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THE EDITOR'S TWO CENTS
By Richard Ramella
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     .info Magazine is gone. Distressing news. It was my favorite paper
Amiga magazine. Many of you felt the same way.
     The magazine had a friendly and honest editorial policy, a reflection
of the people whose beliefs and writing shaped it.
     Though .info had its fanatic following, there were apparently not
enough of us to support it.
     At one time there were six major Amiga-specific magazines vying for our
attention. Now there are three: the monolithic AmigaWorld, Amazing
Computing, and Amiga Resource.
     It's been eons since 1985, when the Amiga burst on the scene as a
wonder machine with little software to support it. Today, there are
thousands of software and hardware products available for the Amiga. There
are hundreds of companies who jumped into the market with great hope and
have since retired to nurse their wounds. The nature of a competitive market
is that not everyone wins, and no one wins forever.
     I regret that .info stopped winning. Its voice was always fresh.

WELCOME, MARK
     When .info managing editor Mark Brown called to say the magazine had
folded, I immediately asked him to do a monthly column for JUMPDISK. He
agreed. His first column, put together on a short deadline, is in this
issue. Mark's work will be appearing in other Amiga publications.

     We're short on space, so the following reader message was joined to
this file:

HIGH-DENSITY DRIVE - Joseph W. Bueter, Hannibal, MO
     The May 1992 JUMPDISK'S  news of the possible
high-density drive for the Amiga has refocused my attention on my own
situation.
     I own an Applied Engineering high density drive. I bought it
as a second drive, intending to use it first as a normal 880k drive, then
later use the high density function, when I needed it. Several months
ago, I encountered some read/write problems with it and called their tech
line (you may recall your editorial that said you had two disks returned,
mine was the error you couldn't find!). I resolved to bear the minor
problems, but I was shocked to learn that Applied Engineering had dropped
all Amiga product development. They also informed me that the final
version of 2.0 doesn't support the high density mode. I now know this to
be true because I tried it. Well anyway, I contacted them again (at 214-
241-6084), hoping to get a fix or source code to start a fix. He told me
that New Horizons (those wonderful ProWrite people) has the code for the
existing driver and they are considering a driver update. I talked to
Randy Brooks at New Horizons and he said while they were waiting on some
information from AE, the big hold up is that they don't know if there are
enough interested drive owners to make the project feasible. If you could
get this information out, the address for interested drive owners to
write is:

     New Horizons
     Attn. Randy Brooks
     206 Wild Basin Rd. #209
     Austin TX, 78746
     (512)-328-6650

     I also talked to another tech person about the Commodore high density
drive. That person's understanding was that the 3000 drives were originally
intended for developers and were mistakenly shipped to the public. I don't
know if there's any truth to the drive rumor, but I read in the British Amiga
Format about a similar inadvertent launch of the 500+. Thank you for your
time and, of course, JUMPDISK.

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