo is a file archiver like arc. This is an update to disk #136 and this is version 2.00. Disk 165--> Conman, CPM, Parsnag, PlotView, RamCopy, and SPUDclock. Conman is a program which allows you to do command line editing while using the CLI. This program will lose some of its usefulness because WorkBench1.3 has the most of the advantages built in. This is an update to disk #133. RamCopy allows users with a megabyte or more of memory to back up floppies with one pass. Disk 166--> AutoGraf, Cref, MultiCalc, and Stevie. MultiCalc is a graphic calculator with huge precision. It has a 48 digit display and has a 3000 digit precision or something incredible like that. Disk 167--> CDecl, CLIcon, CloseMe, DSM, MrPrint, Smus3.6a, and Sounddemos. CDecl is a program that allows you to translate English into the C language and C into English. This program sounds like it could REALLy help when learning C. But I have never used it so I don't know how well it performs. SMUS3.6a is an smus player that allows you to play your music files. It is an enhancement from disk #58. Sounddemos are a group of sound demos to show off the Amiga with. Disk 168 and 169--> These are special disks which contain Matthew Dillon's latest software. Most of these programs are CLI aids: Config, Clock, DME, Dmouse, Backup, Suplib, Libref, Dres, Dasm, FToHex, Files, Shell, Findit, Libs, Addcr, Remcr, and Cmp. Disk 170--> Aftterm, Dis6502, FastText, MrBackup, PtrAnim, Surf, and Turbo. FastText is a program that speeds up text printing. MRBackup is a hard drive backup utility. It uses compression techniques and takes quite a while to backup the hard drive. VERY reliable and useful, though. Disk 171--> AZComm, Maze, Sozobon-C, and Xoper. AZComm is a take-off on Comm1.34. It includes ZModem. Disk 172--> DataToObj, Handshake, MFix, PopInfo, ProCalc, and Spiff. Handshake is a terminal that supports VT52, VT100, VT102, and VT220 terminals. This is version 2.12a which is an update from disk #60. MFix is a program which speeds up Marauder II by turning off the color-cycling during the copy process. That's it for this batch of disks. For ordering information consult back issues of Amy Today. Usually, local user groups or local members have copies of Fred Fish's disks. Please try to obtain a copy locally rather than going through Fred. He seems to be copying enough disks already! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Trading Galore: First we had a picture trade. Users were urged to send in a disk full of pictures and, in return, were given a disk full of the best pictures that had been collected so far. The picture trade was, and will hopefully continue to be, a GREAT success! Because of this, I have decided to open up a new trade which allows everyone to participate--not just those of us with pictures. Send me a disk full of anything you want. (Music, Art, Animations, Sound files, and Public Domain/Shareware software...anything!) Include a SASE (please remember the stamps!), and I will send your disk back to you filled with whatever you want. Just tell me whether you want music, art, software (you can even specify a specific pd/shareware program but I can't guarantee that I have it), and I'll send it back. On request, I'll even send disk copies of all issues of Amy Today. The disks currently copied and ready to be traded are: 1 - Amy Today Picture Disk #1 2 - Amy Today Picture Disk #2 3 - Amy Today Animation Disk #1 4 - Amy Today Back Issues #1 5 - Amy Today Music Disk #1** 6 - Amy Today Picture Disk #3** **Both of these coming soon. Send your disk and a SASE to: Amy Today's Trading Galore 640 Willowglen Rd. Santa Barbara, CA 93105 <<Any requests or submissions of illegally copied software will be burned!>> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Newsletter Trading: (From Issue 1-1) I am looking for Amiga user groups who would like to trade newsletters with me. Every month I will send you three issues of Amy Today and, in return, I would like a copy of your newsletter. I know a lot of this trading takes place and would love to get involved. The more articles and information that I have about the Amiga, the better I can make Amy Today. If you are interested please drop me a line on GEnie, Plink, or by mail. I would really appreciate a sample newsletter and will mail you Amy Today in return. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Advertising: Amy Today is open to advertising at VERY affordable prices. Large and small companies both have a great opportunity for quality advertising while supporting a public domain Amiga magazine. If you are interested please write to: Amy Today ATTN Advertising 640 Willowglen Rd. Santa Barbara, CA 93105 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= In the Future: A review of Modula-2 A review of a CLtd 33 meg hard drive An interview with a shareware programmer Maybe even more interviews, also And hopefully numerous articles from you--the readers. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= "Amy Today" is copyright 1988 by John Rydell. Portions of the magazine may be reprinted but the content of this magazine may NOT be changed without the expressed consent of John Rydell. Yet everyone is encouraged to distribute it AS IS. Please give credit to "Amy Today" as well as to the individual author when reprinting material. "Amy Today" as well as any of its authors are not responsible for any damages that occur because of errors or omissions. Articles reprinted from other newsletters, as noted, are not property of Amy Today but are under the control of their original authors. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=