Over the past month or so, several exciting developments have been brewing at the Ambrosia home office. For one, we moved it!

That’s right: Ambrosia Software has officially moved its operation to a slightly less spacious but infinitely cooler office space in downtown Rochester, NY (as opposed to the ’burbs where we were located previously).

Not to worry though folks, our mailing address and eMail addresses are all remaining exactly the same. Though our phone numbers have changed, dialing our old office number will politely give you our new number, and dialing our old fax number will seamlessly connect you through to our spiffy new office space, and the fax machine dwelling therein..

For those who like to keep their contact databases up to date, our new office number is 716.325.1910, and our new fax number is 716.325.3665. Our toll-free order only line remains unchanged at 800.231.1816.

Now as any of you who have ever moved before are I’m sure aware of, this little exercise in mobility has left us a bit frazzled. There were so many details to plan, coordinate, and execute that we’re all feeling like we wouldn’t mind a Caribbean cruise or two (and we’d certainly accept one in leu of a shareware fee or two).

The good news is that the administrative details that have so occupied both myself and the rest of the Ambrosia crew over the past month or two have been taken care of. Yes friends, this means more goodies ahead for you as we finish unpacking boxes and put our noses to the digital grindstone. Here’s a quick synopsis of what we’ve been plotting:

Internet
You’ve been hearing bits and pieces of our Internet plans for quite some time. In a nutshell, we plan to provide a complete Ambrosia Internet site with www, ftp, listserv, online registration, web editions of our newsletter The Ambrosia Times, online product catalogs, and of course a live HectorCam™.

We took a giant step forward with our Internet plans with the approval of our lease for an SGI WebFORCE Indy server. This hot little box provides an excellent Internet server solution, and one that will handle your accesses without degrading significantly in terms of performance.

We thought long and hard before going with a Unix box as our Internet server; many people were helpful enough to suggest Macintosh server solutions to us. The fact of the matter is however that the Internet and Unix are so intertwined that for a server, a Unix box makes the most sense, and SGI’s offerings are superb.

Besides the robustness of a Unix box as an Internet server, we were also attracted to it because of the kind of performance it can serve up. It wouldn’t do to have our server bogged down while you’re browsing around!

We’ll definitely keep you folks up to date on when our Internet site will be ready to go live. Off the top of my head, I’m guessing that we’ll be up and running by September, 1995.

FAQs
We’ve been working away diligently on a set of FAQs — Frequently Asked Question documents — for Ambrosia itself and our products. FAQs are a common Internet convention that put answers to frequently asked questions on a wide range of topics into an easy to browse through document.

We’ve decided to devote our efforts to creating FAQs as a service to you folks, so we can empower you with quick, convenient answers to questions you’re likely to have about us or our products.

We’ve currently completed FAQ documents for Ambrosia (our company), Maelstrom, and Swoop. FAQs for Apeiron and Chiral are forthcoming shortly, and soon thereafter we’ll be creating FAQs for the rest of our product line.

If you’re interested in nabbing a FAQ or two, please drop by our forum on your favorite information service and grab one. They’re free, less filling, and taste great.

Updates
Even with the flurry of activity that we’ve been involved in over the past month or so, work on updates to our venerable products has been proceeding well. I’ve been focusing on underlying technologies thus far, analogous to carefully laying a solid foundation before attempting to build a house on top of it.

As I previously outlined, a tres cool update to Oracle is going to be the first product out of the gate utilizing these new technologies, and it’ll be fully PowerPC native as well (two traits all of our future products will have in common). I’m quite excited about what the future holds for our products, and I hope you are as well.

We are working with a number of outside developers to bring other high quality products to you. I can’t say too much at this point, but suffice it to say that we’ve got a number of games upcoming that will bring you through the fall/winter season in style.

That’s it for me this month — back to the salt mines!

Regards,

Andrew Welch


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Andrew Welch
Thaumaturgist
Ambrosia Software, Inc.