so do you have a computer at home
i sure do i have an Amiga it's an O one thousand model but it's still compatible to the uh late model Amiga personal computers the three thousand and the two thousand even the five hundreds out now and i love it
do you i got my i got my first one i've been at TI forever and i found an engineer selling his really old TI PC
how about you you got one
oh a forty four
uh i think so no not ninety nine it's one of the full TI PCs
ninety nine i mean or something
i got you right
and he's an engineer so he even came over and set it up for me and had it running for like two hundred dollars so i thought that
my goodness gracious
well you sure made a savings there i have never heard anything to beat that that's just terrific does does is it IBM compatible type
well now it does
no no no no it's just the old PC and it has two floppies it doesn't have a Winchester it doesn't have anything but for what i need just keeping records it does just fine
oh i see
uh-huh
well if you ever decide to get a newer later model think about an Amiga because it's the slickest machine you've ever seen
oh really
it's got four thousand ninety six color graphics it's got real-time animation capability there's a world of games for it if you're into that but it can do word processing you can import pictures into your documents and uh it just does everything a PC can do but it does it better
i'll be darn when i uh i'm in uh Plano right now but when i was up at uh McKinney i had uh IBM PS two i loved that thing i loved it
uh-huh
uh-huh
you did well i i venture to say your you and your kids if you have any would enjoy the Amiga better
well i have kids fortunately that have left grown gone thank heaven
oh really well you're not supposed to admit that
to them i admit it it was fun leave
okay
well my wife and i are gonna be glad to get ours out of the house too i know exactly how you feel
the emptiness syndrome is a myth there's no such thing i mean
oh really
i'll tell her we're sure not staying with the PC subject subject too well are we well how how how much memory you got have you got on your machine
it's nice it really is
yeah we're talking though uh on my
you know i don't really know i knew when i bought it but i don't know right now i've got a little program uh genealogy program called Family Ties
oh yeah uh-huh
and i can research and go to the library and and discover who married who what year and all this sort of thing and come back and load it all into my computer and then when i want to
uh-huh
say this is going to be a present for my grandchildren tell them all okay here you are and then i can sort it all that they can trace it back to their parents and the grandparents and on you know do an explosion
uh-huh
uh-huh
and it all prints out up to five generations per child and you know you can select the child and get the whole thing i think it's just as neat as it can
uh-huh
well that's neat
yeah i'd like to have a piece of software like that for my machine now on my machine i've got a microphone hooked up to it and i can digitize me and the wife and kids all talking and all that but i can hook a VCR up to it and take our picture
oh how fantastic
how fantastic
and then then then if my parents had the same kind of computer which they don't they don't have a computer but if they did then they i could send them all that on a floppy disk and it would play out for them right there on the computer and they could click it to see each next scene
oh
but that's all possible to do on the Amiga and frankly my VCR camera cost more than my computer did
get out of here
for heaven's sake i've never heard of one
but you can do all those sorts of things on the Amiga
i didn't know anything about this that's fantastic
yeah there's a lot of people don't know about it it's put out by Commodore they made the sixty four but this is a machine that they bought from a company that got started up in California
i'm familiar with Commodore
yeah well they make the Amiga and uh not only that but the Amiga is Unix compatible so if anybody around there is using Unix and they want a cheap Unix's work station that cost under about four to five hundred dollars then the Amiga runs Unix
and uh besides uh being able to do all the other things i was telling you about
well i'll be darn
it's a fantastic machine if you've got to have IBM compatibility they've got a card you can plug in and you can run IBM software but the machine is so powerful i don't need it
what
what do you have at work
uh i use a Sun work station at work but i'm i'm in the process of purchasing Amiga to use it as my desktop computer but research work though i use a Sun Sparc station
so you're into computers
oh we have some Suns in this building uh i'm a buyer and and i help them with their maintenance contracts and repair and things like that just it's it's not much of my job but it you know i do come in contact with them
are you
uh-huh
those are expensive machines
i know well see uh the the Sparc stations run about twelve thousand dollars in color and an Amiga runs only forty seven hundred in color
good grief
so it makes a real nice cheap Unix compatible desktop work station and see i've got one at home and everything i run at work i can run at home by you know same sort of stuff and uh
uh it really makes it quite nice it definitely does i have four and a half megabytes on my machine here at the house and uh sixty five megabyte Seagate hard disk and it rips
why do you think TI has not used the Omega because uh-huh
the Amiga
well because it's made by Commodore and uh most people all they know about is IBM compatible because most people in this country that know anything about computers don't know much but they do know about IBM
um
so when the PC came on the market and then it being first one on the market earlier than the Amiga was but when it came market people just naturally assumed that well if IBM makes it should be the computer of my choice
and they intend to look around very much so as a result Macintoshes and uh Amigas didn't get a fair break
oh i see
where but honestly an Amiga is far and away a much better PC than the PC will ever be it has a full multitasking operating system during the Christmas holidays while my kids played games with my machines i backed up my hard disk because i used my Commodore sixty four as a terminal to it like a main frame
uh-huh
so i was copying files off my hard disk to floppies and they were playing a game using the uh joy sticks and they never even knew i was there except i was sitting there and i was pushing another floppy into this little slot uh while they were doing their thing to keep copying files out
yeah
you can't do it on any machine a Mac or anything made
well that's wonderful i'd never even heard of it
yeah it's kind of neat not to mention the fact that it's got four thousand ninety six colors and you can't get more than two fifty six out of a PC or a Mac either one
so your kids were having a good time and you were working
yeah that's right i can do that exactly you sure can you can network them together and everything it's a fantastic machine needless to say so i'm very uh high on it but you said you have computers Suns at work right what other machines do you all have at work
that's marvelous just marvelous
well i work in I A Smith so we're forever looking at something else uh i you know i work
uh-huh
i see well tell them to look at the Amiga a lot of people think it's a toy and a game machine but it is a most powerful work station all the way around multitasking and i mean a real-time multitasking operating system and computer made
well you know you'd be surprised how many of the various ones are coming in and giving us demos at all times and i sit in on all this stuff
uh-huh
not only that but this machine can be hooked up to a regular TV set and you can do video presentations with it
it has all kinds of software you can use that Commodore makes called Amiga Vision so that you can take pictures in and then you can make up your own video presentation Hewlett Packard uses it
Hewlett Packards makes PC's and they use the Amiga to do video presentations and um uh campaigns educational type uh presentations for the engineers incidentally incidentally Bausch and Lomb uses it too
let me ask you something uh if you were if you needed to go to another
sure
town somewhere you know fly to a to see a supplier and do a review there could you put your presentation on a television and just kind of send him the disk instead of going yourself
uh-huh
well what you would do in the case of the Amiga is you'd use NTSC output that you can get on the machine put it right out to a uh video video tape and just cut you a video tape by uh by running it
uh-huh
to the video tape because all the sound and graphics that it produces can be put right out of the back of the machine to a common VCR and recorded on a VHS tape
so you could just say okay fellows we've got a problem get everyone in the room and let them see this tape rather than buying an airline ticket
yeah if you wanted to you could uh but you could do the whole presentation and slick it up and edit it and make all kinds of changes and modification till you had it down pat
on the Amiga once you had done that i mean including hooking up a camera to take pictures of things like maybe you want to do a a a a presentation on how to run some piece of gear well you want to take pictures of it you might want to take pictures of it running
uh-huh
because you can put more than one frame into the machine
and then you can describe what's going on you can record microphoning machine then there's a way to link all that together and once you got it satisfied satisfactory done you can then take it and play it back out of the machine right out the NTSC port in the back to a VCR and record it
after that you can put it all on floppy disk it might take several and between on how big a space you're talking about and uh carry it to another facility if they happen to own an Amiga well you slap it on there put it on their hard disk and away you go
how much will
how much would this cost
for what to do it well the parts or the machines depending on what well you can get a two thousand which is uh a bare essential machine to do this with for about twenty three hundred dollars
yeah for that whole operation
and uh then you would uh with some add on options and things you'd have to have probably the outside price at the max would be about thirty five thirty six hundred dollars
if unless you want to use a video tape to to do all kind of weird things like wipes and and fades and things like that which the uh TV people use
we don't need that type we don't need that type of graphics that's just not necessary
okay well if you don't need that which is really fancy and that has twenty four bit or sixteen million colors
if you don't need that that's another fifteen hundred dollars and that's made by a commercial company just for the Amiga IBM and Mac both tried to get them to make it for their machines but they can't because the Amiga's the only PC on the market that has special graphics and sound
and peripheral handling chips inside and that's why it can be a multitask operating system and not and handle numerous multiple jobs at once because it has three co-processor chips in there that help out the main CPU and off load from doing the graphics
see the CPU in my machine is a little old sixty eight thousand and it loafs because there's three co-processors chips in my machine to handle the graphics the
the color graphics one co-processor chips handles all the sounds and it can make it has four channels of sound two of them come right out the back as stereo ports i have mine hooked up to my stereo down stairs has excellent stereo
dynamic range and it has a third chip in it that has all your peripherals so that if i were to copy a file from my hard disk to the floppy
then the CPU just goes out and tells Paula that's the chip that does peripheral handling copy this file from the hard disk to the floppy and the CPU goes off and does something else because
