by MICHAEL CZAJKA
September, 2001
To: David Stroud
Subject: 2001 Melbourne Show Report
Australian Amiga presence at Business IT show wildly successful.
The joint Australian Amiga User Groups got together (Sep 5-7th) to man the ADUG (Amiga Downunder User Group) www.amigadownunder.org stand at this large, business-only, IT Expo (www.key3media.com.au/itexpo) in Melbourne, Victoria.
The User Groups were able to field:
1) A classic Amiga A1200/060 in a tower with PCI slots and PCI graphics/network cards;
2) The Amithlon Emulator, which runs about 4 times faster than our G2 604e PPC Amigas.
Bernie Meyer http://byron.csse.monash.edu/amithlon.html who happens to live in Melbourne, was there doing demonstrations;
3) A laptop running the SDK (Party Pack) showing off the AmigaDE.
Hosted on Windows with only software acceleration, it was able to run many more apps (animations with rotation, shading, transparency, lighting, sound, etc.) than you could in Windows 98. Now that's impressive!
Around 35,000 people walked through this Expo. We were non-stop all three days, and had a huge amount of interest in all 3 machines. We estimate that we gave out over 1500 leaflets. We were much more successful than we anticipated. Not only were passers-by interested (50% were current or ex-Amiga owners) but we were able to get many of the exhibitors to come down and take a look at the next generation hardware agnostic Amiga (AmigaDE).
Sharp didn't realise their Zaurus runs Amiga Apps!
AMD didn't know the Amithlon runs on a 1.3Ghz Athlon!
Many other firms found that the AmigaDE offered things like thin Internet applications (applications that don't take much bandwidth) which they need.
People went away suitably impressed. You can see pictures of the show at http://boing.net/comdex or there are a number of show reports in AUG groups.yahoo.com/group/amiga_users_group_vic and MAUG groups.yahoo.com/group/maug-australia e-groups, plus an article that was written specifically for the show in the MAUG file area (left hand side of the screen).
Not only have we had large articles in our largest dailies leading up to the show, but they are now following up with additional articles about the stand and what they saw.
We now wait with bated breath for 3rd November and the release of new hardware and software. Oh! how we envy the London denizens who get to see it all first.
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Michael Czajka
Email: MC1@pobox.com
IT Expo Amiga Stand Co-ordinator
MAUG Treasurer (http://go.to/maug)
AUG member (www.aug.org.au)
ADUG Member