Dear all,
I'm an ex Amiga user. I actually still have a towered A1200 which I occasionally turn on, partly for the nostalgia value,but mainly to remind myself that computers used to take seconds, rather than minutes to boot up.
The last time I looked into what was happening at Amiga, they were in in Washington, Eyetech were producing some, not exactly cutting edge, hardware - but were at least producing something - and Hyperion were writing OS4. Now it looks like it has all fallen apart... again.
From my periodic dips into the world of Amiga (which is getting more like a Grimm tale the longer it goes on) it has become increasingly apparent that nobody is really sure who owns what any more. Least of all me. I think the history is something like this...
Amiga (Jeff Minter etc) built a machine with lots of clever stuff in it which Commadore then bought and didn't know what to do with. They produced a number of computers with 'A' in front of them (A1000, A500, A1200 etc) which lots of people bought and lots of other people did really clever things with and thus a community was born.
However Commodore still liked a thing they produced called the 64 and saw the Amiga as a kind of upstart to it so didn't develop things very well and then went bust.
Someone (can't for the life of me remember who) then bought the rights to Amiga, they also bought a shop chain called Rumbalows (in the UK), failed to produce a toaster and then went bust.
Gateway then bought Amiga from them (but not Runbalows or the toaster?). However they got cold feet and somehow the IP got transferred to Amiga in Washington. At the same time some other people, who somewhere along the line started producing a clever PPC based gadget and also produced an OS called Morphos (or something). They said that they owned the IP and it all got hopelessly complicated. At which point I gave up and bought a PC. Which I curse regularly.
As I stated at the top of this, the last time I looked Amiga were in Washington and they had given Eyetech the go-ahead to produce a thing called the Amiga One which was ok, ish, but not the cutting edge that a lot of people hoped for and was, compared to the competition, rather expensive for what you got. They (Amiga) were working on a thing called DE which used something from TAO (?) a UK company that would allow DE to run on anything (including a toaster?) but principally on Intel based hardware (since this is what the development systems were) and Hyperion were producing a new OS for the Amiga one which was PPC based, since a lot of people didn't (don't?) like Intel based products. Eventually OS 5 would combine both and this would run on everything, but be an update of the old Amiga OS, be quick to boot, reliable, etc etc. Developers would love it since they would only have to write code once for any hardware (though probably not a toaster)
The feeling I got then is that Amiga did not have a lot of money. They kept asking people to pre-order, buy tee-shirts etc. Also Amiga periodically fought court cases - which must have cost - and those people who liked Morphos, didn't like them and those who liked Amiga didn't like Morphos, and a bunch of other people started to write Aros, which was supposed to be Amiga os but without being tied to all the clever HW that was in the old systems.
Now it appears that Amiga is in Delaware, not Washington as Amiga - Washington has gone bust. There was a note on the net (can't remember where) stating that Amiga -Delaware - had nothing to do with Amiga - Washington - which had just lost a court case and gone bust. Even though the management of Amiga - Washington - appears to be in charge of Amiga - Delaware ... erm...
Also Hyperion are now suing Amiga - Delaware - for the IP, which they say they have as Amiga - Washington - has gone bust and the only people who ever make any money out of this are the lawyers... and also Amiga - Delaware who suddenly have 2 point something million dollars to buy a sports hall in Kent (USA not Kent UK). They have also signed a deal with someone I have never heard of to produce new hardware (what happened to Eyetech?) Namely a Basic system, which is really too basic (1 memory slot, 600mhz ppc etc) and a power system which is a bit too powerful and nothing in between, which I guess they would like people to buy.
Mean time Apple have switched to Intel, pretty much sown up the MP3 player market and produced some very nice looking HW which is also reliable, but still takes too long to turn on. OS X looks nice and in some areas is a good deal easier to use than XP (I use/curse both and also Linux which I just don't understand, but grep about a lot). The PC manufacturers have continued to produce HW styled by brick layers and Microsoft have just produced a new OS that needs a Cray One just to flash the cursor. This apparently is progress.
In short (and thank you for reading my rant) nobody will be interested in anything that Amiga or Hyperion or anyone else does even if they ever sort out who owns the rights to HW and SW which rather old. The only thing that is worth anything is the name (and that's not much now) and the concept that a computer should use the majority of its resources to run the user's application and not the OS.
Why am I confused? Well it's simply that I cannot understand why they are all bothering. You can't really trademark a concept as simple as a computer that works and while it would be nice to be able to buy one, even one with an A in the title again nobody will want to write software for em since until you get a good sized user base it won't sell enough units to justify the expense. I am afraid that you can only dwell on the nostalgia of a name for so long, and that time and now passed. Not that I'm against nostalgia, I'm off for a game of Wizball now.. pass the joystick...
J
