"In 1997, prospects brightened when the PC manufacturer Gateway bought Amiga and promised to bring out a new, more powerful computer. Mr. McEwen said Gateway had mostly been interested in Amiga's 40 or so valuable patents, for video and sound card technologies.
Gateway hired Mr. McEwen, a large, lumbering man who went into computer sales after leaving his family's trucking business in the mid-1980's, as its chief evangelist for the Amiga. Mr. McEwen had not owned an Amiga before but was immediately smitten and soon came to consider himself one of the clan.
But after two years and a series of false starts, a new Amiga failed to materialize.
Last August, it looked as though the end had finally come. That's when Mr. McEwen and most members of Gateway's small Amiga team lost their jobs and plans for resurrecting the computer were scrapped yet again.
Mr. McEwen put a finer point on it. "Amiga was baggage to Gateway's main business," he said. "It wasn't an asset in their minds."
So passionate had Mr. McEwen become about the computer that he quickly proposed to Gateway that he buy what remained of Amiga's assets. It took him a month to raise the money to buy the rights to the Amiga name; the remaining Amiga inventory, which consisted of some 17,000 machines in Germany; and a worldwide distribution channel already in place. Gateway kept the patents and licensed them to Mr. McEwen. The price for everything, Mr. McEwen said, was "in the millions."
Mr. McEwen now has a staff of 20 in an office in Snoqualmie, Wash., east of Seattle. All but two employees got their start in computers with Amigas, he said proudly."
http://www.cucug.org/sr/sr0007.htmlSo what happened?
