Dear Emeric/Warface,

Thank you very much for the review and the translation. It clear that you made a significant effort and we truly appreciate it.

@all concerned

We would like to re-post this here from the OSNews about the report Warface did. It was directed at the international interest in the Pegasos...

We are taking this one step at a time and the Pegasos *is* proving to be a reliable platform. The Operating Systems we now have running on the Pegasos are MorphOS, Debian, SuSE, Gentoo, OpenBSD, OSX and MacOS9+ (through Mac-on-Linux). The last distro of Mandrake works too, although we are not sure where this will lead. The OpenFirmware of the Pegasos enables compatibility across a the spectrum of possibilities in the PPC environment.

We have sold out of our most recent production of 400 units. We sold these through dealers (see the "Pegasos Network" at morphos-news linked above), user groups (for example in Australia -- www.pegasos.com.au/preorder.html), and the Internet at www.pegasos-usa.com. That URL is a bit deceptive as 90% of the units sold online will be going to destinations outside the United States (13 in Finland). We have a motivated international following that is looking for something more than an x86 based Linux distro or an "expensive" Mac. The fact that this review was done in Hungarian is actually quite exciting to us. It is in places like Hungary where the technically skilled are looking for something like the Pegasos. We could have easily sold another 400 units. The production was sold out in four and a half days.

MorphOS also runs AmigaOS applications. Amiga adherents still live in the worldwide remnants of the former Commodore Business Machines. In 1993 the soon to fail Commodore generated $1.3 billion of revenue with more than 90% of that revenue coming from sales outside the USA. Incredibly, outposts are still in place and it is these people who where first in line for the Pegasos. They are everywhere. When this next batch is delivered we will even have a Pegasos User Group in the Faroe Islands! Crazy you say?! A hobbyist market of geeks and freaks? We think not. In fact, what we are seeing are talents most North Americans have forgotten. They can code in assembly level languages, they can write their own drivers, they can tune the performance of their machine to do what they want it to do themselves. One by-product of all this enthusiasm -- the Demo Scene *is* coming to the Pegasos and MorphOS. Remember, when a demo could be saved on a floppy?

The domination of Windows and the "personal computer" itself have pushed the average user away from understanding what is really "under the hood." Most computer users have a superficial knowledge of what makes what they do work and the relationship between "man and machine" ends at the GUI. Eventually to be broadly successful we need to deliver exactly that "simplicity" to the market, but today, we focus on niches. Our first strike in the market are "techies," who know what they are getting into and want something different NOW. They are the artist/creator/engineer types that can write their own programs and still know how to make a computer, a television or a stereo do what they want it to do (at home with a soldiering iron if necessary!). Ultimately, it will be those people that help us carry the message to the masses, because they are helping us create it.

With these enthusiastic and participative users MorphOS marches forward day by day. In the meanwhile, we are thinking that the whole "value" proposition is changing. With the emphasis on the speed of the CPU and the size of the memory, the computer became an end in itself and not a means to an end. G3 or G4? Right now it does not matter. This is still a work in progress. We are focused on what can be done with the Pegasos and how to make it do more, better.

BTW -- "Any" OS adherent get the same support from us as our own MorphOS. We have a Debian development team of 18 developers that will all have boards soon.

That is the plan. Please send us an email if you want to assist us. We are offering Pegasos machines to developers who can help us and solid incentives to those that want to formally join the team.

Sincerely,

Raquel and Bill
www.pegasosppc.com