Amiga Auction List Posted

[bhoggett]

@HMetal

Credibility--

[bhoggett]

@Wayne

The auction company is required, by federal disclosure laws, to announce that they are selling the assets of Amiga Inc due to the foreclosure procedings by the landlord.

Yes, but I have to agree with Billsey. The way that paragraph is formulated it implies they are selling the whole corporate entity

• that is Amiga Inc., complete with any IP or other assets they might have, rather than just the equipment impounded by the landlord.

I have no doubt that the auctioneer is bringing in additional items for that auction. That is very common practice with auction houses, but the items shown on that auction page (all 50 computers, all monitors, drives, etcetera) were property of Amiga Inc at one point or another. They were all seized by the landlord to cover what amounts to a great deal of debt.

I'm with you on this one. The ridiculous story by "fleecy" that this is equipment brought in by the auctioneers and is being fraudulently passed off as having belonged to Amiga Inc. (presumably for no other reason than to spread more "FUD" about the company) is so laughable it isn't true.

The situation is simple: Amiga Inc were evicted and their office equipment seized for non-payment of rent. In the year since that happened, Amiga Inc have been unable to raise the funds to pay off their arrears and avoid the public humiliation of having their equipment auctioned.

If this is an indication of a company that has no financial difficulties and is thriving, then I would be the next supremo at the Vatican.

It don't know what "fleecy" and Ray are on, but I strongly suspect it has hallucinogenic properties.

• It is hugely debatable whether there is such a thing as Amiga Inc's corporate entity, or precisely what it is they own or do, but that is not relevant to Billsey's point.

[bhoggett]

@bloodline

This turns out to be a lie (along with AmigaOS x86, probably an attempted to displace the AROS team).

That's bollox and you know it Matt.  "Amiga x86" was the name Amiga Inc wanted to market Amithlon under, probably for no other reason than using the "Amiga" trademark and "x86" to indicate the target hardware.

Amithlon was not developed as an alternative to AROS, nor were Amiga Inc interested in it in order to displace AROS.  You really take AROS way too seriously if you think anyone regards it as a threat to anybody's market.  It isn't that now, and it most certainly wasn't two years ago.

The reason "Amiga x86" never materialised as advertised was a combination of things: lack of funds at Amiga Inc meaning they could not convince the authors they would able to deliver on their promises, threats and blackmail from H&P and strong vociferous opposition from Eyetech and Hyperion against any involvement with the x86 market whatsoever.

The rest of your rant is entertaining too, but doesn't seem to have much basis in fact to me, so I'll just treat it as an imaginative re-write of history.

[bhoggett]

@bloodline

I made a suggestion that AmigaOS x86 was an effort to displace AROS. It was a possiblity, not fact, and I presented it as such.

Public knowledge shows that it was not a possibility. It's a known fact that McBill admitted at AmiWest two years ago that they only saw Amithlon for the first time a few days before the show - literally. So how it is that you jump from that to the possible conclusion that it was somehow Amiga Inc's effort to displace AROS is totally beyond my comprehension.

As for the rest, I don't disagree with your assessment of Amiga Inc's performance at all, but I don't agree with your presentation of events. AOS4 was not developed in response to MOS, Amithlon was not developed in response to AROS, and in both cases Amiga Inc had either very little or nothing at all to do with them coming about.

Regarding AOS4, the sequence of events as I recall it goes a little like this:

- Amino buy the Amiga rights from Gateway and then change their name to Amiga Inc. They have no interest in "Classic Amiga" development, concentrating on the AmigaDE future. H&P are due to develop a PPC native AOS4 for use on the existing "Classic" PPC expansion cards. Relations between H&P and AI are not good and getting worse.

- Eyetech make their plans for a custom PPC based AmigaOne public, and AI see an opportunity to sell a desktop OS again (meanwhile their plans for DE turn out to be wildly optimistic). They are still in agreement that H&P should to the job, but with far less freedom and priviledges than H&P had grown accustomed with. H&P are even less happy about AI.

- H&P disagree with the conditions and direction AI want to go in and quietly drop any AOS4 development, probably also due to not getting any financial support from AI towards development. They concentrate on other directions - which later turn out to be a UAE port to QNX.  Meanwhile Eyetech also encounter growing problems with Escena.

- AI's reaction to H&P's action is to talk to the MOS developers about possibly turning MOS into the next official AOS. We've all heard the stories relating to how that turned out.  So the result is that AI have no OS to present to Eyetech for AmigaOne, but this seems unimportant as Escena seem incapable of delivering a working board anyway. Everything grinds to a halt, with the exception of MOS, but no one thinks it would be a good idea to tell the public about it (and they are probably right).

(I don't know much about the Thendic/Pegasos timeline - but I wasn't even aware of their existence at this stage)

- AmiWest 2001 comes about, and Amithlon is presented as "Amiga x86". All hell breaks loose and the PPC vs x86 wars hit the road in earnest. Hyperion and Eyetech supremos make very public and very damning comments about what they see as utterly disatrous involvement with the x86 market, but it dawns on them that their own PPC solution is virtually kaput. AOS4 development is stalled, and Eyetech have virtually given up on Escena. What to do?

- AI lose/give up Amithlon pulication to H&P and cease  talking about it. They concentrate all their talk on the PPC future and the "Triumvirate" is formed. Hyperion offer to do the OS, Eyetech promise to get the hardware project restarted and Amiga Inc... well, Amiga Inc see the "money for nothing" signs and say "Sure, go ahead. We're right behind you."

During all this time Thendic's profile grows as their alliance with the MOS team is strengthened.

I can't see how any of this leads you to believe that AOS4 was devised in response to MOS or Amithlon developed to displace AROS.

You might argue that I don't list AROS as a significant factor in any of the events above, and you'd be right. AROS was never a threat to anyone, and it still isn't. The only role it had was as an indirect factor in the way Amithlon was conceived. (The original idea was to use AROS and integrate the JIT 68k emulation into it to result in a closed source commercial product. This ended up being rejected for a number of reasons, being replaced with the Linux+JIT+AOS combination that finally hit the market).

In conclusion: have Genesi done more for the community than Amiga Inc? Assuredly so. Have Amiga Inc demonstrated incompetence time after time? Yup. Have they proved incapable of learning from past mistakes? 'fraid so. Do I think your interpretation of events has even the remotest possibility of being accurate? Nope.

[bhoggett]

@olegil

Maybe stop by there and tell Alkis how it should be?

I'd be wasting my breath (or my typing, as it were).

Some people, even when they don't agree with me, are prepared to listen to a reasoned argument. Others quite simply are not.

Of course, I stand to be corrected on anything I wrote in that timeline. It's simply a representation of how I remember things, but I certainly wasn't anywhere near being "in the loop" until at the very end when the Amithlon situation I described happened.

[bhoggett]

@bloodline

Sure, but Amiga Inc. might have seen that AROS was targeting a Market that they felt they should be making money from.

Some people at Amiga Inc. thought the x86 market should be tapped, others were opposed to the idea.

This has absolutely nothing to do with AROS or Amithlon, or the reason why the latter came into being.

Amithlon negotiations with H&P were going nowhere, so a copy was sent to Amiga Inc. They liked what they saw and wanted to market it straight away, to the extent that they were desperate to demo it at AmiWest only a few days later. Hyperion and Eyetech didn't even know anything about it as there was no time to inform them (and indeed it should have been none of their business anyway). There was no premeditation to any of this, and certainly no plans instigated by anyone at Amiga Inc.

Amithlon was NOT a response to AROS.There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Amiga Inc ever saw AROS as encroaching into a market they should be tapping. None. Why do you persist in suggesting otherwise?

[bhoggett]

@bloodline

You are saying the it wasn't, Fine. (you are stating this as fact)

I am stating it as fact, yes.  Like I said, as far as Amithlon is concerned I was in the loop. I know when it came about, roughly how it came about, who was and who was not involved in bringing it about, and when Amiga Inc got involved. I am indeed stating facts, not opinions. If you have any reason to doubt this, please enlighten the rest of us.

I'm saying it might. End of story. (I am stating this as my oppinion.)

Well, it's an opinion which flies in the face of the facts, so insisting that the opinion is valid can mean only one of two things:

1 - You do not accept my presentation of the facts, presumably because you have evidence to suggest otherwise.

or

2 - Your opinions defy all connection to reality, and you are planning to join Tim Rue and Steve Giovennella in their particularly unique universes.

Are we wasting bandwidth? That depends. Your repeatedly stated "opinion" has the potential to be a rumour starter, and since I know such a rumour would be blatantly false, combating it at the root seems the most efficient way to tackle it.

[bhoggett]

@olegil

Read links before making up the facts? Surely not.

I mean, you do realise that this whole auction is just one large FUD exercise, don't you? Amiga Inc didn't owe any money at all. The landlord only threw them out and locked the office because he was bribed to do so by Genesi.

Mike Bouma said so, and therefore it must be true. :-o