CUGI

Commodore Users Group of Ireland



Important Announcement - 25th November, 1996

At the CUGI AGM of October 1996, only 7 members were present. Since four of these were members of the 1995/96 committee who had all indicated they would be unlikely to serve another term, and four members are needed under the club constitution to form a committee, this was rather disheartening.

Although we appreciate some members may have been unable to attend, we felt that the general reluctance on the part of members to serve on the CUGI committee, combined with dwindling attendances at past regular meetings, and the difficulty in finding Amiga related material to demonstrate at meetings, neccesitated some radical action on the part of the committee.

It was therefore decided that there would be no more regular CUGI meetings, until such time as Amiga developments justify holding them.

In accordance with this decision, the last CUGI meeting took place on Sunday, November 17th, 1996, in St. Andrews College. At this meeting, most of CUGI's assets were sold, although we still have some items remaining. We also kept some of the harder to come by reference and service manuals, so that these would still be available if needed.

The next issue of the club newsletter, to be distributed in November (all going to plan) is also likely to be the last for the forseeable future.


The Future of CUGI



In lieu of holding actual physical meetings, CUGI intends to focus on improving its electronic presence over the coming weeks and months. The aim of this radical step is to preserve the community spirit and contact network that CUGI provided, and will hopefully continue to provide for many years to come, until such time as normal meetings can resume. This decision has not been taken lightly, but the current committee (and all who bothered to come to the AGM) collectively feel that this is the best way to keep CUGI alive.

As part of this process, a new Irish Amiga Users electronic mailing list has been set up, and we'd encourage you all to contribute to it. We'll also be working to update and expand CUGI's Web pages.

CUGI's home page will soon be moving to a new host, to make it easier for the committee to modify CUGI's Web pages, and also to remove our dependence on the benevolence of outside organisations such as Broadcom, and St. Andrews. This change should go mainly unnoticed by you, the user, in the short term, since the URL will remain the same, but it will allow for more regular updating of the pages.

Future plans for CUGI's Web site include putting back issues of the newsletter online, and maintaining a page of links to other useful Amiga sites. We'd like to hear from anyone with ideas or suggestions about what other links could be included, and we also welcome constructive criticism on the existing pages. We'd also like to hear from anyone interested in maintaining a page on some aspect of the Amiga, or other Commodore machines, such as the C64. You can contact us as cugi@ieunet.ie.

These developments herald a bold new era for CUGI and the Amiga. Although we've heard it many times before, it now seems inevitable that the Amiga will be revived in some shape or form. Third party developers such as Phase 5 seem close to releasing PowerPC based Amiga's, and the improvements made to the Amiga OS and hardware by VISCorp for use in their ED set-top box cannot help but have positive effects on the development of stand-alone machines.

Finally, we'd like to ask you all to continue your contact with CUGI, even if you are now the owner of a WIntel system.

The CUGI Committee,
25th November, 1996.