Amiga is a registered trademark ol Commodore-Amiga. Inc. IMPACT and GVP are trademarks of Great Valley Products. Inc. Dealers Circle 245 on Reader Service card. Consumers Circle 127 on Reader Service card. ZEITGEIST Another anniversary. FOUR YEARS AGO the Amiga was launched in New York City and our first issue of AmigaWorld was there. Obviously, since the whole Amiga project was so hush-hush, we had a lot of inside help from Commodore. They wanted a slick, professional-quality magazine right from the start to help the Amiga get going, and we said we would love to do it. They let us into the facilities at Los Gatos, gave us facts and stats, let us play with prototypes, and even pre-purchased enough copies of our first issues to get us going. So Commodore helped the Amiga and Amiga World start. After things started rolling along, Commodore ran into financial problems, and all the great promotional ideas and marketing plans evaporated. I feel that AmigaWorld paid back the debt in that first year. When no one else was talking about the Amiga, except a few people with pioneer spirit, AmigaWorld was out there every other month. The Amiga is such a great machine that it practically sold itself, but Amiga World helped keep people aware. While the .Amiga, Amiga developers, and Amiga World struggled along in that first year, we published a goodly amount of fluff and talked about a number of products that never saw the light of' day. There weren’t eleventy-thou- sand products out there, there weren’t millions of machines, and no Super Bowl megacommercials. But by the end of that first year, thousands, rather than hundreds, of people owned Amigas, the list of public-domain programs was expanding, and AmigaWorld could finally start publishing some good material. There were even a few other magazines and user-group newsletters starting up. By the end of the second year, Commodore was getting back on its feet and things were looking pretty good. The number of companies announcing vaporware had diminished and we started seeing some pretty spectacular products. Products that made the Amiga do things that everyone knew it was capable of doing better than any other computer. Ray-tracing packages that are still far ahead of those designed for any other computer. Paint packages and games that are the standard for great graphics. Accelerator boards, MIDI interfaces, harddisk drives, color printers, and on and on. During the third year, Commodore released the A2000 and the A500. Now there were answers to problems. There was hardware and software to fill almost every need. People in other industries started looking at the Amiga as a real alternative to MS-DOS or Macs, particularly in areas like video, graphics, and animation. At the end of 1987, AmigaWorld went monthly. There was more material than we could publish, Commodore was beginning to market the machine again, and the Amiga was definitely going strong. By this time Amiga World had stopped publishing previews of products, stopped doing interviews, and stopped doing fluff pieces on subjects such as “what is the future of the .Amiga?” because you told us you didn't want that. We started covering more products and applications of general interest. We started doing comparative reviews, buyers guides, and product roundups. We didn’t do tutorials of obscure languages, publish industry gossip, or do company profiles, because only a few of our readers find those things useful. Instead, we talked about using 1.3, programming in Amiga Basic, and gave you articles about digitizing tips and paint-program techniques. In this past year, a number of new Amiga magazines have started and some old C64 128 and even Atari magazines have switched over to .Amiga coverage.