OVER 700 PRODUCTS …

A commentary on AmiExpo in Los Angeles, USA.

First published in Amiga User International magazine, March 1988

The AmiExpo hit the West Coast of the U.S.A with an impact equalling its highly successful debut in New York, bringing some new and very exciting products. It also provided a focus that unquestionably strengthened and should encourage the whole Amiga community. With now over seven hundred software and hardware products available to Amiga users, the machine is clearly carving out a place for itself in the computer world that many believed would never happen.

The Amiga now offers an enormously wide range of possibilities from budget games to the highest technical applications — a range that probably no other comparable computer has ever achieved and which is allowing the fulfilment of its tremendous potential. We hear that the Mount Palomar telescope is now using an Amiga in its astronomical work and among the fast increasing and extra-ordinarily broad spectrum of subscribers to this magazine, we have just received a subscription request from one of the top scientific governmental departments in the U.K.

Yes, the AmiExpo reinforced the sense that the Amiga dimension has grown to a full international scale. And there is a growing feeling that Europe is beginning to challenge the American leadership, as U.S. companies are becoming aware of the opportunities that Europe, and the rest of the world, presents and as Amiga products of European origin start to make an impact in the U.S.

We saw some interesting examples of transatlantic collaboration. The U.S. company, Aegis, used the show to launch a German-written game. Abacus, another American company, was showing Germany’s Databecker products which it has published in English — and shipped over to the U.K. And in the U.K. itself a games house, Grand Slam, bought the rights to the U.S. written novel ‘The Hunt for Red October’, created the computer game and is now successfully exporting the game back to the U.S.A.

It is also encouraging to find that the readership of Commodore Amiga User International Magazine already stretches from the U.K. to Brazil, from Finland to New Zealand, yet more support for the view that – with approaching 500,000 Amiga users worldwide, the Amiga is already one of the few computers to have created for itself a global dimension.

Antony H. Jacobson, Managing Editor and Publisher, AUI