When I wrote to this list on 13 February I said I expected - if everything
went to plan - that if the A1-XE boards shipped to developers in early
February worked well we would order and receive the end user earlybird
systems by the end of February. But I did add :-

"These are of course target dates, and cannot possibly be taken as a promise
or guarantee. All I can say is that we are as keen to have your money as you
are to spend it, and do not, and never have had any intention of
deliberately holding back shipments just to be awkward (as some people seem
to think). However we will not as of policy ship any product before we are
satisfied that it is fully functional - including an installable and
working operating system - other than to developers for testing purposes."

Well in the event the developers did find a few problems with the newly
available hardware/firmware combination, and as a result UBoot had some
further updates - as posted this week by Hyperion - including board
diagnostics and better RAM support. In addition SuSE ran out of boxed PPC
Linux sets, so we have decided to ship Debian Linux with the Earlybird
systems instead. The developers, and particulrly Ross Vumbaca, have done
sterling work in putting together an end-user installation guide. Thanks
again guys.

The upshot is that the earlybird and remaining A1-XE/G4 and G3 boads are now
ready for final BIOS programming and shipping to us. We expect to receive
them next week and start shipping them out the following week.

Many people have also asked us to produce a high end cpu module for the
A1-XE and I am pleased to announce that we will be commissioning a high-end
G4 module for delivery later in the year. The current favourite is the
7445@... - but we will of course monitor the available cpu options to
make sure that we can offer the best price/performance to upgraders. These
top-end cpu's are currently *very* expensive so will only appeal to users
who must have the fastest for business (or ego) reasons.

Finally we have received several emails about Terrasofts 'will we/won't we'
attitude to the Teron boards and our opinion as to what, if any, is the
conspiracy theory behind their (non) announcements.

First of all it is necessary to put right some of the popular misconceptions
that have been relentlessly been put about by certain individuals on ann and
elsewhere.

MAI - as has been said many times - are a fabless chip manufacturer who also
own the Teron design. They do not make boards. In the past MAI have
commissioned the building of boards in sample quantity boards from a third
party prototyping company (a sort of far eastern DCE on their good days) and
we have bought some of these boards from MAI to ship to developers. But for
any sort of producton volumes we have to contract directly with an
independant board manufacturer and clearly this involves a significant
volume and therefore upfront financial commitment.

This means that neither Terrasoft nor us are 'just a distributor' of MAI
boards. To have anything other than sample boards produced to the basic
Teron design, those boards have to be individually ordered, in very
significant quantities, by us, Terrasoft or whoever. If Terrasoft want
boards from our production they have to apply to us to be a dealer. If not
they have to stump up a rather large amount of money of their own to build
their own production. MAI of course get a royalty for their board design for
all boards manufactured. For the record we have placed by far the largest
order for boards based on the Teron design of anybody, including MAI (and of
course Terrasoft).

This PPC motherboard market is of course a new market for Terrasoft who,
despite the best wishes of those who would do anything to see genuine Amiga
supporting companies such as us and Hyperion fail, are really a very small
company that have historcally made their money selling Linux books and
merchandise, and providing paid some YDL support to companies. My guess is
that it is their uncertainties in this new (to them) board market coupled
with
the required volume/financial commitment which is now causing them to
reconsider their options. In fact Terrasoft have not even contributed to
porting YDL to the Teron board - this has been done by Bill Mueller of MAI
and others on the A1 dev list..They clearly also completely messed up their
TeronPx/G4 pricing calculations - hence the quick withrawal from their web
site.

Contrary to what has also been speculated, there is certainly no requirement
for us or end users to pay a licence fee to Terrasoft for any AmigaOne board
whether used for running OS4 or Linux.

I'm sure the ann orcs will try to make something sinister of all this, but
we, and Hyperion, really are doing our best under very difficult
circumstances to deliver the best, most cost effective, genuine, Amiga to
date.

Thankyou for your continued support

Alan


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