Amiga on the block (again)
The Master brand singers
Commodore, the American personal computer company felled by mismanagement many moons ago, lives on, here and there, through trademarks and brands long since parcelled up and sold to other companies.
Amiga, the name for its expensive multimedia workstation, is owned by a US start-up called Amiga Inc - tagline: "Amiga provides the tools and technology that makes Digital Living easy."
It owns the Amiga trademark in 100 countries and it is putting this up for sale, to juice up the funding.
Its broker, a San Francisco outfit called Pluritas, notes the Amiga's "active user base". Who are they kidding?
More plausibly, Pluritas notes Amiga's "unique cult status with developer and artistic/animation community but with mainstream, mass market brand appeal" and "master brand potential [which] be extended over products and services related to the computer, technology, and gaming categories".
Any takers? Call Pluritas on +1 415 354 1760.
Whither the Amiga OS?
Post-transaction, it looks like Amiga Inc. or whatever it will be called, will retain ownership of the Amiga operating system. However, this is decidedly muddy: a Belgian company called Hyperion Entertainment owns the rights to Amiga OS 4, while Amiga Inc. seems to own everything else.
Unlike Amiga Inc., Hyperion is actually interested in building stuff and porting software to the Amiga platform.
Can't imagine too many people are interested in developing for this moribund platform, but you can check out our 2008 CES vid for a short overview of Amiga OS 5 from Amiga Inc. President Bill McEwen.
Can't see the video? Download Flash Player from Adobe.com
And for a walk down Memory Lane, you can find a history of the Amiga at Amiga.com. ®
COMMENTS
Still going...
The Amiga was, and possibly could still be, the last, best home computer ever. There's got to be a lot of us in the el Reg Readerbase who at the very least may have experienced one and, like me, still get the jitters when the name turns up in modern media somewhere.
Yes, the coders are still out there. Yes, the animators and graphics artists are still out there. Yes, the musical composers who use trackers instead of staves are still out there. And, yes, all modern machines do it better and cheaper. But that's not the point. In my world, using my Amiga to do pretty much anything makes me smile a hell of a lot more than any of my other computers - whether it be playing games, surfing the net or doing something creative. Long live the Amiga!
::A1200T - 060/40 - 8Mb - 540MbHDD:: <-Had to include this |;o)
The Amiga is still alive today precisely because it was so special.
Those who used the Amiga know what a truly revolutionary computer it was. In 1985 it brought affordably to the masses the ability to do true multimedia. Something that was only possible much, much later on other platforms. With true pre-emptive multitasking GUI, 4096 colors our of 4096 HAM mode and stereo sound all in 1985 - the Amiga was light years ahead of its time. It did so with so little resources compared to what is required today. The developer community on the Amiga reminds me of the Open Source community in Linux. There were so many free utilities with source code on Aminet. The difference was that the community was willing to help people without calling them n00bs and telling them to RTFM.
It is a real shame that Commodore got its hooks into it. Should a company who knew it's potential and how to market it had owned it the world would have been a different place.
So to those on the outside, I can see that it's likely hard to understand why someone would still have a fond place in their heart for technology that by today's standards seems so common place. To those of us who experienced the true revolution and in many cases have just grown used to the evolutionary computer market, returning to the Amiga, gives us a chance to relive our first true glimpse of modern computing. I still miss the Amiga community and it's friendly nature and willingness to help anyone with a problem no matter how simple or difficult.
Personally, I'd still be willing to buy AmigaOS should it be ported to x86 and modernized.
Alternatives
"Amiga Inc, do whats left the community a favour and release the AmigaOS4 source code and let people come up with an x64 version."
See the earlier comment - they don't own it, a company called Hyperion do and they still develop it.
"Personally, I'd still be willing to buy AmigaOS should it be ported to x86 and modernized."
Have a look at AROS. It's an open-source x86-based AmigaOS clone. In a year or two I see it being more advanced than AmigaOS 4.
As it was written in the original A1000 ROM....
"Amiga made it... Commodore screw it."
Games machine? Yes. Wonderful at the time. Fully "hardware multitask". OS? Wonderful at the time. Fully preemptive multitask when "windows" was just a bunch of useless icons and the same old programs.
Those times will never comeback... My admiration to people who still uses it. I saw the Internet first on my Amiga. I learned to program on my Amiga. I've seen Linux for the first time on my Amiga. I spent countless hours looking at demos, listening to music and playing on my Amiga.
The sentence above was really there... as did the foot impression of Jay Miner's dog in the A1000 case... together with the team signatures. Engineering with passion... Not something we can afford these days...
Guru Meditation....
Beneath a Steel Sky is freeware now.
Actually, the developers of Beneath a Steel Sky released it as freeware several years ago in exchange for ScummVM adding support for their more commercially-viable games. (This allowed them to actually sell their other games on Windows without putting in much effort themselves, so it worked out quite well.) You can download it entirely legally from the ScummVM website, no registration required.
