• Scattered
• A500s
• Early Days
• A String Tie
• A Virus
• Reconstruction
• Hobgoblins
• Part 2  plus Contact Information
  

This is a personal view, told from what I have been involved with, which I've put into the style used in our club magazine, the Amsmag, but written for Club Amiga - Noel Fuller.

Scattered

Auckland, a northern New Zealand city sited on 50 volcanoes on an ithmus between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean, is very spread out. So is our club, current membership hovering a little under 70 with 4 currently active branches. A fifth has just folded and one of the four has almost vanished from corporeal existence. Other clubs around New Zealand in folding have left us with a sprinkling of members all over the country.

From time to time a TV company would want some help. One wanted a programmer. I put them in contact with a brilliant and creative lad just out of school. "Just what I wanted," he said. Stephen Fellner, I believe, is now somewhere in Europe working on AmigaDE, and moderates our yahoo group. He has predicted Easter release for OS4. I've struggled not to believe him the resurrection I suppose!

Our very gifted repairman, Anthony Hoffman, lives in Christchurch, midway down the South Island. A dead A4000, left on my doorstep supplied parts for my A4000 within a week, while Anthony repaired the motherboard to do duty as his test board! To such devices have we fallen that where an Amiga is still in use it is only because departing members and "wild" users (not members of a club) have donated their machines (dead or alive) to the club. The machines left are mainly A1200s, some towered, and big system A4000s with a sprinkling of other machines.

A500s

No seriously used 1.3 A500s remain, at least as main or only computers. We carted a lot off to the dump, having nowhere left to store them. One former member collected A500s and used them for process control, chiefly hydroponics. He could whip up a breadboard in minutes but alas, did not pass his knowledge or software on. It's an area of Amiga computing I've always thought could be made more of.

On a number of occasions some new member has arrived with a basic A500, and soon become equipped with a faster machine with at least OS2.1 if not 3.1. I precipitated change when I refused anymore to make an OS 1.3 version of our monthly magazine, the Amsmag. The few 1.3 members left wanted to read the Amsmag so they upgraded, the club making it easy for them.

Early Days

My first machine was an A2000 bought in 1987 when standard retail price was numerically twice what anyone pays for a Pentium 4 system now, and hard disks were only a mystical idea (to us). How do you use this thing? We joined the club which then met on the North Shore, the part of Auckland where the latest and greatest starts selling first. That was the Amiga. The "North Shore" refers to the seaward side of our main commercial and yachting harbor, the Waitemata, and overlooks the Hauraki Gulf where the America's Cup will have been decided by the time this appears in the Club Amiga newsletter.

At meetings we copied Fish disks, borrowed from the PD library, saw the latest software and peripherals, and did whatever else people do at Amiga Meetings. Dozens of computers were often present whereas now there is usually just the demonstration machine and even it might be a PC laptop if the subject is general and a slideshow is needed.

We sold hundreds of floppies every meeting. Now we sell virtually none, using our remaining stock to supply the Amsmag to the few members still not on line. The club was a private club then of maybe 600 members, near as I can deduce. It's owner, Roger Manson, traveled all over New Zealand setting up branches, their members soon instituting local revolutions, going their own ways. The New Plymouth group even mounted periodic Amiga Shows.

We created our own Workbenches off the Fish disks and later Aminet. Part of the interest each month was in seeing what had so far been achieved in terms of speed and ease of use. Branches elsewhere in Auckland were set up and a BBS started. The Amsmag was just a dump onto a floppy but we awaited it avidly. One of the youngsters, Mark Gladding, just learning to program, accepted a challenge to create a magazine creation program that worked like reading a book. He did a brilliant job, with "Magnetic Pages", upgraded it when OS2 came along and again later, the last launch the same month that Commodore went belly-up. We abandoned magnetic pages reluctantly when its graphic capabilities fell too far behind, though it works well and still runs OK on OS3.9. For 6 years Mark edited the Amsmag and also took a turn as sysop.

A String Tie

At this point reader, you should remove and hide your necktie!

Just about every other store sold Amigas and we were warned not to be impressed by the lying demos they ran, but to ask to actually see the software itself produce the effects on the demos. We learned that the software almost never lived up to the glowing reports and adverts in the glossies, and got cynical about buying on the basis of sales claims. Nevertheless we had members into anything one could think of and doing it well.

A large store wanted to run an Amiga promotion with Commodore and I was invited to call on the manager with a view to me handling the questions. All the shop assistants were in uniforms with ties. While waiting to meet the manager I was talking with the Commodore sales rep about the theory that the necktie was originally the tie that held the codpiece on before the invention of flies with buttons. Now the tie had levitated up to the neck it remained a phallic symbol. We laughed about the symbolism of the large tie and even more about that of the string tie. I turned round and there was the manager who had been standing just behind me, wearing a string tie - no job for me - I'm still chuckling at the strained look on his face.

A Virus

There came the first virus brought home from a meeting. It somehow killed the 6000 word magazine story my partner was just completing. She started again and a few days later, while saving it, a lightning strike killed it again. Her third edition she said was the best, but the editor of the glossy cut it in half anyway! If I had known anything I might have recovered the article each time.

I decided that writing for publications on a word processor, using Superbase Professional in running yacht races for our yacht club, and putting titles and transitions on the videos we did, was not enough. I had to learn the guts of the machine so I experimented for a year or two with everything until I felt I knew enough to run a course for other members. They came to the geodesic dome house I built, where tables holding their computers fitted well against the outside wall, me walking the deck behind their chairs issuing instructions like:

"CD to ram:
Are you all in ram because this next instruction will be lethal if not?
OK then enter `delete #?'"

That course created a number of instructors who then became the core of our club, running courses, repairing hard disks, assisting and teaching other members. So some good came from that virus. Now there is a big change. Since the departure of game playing children swapping disks and the advent of the Internet, virus infection has become almost unknown on our Amigas - we take care to ensure members are up with the latest killers of course. Will this change if the new Amigas are successful enough to become targets again?

Reconstruction

There was a huge turnout to a demo of the first A1200 - the last big meeting alas. In November '92 New Zealand Amiga experienced a bit of a revolution. The club was no longer privately owned and with 330 members, we restarted with a modem, an 80 meg hard disk, no cash and 400 floppy disks. The BBS was hosted by a commercial BBS. We made the Amsmag subscription part of the Annual subscription. The improved communication immediately reduced the annual turnover of members from 80% to about a third of that at the time, it's much less now. We began the difficult process of developing a democratic constitution and becoming an incorporated society called more realistically "Amiga Auckland" with a fair bit of agro along the way. This proved the right course though, and by the end of 93 was working well and has done ever since. November '93 we launched our our own BBS again.

1994 was the year Amiga stores went over to PC, selling off stock at "better" prices and through '95 '96 they donated what they didn't sell to the club. With Commodore NZ going to the liquidator a large number of CD32s became available to us at low cost so we bought as many as we could, this being our initial path, with the help of Weird Science UK, to having CD players hooked into our Amigas. Eventually that ended when the bulk of the supply went to UK - was it Eyetech?

Then we worked at getting CDRoms into our machines. Our membership remained relatively stable and has only gradually reduced over the years, unlike the steep slides into extinction experienced by many clubs.

Hobgoblins

In April 95 I took over as editor of the Amsmag. We anticipated a final resolution of the Commodore buyout. As a commentary on the doubt and hope about this, member, John Richards, produced this title page, "The Second Coming"
Pic to top

Some would find this picture more appropriate now to the release of the AmigaOne and OS4.

With ESCOM confirmed as a buyer and a feeling of some discomfort about it, my comment in the May 95 Amsmag was the title page below: "The Bloated Hobgoblin". The comments that popped up if you hit the buttons are not included here, but the "nose" listed ESCOM's recent aquisitions.
Pic to top

The image proved more apt than I expected - with respect to ESCOM's crash.

With the total disappearance of Amiga software retailers in Auckland and most other places, we began to worry about obtaining software. We took more interest in the Internet but chiefly our interest was in CDs so the club imported them in bulk for the members of our club and of some other clubs in NZ, mainly from Weird Science in UK. This was quite a big activity for several years and maintained our interest. In the early days reviews of games and software were large features of our magazine. Now the emphasis was on CD reviews and price lists.