These are my pictures from the Colmar Multimedia Expo, October 25-26th, 2008.
This was probably the first event for years where Amiga-related hardware and software were on display and for sale in the company of other, more mainstream products. And it was a surprisingly successful event for the Amiga community. Among lots of exhibitors with products for the bigger platforms, our favourite outsider scored well in several aspects. It generated some of the biggest crowds of the show around the Relec/ACube stand, especially during Sunday. The presentation held Sunday afternoon was by far the most attended presentation during the show days. And the ERP system also presented on the stand won one of the Innovation Trophies awarded at the show. Finally, the exhibited Sam-powered kiosk terminal with a touch-screen showed some fascinating new possibilities for the new hardware and OS 4.1, and it turned out to be a real crowd-catcher.
A little background: Shortly before this show, it had finally been announced that AmigaOS 4.1 would be produced in a version for the Sam motherboard produced by ACube, who also distribute the various AmigaOS 4 versions produced by Hyperion Entertainment. The combination had first been presented by ACube at the Italian Pianeta Amiga show a few weeks earlier (27th and 28th of September), and the Swiss Amiga dealer Relec and ACube had decided to book a stand together at the Colmar show in order to try to reach also outside the ranks of die-hard Amigans.
Among OS4 developers and beta-testers, we had for quite a while been talking about finding a place and an excuse to meet "in real life", and it was decided that Colmar would fit the bill, sitting more or less centrally in at least Western Europe. I had also ordered a Sam motherboard for myself directly from ACube, and I decided that I might as well save the shipping and pick it up myself when I met the ACube guys in Colmar, so that was one more reason for me to look forward to the show.
I wasn't disappointed. Yes, of course I got my Sam board, and OS 4.1 for it, but I also got to meet some Amigans who are working hard to keep the dream not only alive, but actually growing more and more back into reality. And when I say Amigans, I am not only referring to "the red side", i.e. AmigaOne/Sam and AmigaOS, but also to the people on either side (or both) who create great products for us all.
One such example is RMS Communications' ERP system, built by Christoph Pölzl on top of MUIBase. He uses MorphOS/Pegasos himself, but his product could just as well be used under AmigaOS, and although it might not be a product that many of today's Amigans need, it is a nice proof of our platform's ability to be used for so-called serious purposes as well as the more entertainment and multimedia oriented applications.
Several of the other people at the Relec/ACube stand also came from the "blue camp", but we have obviously come a long way from the trench-digging of the early days, because everybody could talk and work and have fun together, regardless of their preferred OS variant. There was above all a really great ambience of cooperation about showing the "world" what this whole Amiga thing was all about.
So a big thank you to all the ACube and Relec people, as well as to the other Amigans I met at the show. Hope to see you all again soon!
Niels Bache
(webmaster@nbache.dk)
All slides in one page - for those with more memory than desire to be online
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