A talk with Petro & AAi, ICOA, Comdex

From: Timothy Rue 
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 97 11:01:01
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises

* It is now Friday the 6th of June, in my efforts to write all of this ***

This is only the second part. Take Heart not to make any judgements but put
Heart into any actions you may take based on this first part. For those
who have the ability to translate this into other languages, please do so,
for this IS for everyone.

© Copyright 1997 - Timothy Rue

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My Talk with Petro - continued
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I have posted the above (previous post) to several newsgroups but before I
continue I must bring some clarity as to who I am. I'm just an end user, I
have no products to sell. One of the last things I communicated to Petro
was regarding my religious beliefs. I simply said "I don't know." I'm sure
many of you, upon reading the above began to apply all sorts of religious
conotations to the above. What is written above is all true, it happened,
but people, this is real life. There is no time for creating illusions, and
I'm no saviour, but just an end user. So keep this in mind, set aside any
illusions of this or that happening, otherwise you'll get distracted from
doing the things that need to be done and those who know better will get
the best of you. There is no magic, mystery, or prophesy to any of this,
but only understanding in what to expect of ourselves so that we may
correctly deal with it, see and do the positive and productive things that
lead to geniune self respect and self esteam. So let's get over any
illusions and get on with it. With this said...

---------------

Petro walked into the lobby and I greeted him. He went up to his room to
get some paperwork and returned. We went to my car and got on our way to
the meeting. Earlier, I had taken a polaroid of a modular computer
concept I had generated thru Lightwave. On the back of it I wrote the
simple key points of what I needed to talk with Petro about. But above all
of this I had one question for Petro I had to ask. "If you where given a
couple hundred billion dollars in U.S. currency a year, what would you do
with it?"

Oh, one more thing before I continue this. I don't recall my talk with
Petro word for word. I didn't have a tape recorder. What you'll read here
is the general direction or focus I have in what I communicated to Petro.
Petro's general responces as well as some specific responces. This will
include some questions Petro asked me and my responces. You see, you had
to be there, just listening, to really understand. For me to try to recall
everything said and write it down in the sequence it happened for you to
read, is just not realistic. With this in mind you might re-read the above
and consider the dates and sequence that happened and keep this in mind
when you read the rest of this. Realisticly I can present you with what
you are more likely to understand thru this media of the internet. As Skal
pointed out several times thru all that happened, people can and often are
quite different when you meet them in person, as opposed to the internet.

Petro did answer the question I asked, but I'll not tell you his answer.
You see, people can change, Petro might have answered with the best answer
in the world, the worst or perhaps with just something common. But it
doesn't mean anything unless acted on. And to take productive action
first requires understanding, thought and planning. To set a priority list
and work it as the current details gets done, change or otherwise gets
removed or placed lower on the list. But we all need a common goal that
will enable productive team work. So what might be the best common goal?
The future of mankind? If you think about it, what else could it be that
would be common across the board in establishing team work? And our future
is in the hands of kids. So we are going to do this for kids, all kids,
including the kid in all of us no matter what our age. For the innocence of
youth but with the understanding and experience of who we are, that we can
and do make errors. And this should be clear by acknowledging the reality
of starving children, who had no choice where they where born or the
harsh constraints placed on them.

If you think removing world child hunger is to difficult a goal to reach,
you are mistaken. It's really a snap to do. The established organizations
that know how to properly convert cash into such help, exist. The figure I
gave Petro in my question to him, also exist. Its just a matter of getting
to it in a way that everyone is ok with. And for those who are not ok with
it, they would expose their own errors and be allowed to make corrections.

I told Petro about an Olympic event that happened here in Atlanta this
last year. It wasn't the kind of planned event that everyone cheers for
but the kind of event a great deal of planning went into to avoid. The
world saw this event but it was not used in the images on the screen for
Ted Turner (CNN) teaming up with Oracle four days later. And there was a
key reason for not using it. I recall leaving the auditorium and hearing
someone say loud enough for many to hear "But it doesn't handle the
exception!" Could this have been the man I had spoken to while in line? It
did come from the direction he'd taken to sit.

A bomb went off in the Olympic Park, a woman died, others got hurt, and a
man was wrongly publicly accused. Today it is believed that the bomber
will never be caught and the man accused is now a multi-millionaire thru
lawsuites which the rest of us pay for in taxes or increase product prices.
And a child is scared for life in more ways than one.

Law enforcement had been trained to react quickly and had plenty of
pratice, if not before hand then with all the false bomb threats that had
happened before this bomb. But the fact is, people will do stupid things
and it is up to the rest of us to be ready to deal with it. Only in this
case there was a delay, maybe all that was needed was an extra ten second
for the area to be clear enough to prevent death and lower injury. Where
this delay happened was at the 911 operator station. It's public record
that the 911 operator spent some time trying to find the address of the
Olympic Park, but in all that had happened in getting ready for the
Olympics, the park was never given an address. Everyone knew where the
park was, especially law enforcement, but the data processing program
needed a valid address before it would process the information. Think
about it! If you where an officer on patrol and you got a call over your
high tech mobil computer, don't you think you'd need an address? Is the
programmer at fault? No! In fact there was no individual logically at
fault for the delay, everyone did the right thing, the best they could be
expected to do.

So how is it that the 911 operator didn't have a standard route to take in
quickly dealing with the exception of any planning done? Recognize that
the 911 operator was an end user of a computer system and that it wasn't
the programmers fault but an unatural pratice of the computer industry.
This is only one example of the results of this unatural pratice. This is
where the money is. In the conversion of non-productive expenses to
positive productive profit via charity goals.

I told Petro that Bill Gates knows there is a problem and Bill is putting
money into research trying to find the solution, but Bill will fail.
Bill doesn't know what the problem is and even if he did, he's not in a
position to correct it. That it is his daughter who has caused him to be
looking for solutions.

Petro told me how he put alot of work, long hours into working the Amiga,
keeping it alive. How it would take him away from his family. We talked
about kids, how they would learn by putting things together and sometimes
supprising us all. We, of course, talked about the computer industry and
he asked me questions that I could only respond by saying I'm not
currently intouch within this or that facet of the industry well enough to
know the details. But then my focus was in another direction, rather than
getting deeper and deeper into the various facets and details of the
current state of the industry, my focus was on communicating a perspective
far enough away from the industry to see what the problem is. Other
questions Petro asked of me I answer to the best of my ability and I was
honest about just how much I knew. On one side of the coin, I knew Petro
was looking to determine if I might fill a position at AI, on the other
side of the coin I was communicating yes but that he needed to see it for
himself what I can and have been doing. You see, I'll not work for a
company as important as I know A.I. is, unless I'm recognized for the
talent I have at being able to step back far enough to lose sight of the
details within a problem so that I'll see the simple and easy to apply
solutions that will inherently remove the possibility of the problem
existing in the first place.

Petro did communicate to me problems he was facing, one of which Skal had
also communicated to me. I too have faced that same problem, and in part,
the why I'm writing and posting all of this. But I recognize a bigger
problem, the one causing this and other smaller problems. Knowing that
addressing this bigger problem will inherently result in removing the
existance of this and other smaller problems.

Petro said he was a simple man several times throughout the day and night.
I like this because I know it's the only sure way to go. You can move a
mountain with a single hand full at a time. Or you can do simple things
that build up to a safe tool that you might take an elavator up to the
controls and move more in a day than a single man could move in a life
time.

If there was anything Petro did for me, he listened. He is the first one
to really do so and it's this that caused me to stay up for six hours
after I left him at the hotel. Of course I needed to listen as well, I
did and it helped me to solve the problem. The solution does require the
listening skills of others, the well thought out feedback communication of
others, and the patience of many. I believe Petro got as much out of our
talk as I. Right before getting to the meeting, Petro said not to be
concerned about our lateness, and I responded that he was reading my mind.

Petro and I talked about success principles and concepts Gateway, A.I. and
I had in common. Usually it was I who would start talking about a
principle or concept and Petro would comment the agreement of such from
their side. At first he may not have realized I wasn't just remembering
something from a book or tape but in time he realized I praticed them. For
those who question why I'm not more successful, well there is this thing
called Posttramatic Stress Disorder of which I suffer from, but until just
recently I didn't know it had a name and even some evolving research. If
you check out what research is available via the web, you may be supprised
to find according to current research I may not be able to recover due the
length of time and events I've had in dealing with it. I'd not have done
as well as I have without applying success principles and concepts. And I
am also determined to not only beat this disorder but change the content
of research on it (and I've got something honest researchers on this
disorder will find very helpful - writings by myself over a period of
fifteen years regarding a matter directly related to this disorder).

PTSD has held me back but it has also caused me to learn a great deal. Now
that I know what it is and how it effects me, the question is will I turn
it into an advantage as I beat it? Do I have a choice? Or is it just a
matter of determination? Only I can answer this and its yes.

I didn't talk to Petro much about PTSD but only refered to it at such
times that the conversation was about spending time with family or other
such personal things that PTSD has kept me from. Meaning I've had and
spent more time focusing on other things, solving problems or at least
trying to.

We talked about how those in the industry are like a bunch of kids,
putting things together in all sorts new and interesting ways. How
everyone has good ideas but it is in finding a commonality that leads to
simplicity and allows for the kids to do all these things. We talked about
the Polaroid I had give him. The connector, he'd asked me if I had a
proto-type of it. I didn't but proceeded to explain the simplicity of it.
That it (the packaging and the connector) may not be the best application
of the idea behind it (even I have considered improvement in the concept)
but that it really was up to those in a position to manufacture it and
those in a position to apply it to decide the specifics. But that the idea
was to do something simple that will allow the kids to put things
together. That the connector was only just a connector allowing whatever
connection between things (blocks) that is needed. With say four hundred
possible connections you'd have room for any thing you wanted, expecially
considering how not you can connect to the world over just two lines.

We talked a bit here and there about the VIC, that it really is only a
software connector like the hardware connector, in that the objective is
to allow the kids to put things together but on a software level. That the
VIC is not an invention but an identification/discovery of integration
functionality that allows for putting things together while being able to
handle the exception. But I wasn't pushing the VIC on him, that the VIC
was always ment to be freeware, as a genuine act of goodwill to the
community. That it'd be smaller than csh.

Simple things that allow kids to put things together.

Funny, but I bought the audio tape to the first keynote address and it
started out with putting constraints on kids choices. Keep in mind that
the talk I had with Petro was Saturday and the keynote was the following
Monday. To compare all of Saturday with Petro, AAi, Skal to all of Comdex,
There was far more focus, drive and energy in the one day, Saturday then
all of Comdex. You'll come to realize to as you read onward with this post
and come to understand the why behind it.

Early in my talk with Petro he said that he was the one to lead A.I. and I
agreed completely. Later in my talk with Petro the idea of the Amiga
being applied in a manner consistant with the trojan horse concept, to
sneek it into the industry, had come up. We talked about why this was not
a bad idea but wasn't needed in order to accomplish growth of the Amiga
use. To sum it up, the trojan horse bites back and only slows growth and
development. Openly helping people solve problems is the key. Doing so
only lets those you help have free choice and in an industry where the
pratice is of constraining free choice there is no need for the trojan
horse. People will come back for more free choice.

At Comdex I noticed that the most crowded area, the most difficult areas
to get thru, wasn't with any of the large corporations but the Linux area.
A crowd so thick it was shoulder to shoulder.

Near the end of my talk with Petro, he asked me "So you think the Amiga is
the machine to do this?" From the beginning of our talk I was presenting
Petro with certainty about the productive future and growth of the Amiga.
Here I was also certain as I explained that the Amiga had something that
no other system has, the three fundamental, primary interface modes. And I
picked up the issue of Computer Currents and refered to the article I had
read about how general office software was beginning to become automated
but noted the last paragraph of the article. It said that although general
office software can be automated, it wasn't so easy to do. I then pointed
out that general office software is far from being the only software used
in business, especially in creative business. And I explained to Petro
what the three interface modes of the Amiga are and that it has always had
them, even before AREXX.

We talked about starving children in the world and from a business
perspective these are the customers of the future, You help them now and
they will come back. Pointing out that Gateway knows this and why they
helped out the South Dakota flood victims.

You should understand that in my talk with Petro we did not talk about
this subject then this other subject and so on. But our talk was about
little peices of subjects here and there, building up to the climax where
Petro then opened the car door.

Near the midway point in our talk I had mentioned how, in the natural
evolution of something, something can happen that sets the evolutional
path off course.

After dinner I asked him if AAi was the first usergroup meeting he'd
attended since Gatway. He said it was the first in the US but he'd been to
others. So I asked him if, in all that he had been hearing from users, was
there a level of consistancy in ideas or was it otherwise. Petro said that
there was a level of consistancy and I responded that people build upon
what they have learned and know.

Near the beginning of our talk when the subject was about Bill Gates, I
had told Petro that Bill did something that was the source of the evolving
problems, but I didn't tell Petro what it was. I have also communicated to
The Amiga community that the Computer industry took a wrong turn about ten
or so years ago.

Again, do not place judgement on what and who you are about to read and
take heart in anything you may do based on what you have been reading and
will read. Do not get caught in any mystical illusions, and there is
plenty in all of this that can wrongly lead you into faulty illusions. I'm
no saviour, I'm human and just like the rest of us, I make errors as you
will find out, and this is the proof I'm human. WAKE UP PEOPLE!!! The
future is in our hands, not in mystical illusions.

Lamar told me that upon the last moments with Petro, at the airport,
Petro had commented that the Amiga community is a cult. Lamar was
bothered by this but as their conversation evolved about this it became
clear it was only a misunderstand as to what Petro ment. A simple
translation of meaning behind the words used in different countries. So
let's keep this type of potential error in mind also. So that we can do
what we need to reduce such error.

Also this is not the end of my posting, there is more to come.

Twenty two years ago Mr. Bill Gates yelled piracy. This caused the natural
course of computer and software evolution to go off course. It caused a
fracturing and fragmentation of the beautiful spectrum of what was
evolving. It put the developer needs in conflict with the end-user needs
and why there is a lack of end-user having the ability to handle the
exceptions to what developers created. Illusional constraints evolved in
many other facets as well.

Petro opened the car door.

Keep in mind that Mr. Gates was going to Harvard, a law school, and that
he has always been a game player, a sport. There are many facets to all of
this that one must consider in order to make a fair judgement. Mr. Gates
is not guilty of anything more than being human. The situation that
happened simply wasn't correctly addressed. Human error, just like all
that was happening to prepare for the 1996 Olympics, this situation has
many facets and at a key point, where many facets where in place,
something happened that caused an explosion. Mr. Gates' empire and those
whom have joined him are at serious risk of crumbling, simply because the
foundation on which all of this is built, is faulty. It is only a matter
of physics that it will, with absolute certainty, fall. Nobody needs to
help it do so, but rather everyone needs to begin working damage control
so innocent and productive people don't get hurt while also taking
advantage of this understanding and bootstrapping it to much bigger
problems, like world child hunger. A priority list of which this is at the
top of. Our future is in the coming generation(s). We Amiga supporters
know better than any other collection of people what it is like to deal
with the odds being against us and are learning how to deal with and over
come the odds.

In the phone conversation I had with Lamar, where he fell asleep, after I
woke him he'd told me about the Bob Beman story. But he added that he
could not help but be seeing the Amiga as the little know and little
supported long jumper. Of course he did! :-)

Don't do something for a cause, The Amiga doesn't have a cult following!
But instead set honest productive goals and work towards them. Reaching
them is where genuine self respect and self esteam come from and gives a
short time to stop, relax and smell the rose of an evolving beautiful
spectrum. Become a self leader, not a follower.

AGAIN, this is not the end of my postings, just intermission between acts.

* It is near 11 a.m. the 7th of June, at this point in writing. This
second part may be revised as I integrate more. This work is copyrighted
1997 by myself - Timothy Rue. But only so that no alteration be done. You
may copy it but only in it's complete context or with notice that it is
only a part of larger work. ***

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Email: timrue@mindspring.com