Swedish Amiga show reports
AmiCon 92:
I got the opportunity to work at the Swedish Amiga show AmiCon92 in 1992. AmiCon92 was located in a suburb to Stockholm called Sollentuna.
We thought the show was going to start early in the morning but we failed to take notice that the show was about to start 4 hours later than what we thought. Thankfully, to save us from a lot of free time a person from the show organizers asked us if we wanted to help out and work there. We was let in early and got to see all the big names in the Swedish Amiga industry at the time.
I earned 500 SEK by working there for two days which was not at all bad. I also got a free Amiga t-shirt that sadly got to worn to wear, it had a fantastic multicolored Amiga logo with the double tick. It was cool to see all the Commodore business guys. Basically my job was to guard an open door so that nobody could sneak in to the backside, but my guarding place was located at the toilettes so I also had to guard a baby and a boxed brand new GVP hard drive for an A500 while the father took a leak. All in all it was a small show but very crowded, plus it was cool to take part in the Amiga world when it was still a big mainstream platform.
Some of the cool stuff on the show was an A2000 that played up a short scene from Back to the future 2 in full screen on a Commodore monitor over and over again, it was a huge crowd catcher. There was also a very cool -at the time- A2000 that was used a BBS computer. It had three disk drives, which was awesome, and anyone could choose three PD programs to copy for free if you supplied empty floppies yourself. Naturally Scala was there and lots of other small and big Amiga dealers and such. Then there was some lottery program some guys and their father tried to sell. It was called Ranko and had the most irritating tune ever that they had set on replay. Apparently they didn’t sell that many copies of the program the first day, so the next day they brought a digitizer and a camera with them and told everyone passing by they could get a digitized image of their own face for 50 SEK. Believe it or not I think they made more money on digitizing peoples faces than with the lottery program.
Amitech 97 and Amitech 98
Amitech was a new Amiga show that was intended to promote the Amiga and show people who thought Amiga was dead that it was still alive.
Amitech 97
I remember going to Amitech in 1997 not knowing what to find but I left very impressed of what I saw there. The area was small. But there was still a lot of interesting stuff to see. Phase 5 had a cool booth and the largest area where they showed of their PPC boards on some cool Infinitive towers. Their huge booth looked very professional. There were also some Amiga dealers showing off the usual cool stuff like tower kits and the rare Draco Amiga clone. There were also some guests that came and held speeches. Petro was there but I didn’t want to stay around to wait for him. I listened to some guy from Motorola that was there to promote the PPC CPU from Motorola. But his speech was very short and nobody had any good questions afterwards. He said he was impressed by the Amiga demos, and then he told everyone he had a PC at home and the crowd started to boo him out. There was some great stuff shown at the show and it all felt very positive, I left with a good impression of the Amiga and its user base, and it seemed to be a popular show.
Amitech 98
Amitech 97 was actually a good show so I wasn’t really prepared for the disaster that Amitech 98 turned out to be in 1998. I don’t exactly remember how much it cost to attend the show, but it was higher than before and not really that cheap for such a small show. When I entered the building I saw a lot of empty tables and a very empty hall. -Where were all the people?
I am not making this up but I walked around the area in 10 minutes then I had seen all the show had to offer!
So what was there to see?
Well. They had an A1200 with every possible accessory mounted inside a cool Infinitiv tower running Doom (which was just released on the Amiga at the time thanks to the source code being released). On another booth they had recorded someone playing Doom on the Amiga on a VCR and were showing the video on an old ugly 80′ies television. I don’t understand what the point was of that? It was disgusting watching Doom being played from a low quality VCR player on a ten year old television! I saw the Index Inside Out project which was a small PCI card intended to be used with a 040 or 060 CPU inside a PC or other PCI compatible computer. Sadly it never made it to the market. Index booth was just a table that had a black carpet on it and then the small PCI card on it. Jens Schönfeldt was there showing of his hardware. He had all his fantastic products there. Also an A4000 was running the game Myst. After 20 minutes I had seen enough and left the building. Later I read in a magazine that there had been far too little attention of the show made, and the bad weather was also a reason for the little interest in the show. It was a surprisingly dull show and a total waste of money.