Bill Panagouleas of Anti Gravity: What happened with boXer?

[arnljot]

boXer page

Anti-Gravity made an offer to purchase the rights to the BoXeR and I have accepted.  The offer had many attractions, not least because the development funds they offered would ensure the board will be completed.  Anti-Gravity will not only put the BoXeR into production, but also have longer term plans that should build momentum behind the product.

Did money ever exchange hands?

BP - AT sales manager

Bill Panagouleas
Anti Gravity Products
Sales Manager

Do you have access to boXer designs? Can they be open sourced at this time so that fpgaarcade and minimiggers can learn from it?

was there any software developed which can be open sourced?

Do you have contact with the people who might know today?

It would be fun to know a bit about this piece of amiga history. Cheers!

Anti Gravity Boxer Page

Uniting People • Unleashing Potential  

Cool slogan!

Anti Gravity Boxer story:

Mick's Idea 1997

While Anti Gravity addressed its primary markets in video and animation, Dan looked for ways to encourage the development of new Amiga hardware. Escom's Amiga Technologies developed Version 3.1 of the Amiga Operating System and contracted out the manufacturing Amiga 1200's and Amiga 4000's. Escom announced it's intentions to produce a Power PC Amiga, but no new Amiga hardware seemed forthcoming.

In 1997, Mick Tinker of the United Kingdom outlined his idea for a completely redesigned Amiga compatible computer. Based around the existing AGA chipset, it would be designed with industry standard features such as ISA slots, dual mode parallel ports and a high speed bus. Future plans included upgrades, such as new chipsets and the Motorola Power PC.

Convinced that the Amiga architecture was superior to other technologies, Dan saw the BoXeR as the best development path for the Amiga. He decided to support the BoXeR effort in any way that he could. He began a marketing a campaign to sell a BoXeR based computer dubbed the Alien BoXeR. He also provided input on design concepts for the system.

Mick began work on the new system with support from Blittersoft, UK. As the development of the board progressed the situation at Escom's Amiga Technologies deteriorated. As the BoXeR neared completion, Escom filed for liquidation and the availability of complete chipsets became unsure. Mick decided to redesign a portion of the board to combine the scarcest chips into one chip.



Lost Chipsets 1998

The BoXeR system development reached its final stages. Amiga International assured Mick that the chipsets were available and plans were under way to begin the manufacturing.

Meanwhile, Quik Pak made a bid to buy the Amiga. When Gateway won the bidding process, Quik Pak became embroiled in a dispute over the assets stored at Quik Pak. As a result the chipsets were never shipped to Mick. When the chipsets arrived in Germany several months later they were damaged and they had to be scrapped. The crisis forced Mick to take a day job and continue the development of the BoXeR in his spare time.

Unable to build the BoXeR, and with the integration of the chips already under way, Mick decided to redesign the computer by integrating all of the custom chips into a single chip. He also decided to make significant improvements in chip performance. It would take another 6 months to finish the design.

Dan could see that the project needed funds. He approached Blittersoft with an offer to buy the manufacturing and distribution rights to North America and South America. At the same time he was presented the opportunity to develop the WaveNet Studio software for the Alpha Systems. Without the resources to do both, Dan decided to support the BoXeR. In the middle of 1998, Dan purchased from Blittersoft the manufacturing and distribution rights for the BoXeR in North and South America. A few months later India was added to the territory.

Along the way Mick continued to make improvements, switching to PCI slots, adding Power PC and other odds and ends. It soon became evident to Dan that the best way to complete the project would be for Anti Gravity to buy the complete rights to the technology and add more engineering personnel. When Jim Collas took over Amiga at Gateway, he indicated that he would support the BoXeR effort as a way to strengthen the Amiga.

By the middle of 1999 Dan decided to purchase the complete rights to the BoXeR. Then Jim Collas left Gateway and Gateway/Amiga ran silent. What would happen to the BoXeR now?

[arnljot]

The History of Anti Gravity

Steel Town to Tinsel Town1964 - 1990

Born in a the small steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, computing devices fascinated Daniel J. Lutz at an early age. He owned a Pong, an Atari 2600, an Intellivision, a Commodore 64, and an Apple IIe. He would go down to Radio Shack and play with the Tandy systems. In his spare time he disassembled electronic toys a and reassembled them, with modifications of course.

Dan moved to Venice, California in 1980, at the age of 16. After graduating from high school, he worked as a lab technician at Kaiser Permanente. At the age of 21 he enrolled in the DeVry Institute of Technology where he earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electronic Engineering Technology. At DeVry he worked on x86 and 68000 processors.

After searching for a CAD program for his Apple IIe, Dan realized that he would need a new system. IBM PC computers had just added a mouse as a standard feature. The PC didn't seem comfortable yet with a mouse attached, and the MacIntosh had featured a mouse from the very beginning. The MacIntosh seemed to be the best choice.

A DeVry colleague invited Dan to see his Amiga 500. Because of his enthusiasm, more than anything else, Dan accepted the invitation. With visions of a sooped-up Commodore 64 in his head, Dan was not prepared for his first introduction to the Amiga. After spending more than 5 hours downloading files from a BBS and drawing objects in Intro CAD, all thoughts of a MacIntosh disappeared. The ease of multitasking, while downloading files, the animation and the nimble ability to manipulate files created an unmatched computing experience. From that point forward the Amiga became Dan's career focus.

He purchased his first Amiga in June of 1987, two days after his first Amiga encounter. The Amiga 2000 included the 1.2 Kickstart ROM's, the first autobooting GVP SCSI controller (anxiously awaiting the release of 1.3 Kickstart and autobooting GVP ROM's), 2 Megs of fast RAM on a Commodore RAM card, a 40 Meg hard drive, a MicroWay flicker fixer, a 15" Diamond Scan Mitsubishi monitor, and Intro CAD, of course. Dan continued to upgrade the A2000 adding an '020 accelerator, and then a GVP '030 with 8 megs of RAM over a three year period.

After graduating in 1989 at the top of his class, Dan looked for a job creating Amiga peripherals. When he applied at Centaur Software in Santa Monica, he found out that it was a sister company of Creative Computers. Since there were no immediate openings at Centaur, he took a temporary position as a service technician in the Lawndale Creative Computers store. After three months he moved to the Santa Monica store and became the manager of the service department. By the spring of 1989 he had become the manager of the store. While at Creative Dan worked out a way of modifying Amiga 3000 to house a Video Toaster 2000. Eventually, he designed the famous "Cube" case for the Amiga 3000, which more than doubled the expandability of the system.

In 1991, Dan enrolled in the Masters of Elecrical Engineering program at Cal State Long Beach. Meanwhile, two animators came to work at Creative, Thomas Hollier and Tim Wilson. Dan saw a way to compete with the giant high end 3-D animation houses using Amigas on an ethernet network. Dan and the two animators formed Anti Gravity Workshop in July, 1991 and moved in to Dan's two-story garage. Tim and Thomas left Creative while Dan continued to work there to support the growing company.



Animation, Production and Products 1990 - 1994

Television and Motion Picture production companies and large industrial corporations found Anti Gravity animations to be of higher quality and lower cost than competitors using SGI super-computers. Companies like HBO, Fox, Disney, and Hughes Communications preferred the output produced on Anti Gravity's Amiga network. The combination of high quality output at a rock bottom price caused such rapid growth in the company that Dan quit his job at Creative and suspended his masters candidacy just a few units shy of earning his degree.

Anti Gravity animations appeared in numerous video and motion picture productions such as, "Honey I Blew Up the Kids," "Tales From the Crypt,"and "Fox VR Five." In 1992 Amiga World featured the Anti Gravity Workshop team in a special edition. The AW issue highlighted the Motion Picture Film Recorder, Motion Man and other high-end uses for the Amiga. The cover, created by Tim Wilson, won the award as the best magazine cover of 1992.

The ultimate goal was to produce a full length motion picture using 3-D animation. To do this Anti Gravity developed techniques tricks, software and hardware systems to aid and automate 3-D production. Tim and Thomas hand-crafted a manipulative human form that would become Motion Man and later Tim Wilson's Humanoid. A Motion Picture Film Recorder was developed to automate the capture of computer graphics and animations on film. Animation frames were rendered on stacks of accelerated Amiga 3000's and automatically dumped to the film recorder, laser disk, Beta Cam and other formats, with AREXX scripts.

The success of Anti Gravity Workship generated interest at Commodore and elsewhere. Anti Gravity became a regular fixture at Amiga trade shows, and industry professional associations. Anti Gravity developed a sterling reputation for on-time delivery of projects due to a unique customer interface process. As a result Dan began to receive consulting requests to to help graphic production companies improve their quality and on-time delivery. Quite often Dan would suggest that companies purchase the products used at Anti Gravity Workshops. Invariably, the clients would ask if he could get these products for them.

To meet the growing demand for these products and to market products developed at Anti Gravity Workshop, Dan formed Anti Gravity Products in 1992.

Motion Man became Anti Gravity Products' signature product along with offerings such as magneto optical drives, Snap Maps, Solar System Kit and the Pentetrator (Pentium PC on a card). Gradually, Anti Gravity Products began to sell complete Amiga systems, preconfigured for the customer. Many of these systems were high-end video and animation networks and peripherals costing between $10,000 and $25,000.

In order to help small Amiga developers advertise and at the same time increase business for Anti Gravity, Dan negotiated with magazines such as Video Toaster User, Video Pro and Computer Graphics World and Amiga World. Dan would buy bulk advertising space (4 to 10 page spreads). He would exchange the advertising space for product from small Amiga developers who did not have the cash to advertise. The magazines agreed to liberal repayment terms based upon Anti Gravity's ability to sell the product, a winning proposition for the magazines, Anti Gravity and the developers. Anti Gravity's advertising budget blossomed to in excess of $20,000 per month.

Dan saw another market on the horizon. As 3-D objects became more complex and animations became an increasing part of television and motion pictures, the demand for rending power increased exponentially. To address this market Dan created the Rendersaurus based upon the same MIPS processor used in SGI rendering monsters. The second revision of the Rendersaurus migrated to the Alpha processor and became a fully functional animation workstation, with non-linear video editing.

All was well with the world... The Amiga had risen to preeminence in video and motion pictures. Anti Gravity had become an industry leader in animation and rendering systems.

[arnljot]

The History of Anti Gravity ... cont ...

The Amiga Saga 1994-1997

Meanwhile, the Amiga community became aware of a brewing tempest at Commodore. Commodore had begun to focus on their fast selling PC line, especially in Europe. Key research and development personnel and other long time employees left the company and by the end of 1994, Commodore Business Machines had gone bankrupt. Left without an owner, Amiga faced an uncertain future.

Within months companies like Commodore, UK, Dell and others announced their intention to purchase the Amiga. Companies such as Hewlett Packard and Digital Equipment were the subject of rampant rumors.

In the spring of 1995, to the surprise of everyone, Escom AG, a German company purchased Amiga. They immediately announced plans to establish an Amiga specific arm of the company. Escom formed Amiga Technologies to continue development.

AT hired well known Amigans, such as Dr. Peter Kittel, Ralph Schmidt, Dr. Allan Havemose and Olaf Barthel. OS 3.1 became a reality and Quik Pak, a Pennsylvania company, received a contract from Escom to become the manufacturer of the Amiga 4000 Tower, while a French company continued the production of the Amiga 1200. The Amiga seemed poised to thrive again. Escom contracted with MaZeT to build a Power PC Amiga. Dubbed "The Walker", two prototypes were produced and shown to the press.

Dan's experience with Rendersaurus established connections with Digital Equipment and Samsung's Alpha Semi-Conductor Group. When Escom took over the Amiga, Dan approached Manford Schmidt of Escom at the Cologne 1995 Amiga show about porting the Amiga operating system to the Alpha processor. Schmidt agreed that the port could be made with 2 million dollars in funding. Dan contacted both Digital Equipment and Samsung with the proposal. Samsung Alpha studied the proposal in detail, and Dan contacted Aspen systems to produce the hardware. Samsung agreed to contact Amiga with an offer.

Meanwhile,as 1996 rolled around, Anti Gravity continued to grow and prosper. Animations became more common in film and video, and Anti Gravity video editing suites based upon Amiga 4000 Systems sold consistently well. Starting in 1994, however, much of the computer generated animation moved from the specialty shop to the large production studios. Thomas moved on to work on feature films and Tim Wilson moved out on his own. Dan's focus shifted from Anti Gravity Workshop to Anti Gravity Products.

With 12 employees squeezed into the garage and increasing traffic to and from the house, the City of Santa Monica finally insisted that Anti Gravity move to a traditional commercial location. Dan moved the company out of the garage to the current facility located at 1649 16th Street in Santa Monica.

Soon after in 1997 disaster struck Amiga again. Escom AG, once the largest reseller of IBM compatible personal computers in Europe filed for liquidation. Escom had invested major resources into the purchase of 60 Mhz Pentium processors. Shortly thereafter, the "Pentium Divide Error" was discovered in the 60 Mhz chips. Intel released the 66 Mhz Pentiums which experienced massive shipping delays due to increased demand as a 60 Mhz replacement chip. Escom had just completed a massive expansion, adding thousands of retail outlets. When the 60 Mhz Pentium systems were returned en masse, Escom could not recover. Samsung could not reach Amiga Executives, and plans for the Alpha port vanished with Escom. The Power PC Amiga was never finished.

Again Amiga's owner had died. Again the demise had been unrelated to the success of the Amiga. After an uncertain few months, it seemed that all would be well at Anti Gravity. Quik Pak continued to produce Amiga 4000 Towers.

But, Anti Gravity's move to the new facility could not have been more ill-timed. To make matters worse, Video Toaster User, Anti Gravity's main advertising avenue at the time, was bought by a competitor and shut down. With the death of Escom, sales took a sharp downturn. Amiga hardware could not keep up with the faster and faster processors in other systems. While video editing suites continued to sell the volume decreased dramatically. Anti Gravity's work force decreased to a handful of people by the end of 1997.

Dan and his Anti Gravity staff greeted the Gateway purchase of the Amiga with renewed hope. It looked as if Gateway would produce the new Power PC Amiga computer everyone wanted.

Meanwhile, in 1998, Dan developed another new idea to revive Anti Gravity's penetration into the 3-D market. Why not automate the animation and business processes developed at Anti Gravity Workshop into a studio quality product? At the same time Dan became aware of a group of programmers who had developed WaveNet, a distributed rendering system for the Alpha processor running Windows NT, much friendlier than the Screamernet rendering software used throughout the entertainment industry. By including the costing, proofing, bidding and billing processes developed at Anti Gravity Workshop, a comprehensive studio package could be produced.

In the summer of 1998 Dan approached Samsung's Alpha Systems Division to develop a scalable multiple Alpha processor rack-mounted render farm with up to 24 processors. WaveNet would provide the ideal management tool for render farm. Samsung responded by collaborating with Dan. Dan designed the system. Samsung built a prototype based upon Dan's designs. Preparations were made to reveal the prototype at the NAB trade show in Las Vegas, November, 1998. With Alpha sales declining, Samsung closed their Alpha Semiconductor Group two weeks prior to the trade show and left the prototype untested.

Hope of a Gateway revival of the Amiga began to fade as the PC giant seemed unable to settle on a plan of action. With each new plan the Amiga fell further behind. By the end of 1998 a sense of uncertainty had returned. To Gateway any idea of Amiga hardware had faded and Amiga had become software, a look and feel.

With the entry of Jim Collas came a renewed sense of hope. Surely the man who had helped bring Gateway to prominence would have the clout to move the Amiga forward. The excitement grew with the announcement of the MCC, a super-fast covergence engine that would drive the new Amiga Operating Environment. Anti Gravity opened discussions with Collas regarding the BoXeR, the launch of an Amiga Online ISP and other issues.

By August, the Collas era had ended. Plans for the MCC vanished, and Gateway announced a self-imposed silence regarding their plans for the Amiga. Again the Amiga community waited to see if the end had finally come.

[arnljot]

Well, according to them the future was:

The future

A New Plan
   

In conjunction with Anti Gravity's announcement in April of a strategic partnership with the new Amiga, Dan also announced Anti Gravity's outright purchase of the BoXeR technology and the world wide manufacturing, distribution and sales rights.

Dan made contact with each investor and secured support for a a new plan centered around a hardware company. Despite the setbacks, not a single investor retracted support for the project.


Joe Torre Hired
   
During the St. Louis Amiga show, Dan approached Joe Torre about joining the BoXeR engineering team. After securing investor support Dan hired Joe and sent him directly to England to work with the BoXeR development team. At the end of June Joe returned to Atlanta to continue working on the project in conjunction with the development team in London.

"Now I get to work on the most advanced classic Amiga compatible ever designed by the outside world...an "Ultra-Classic" that will enable genius to flourish like the original did. Tweeking the design and mixing the best of ATX with the best of the Classic, will empower BoXeR owners to be, once again, proud they still use a, now even better, Amiga computer."

The Anti Gravity team remains committed to bringing the BoXeR to market, its partnership with Amiga, Inc. and to the Amiga community. Details of future plans will be announced with the launch of the new hardware company.

So, we just wait for Bill P to speak up and tell the story with the details that's missing.

Like, was there ever a working version of the BoXeR?

Does the designs still exist? Who owns the IP? Joe Torre, you're also still around, last time seen at this sites take over, we'd like to hear from you too please

[arnljot]

So Bill or Joe, nothing to share? :-)

[arnljot]

I don´t want to be rude or insensitive to people who felt they´ve been had in the past.

But I´d like that if such a discussion is to be had, that it´s hosted in a separate thread.

This one, I´d like for those who worked with the boXer in the past to come forward and tell their story if they so choose to.

[arnljot]

@joetee

Thanks for an interesting read. I didn't know that about AG, I thought they were one of Amiga Incs victims.

I really look forward to a write up buy you from that period. Or if you share it through a magazine or book (Amiga Future or the unreleased 2nd ed of the commodore book

What state was the boxer when it was abandoned? Was it just plastic, led and silicone. Or did it show a kickstart screen or even boot?

I have to stop writing now, because I'm getting distracted by Crom00 avatar looking at me... LOL

[arnljot]

The product is still owned by someone, I wonder if it's MT or AG. If it's AG it seems very unlikely that they will give it to the community.

If Joe or Bill knew that a "good guy" owned the ASIC design for the amiga custom chipsets, they'd be on them now to have them do something with it - right?

+1 for having the boXer remains in a product today. But not at any cost.

[arnljot]

Seems highly unlikely that we'll get anything from this.

Bill P and Joe T are understandably on bad terms with AntiGravity from what I read here, and AG is the last ones who claimed to be owners of it.

Mick T was the original owner, but he doesn't have a webpage anymore - only I can find on him is a Linked-In page, and berfore one knows for sure who owns the designs, I don't see that it would be smart to nag on Mick about the BoXeR.

Dream situation would be that the owners was someone who was still sympathetic to the Amiga Community and would put all the source, designs and documents still available on a googe.code project page and open it up for people.

Also, the dream situation would be that they either followed amiga.org and did so now on their own initiative or that Bill P or Joe T knew it was Mick and asked him to do it.

If it's AntiGravity, it would seem that the Illuminati has had them burn all the documents... :-/