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Amiga Is Back In Business
Used by permission of BootNet

After meditating for several years, the guru has surfaced again. Last year Gateway took a chance and purchased the patent rights to the Amiga computer. "After tens of thousands of e-mail, faxes, letters and calls from Amiga supporters, Gateway realized there was a huge, passionate community they didn't even know existed," according to Amiga spokesman Bill McEwen. This prompted the recent announcement at the World of Amiga conference last week in London, that Amiga, Inc. was officially open for business.

Abandoning the 68000 CPU family, the new Amiga will run on a new, as-of-yet-unnamed "multimedia" processor. The CPU is expected to run 5-10 times faster than today's PCs, while featuring 3D support capable of handling the display of 400M pixels per second (current high end video cards are in the neighborhood of 50-100M), four simultaneous MPEG video streams, high-speed Internet connections all while maintaining backwards compatibility. All this at a price of around $500 for some models.

Amiga OS version 5.0 is due by the end of next year, speculation abounds that the company may try to wrap in all or part of the Linux or Java operating systems in a new kernel version to be announced within the next month.

Since its 1985 debut, the Amiga has been plagued by poor management and marketing. Despite the perception that the Amiga is a "dead" platform today, it has no less than 30 monthly publications and a huge underground following of software developers and even a few hardware manufacturers. Since the Gateway purchase, there have been plenty of licenses from game companies and various applications being ported. Navigator, Opera, Quake, and Myst to name a few of the more popular titles.

The original Amiga was the world's first multimedia computer, sporting a Motorola 68000 CPU, and advanced on-board dedicated chips for image rendering and sound-generation. Even at a seemingly sluggish 7MHz, it could capture full screen 640x480 30fps motion video without dropping a frame. Try that with your current PC. It was a truly 32-bit preemptive multitasking environment with features that still have yet to be realized by Windows95. Shared libraries loaded and unloaded dynamically as the system required, and reusable functions for OS tasks were a core technology that Windows can only hope to accomplish with it's kludgy .DLL files, requiring an extra instance per application. Back when 100MB hard drives were a big deal, the Amiga OS had a file system capable of managing gigabytes. Wide SCSI was included in many models and located near the processor, circumventing bus circuitry that would otherwise bog down the throughput.