History Part 2
Commodore
Due to Poor managment and Commodore's strategy over many years Commodore
went from market leader to bankrupt in 1993 and it assets sold to
various companies. The Amiga wasn`t a failure, and still had plenty going for it.
Escom
Escom Bought Commodore mainly for the brand name as they had found that
the Name Commodore was still respected by the public, Escom expanded rapidly buying
out a large number of Rumbelows stores, they soon began to have cash flow problems.
They where only interested in selling PC's and Amiga's were neglected by sales staff
as there was more profit in selling PC's. Escom went bankrupt. leaving alot of people
with PC's with worthless a warranty, as they never paid the maintence contracting company.
Escom left a mess behind them and Amiga was caught up in it.
VIScorp???
Speculation starts over owership of the Amiga
VIScorp put in bid for Commodore
VIScorp abandon their bid for the Amiga
QuikPak put in abid
Gateway 2000 put in a bid
Gateway
In May 1997 Gateway bought Commodores assets from the liquidators of Escom mainly for it's patent portfolio,that they thought could come in handy in their future PC developments.
But after Gateway started to recive thousands of Emails and letters from
Amiga users from all over the world, soGateway decided to start a prodject to revive the Amiga.
Amiga International was set up as a subsidiary based in Germany working on Amiga sales and marketing while
Amiga Inc was set up in South Dakota USA to deal with research and devlopment of the Amiga mainly by licencing the Amiga Technology to third party companies.
The developments so far have been:-
- PPC, and 68k series chip,powered accelerator cards developed by Phase 5.
- Haage & Partner and Phase 5 to incorporate ppc compatibility in the new Amiga.
- OS3.5 under development based on Kiskstart 3.1 ROM chips
