Birthday wishes for the Amiga and AmigaWorld. BACK IN THE dark ages, about three years ago, the Amiga computer was officially unveiled in NYC with a lot of hoopla and pomp and appropriate circumstance. As people walked into the auditorium to get their first look at the Amiga, they picked up a copy of a fairly slick magazine called AmigaWorld. Exactly how we managed to have our premiere issue ready in time for tfie Amiga launch is a confused and convoluted storv. If you want to hear all 4 the gory details, stop by some afternoon and we can spend a few hours reminiscing over a beer or five. I have related parts of the tale here and there, and when 1 retire to write The Book About the Magazine, the world will know the whole story about how much trouble and fun it was. That first issue came out in July '85, and we published one more issue that year. Those first two issues contained enough solid information to fill about half an issue. The rest was padding, hype, pretty pictures, and wishful thinking. I admit that those early issues were more pastry than meat, hut we didn’t have a whole lot to work with. At least the magazine looked great and got people interested in the Amiga. We kicked off 198(5 with one of our most talked about issues, the Andy Warhol issue. People still grimace or Hindi or chuckle or kid me about that issue. Hey, 1 liked it. (1 did the interview with Andy and wrote die story, so of course 1 think it was brilliant.) As 1986 wore on. We started to pick up the pace a bit. We were finally getting real authors to write real stories about real products. We were gathering more material to publish than we had room for in the magazine. We had gone from one extreme to the other. It was great to have all this material, but we quickly found ourselves constrained bv the bi-monthly schedule. I t You wanted more information, ancl we had it, we just couldn't get it all to you. By the end of 1986, we knew that it was time to push hard to become a monthly publication. The question was, were there enough advertisers out there to support a monthly Amiga magazine. (We had and still have more than enough readers, but as I have said before, as long as we have all those ads in the magazine, we won't have to charge you $ 8.00 a copy.) Throughout 1985 and ’86, people told us that we weren’t giving them enough hard core information about the Amiga. That was true, and other magazines capitalized on that. They emerged right and left, claiming that they were for the “serious” Amiga user; they published more technical informal ion than we did. Were more timely, etc. My feeling is that there is more than enough material, people, and interest in the Amiga market to support more than one magazine.