History of the Amiga


Commodore was founded in 1954.  Its full name was Commodore Business
Machines, or CBM for short, and its first role was as a typewriter
repair business.

Commodore's first computer was released in 1977, and this was the
Commodore PET.  This was a huge success and riding on the wave of
popularity the world famous C64 was released.  With its groundbreaking
64k of RAM it stormed the market and was the base of all US and UK
games and continued right up until 1989.

In 1982, a group of computer enthusiasts got together to design
what they believed would be the "ultimate" machine.  The three
men responsible for this amazing feat were Jay Minor, Dave Morse
and RJ Mical, all of whom had had computer building experience.
They got backing from three dentists in the US and set up a small
workshop in Silicon Valley, where they built their super machine
under the pretence of being joystick manufacturers.  In fact,
they were so secretive that they gave all of their chips special
code names in case their phones were tapped.  These code names were
their girlfriends' names, and this is where the tradition of Amiga
chips having names comes from.  hence the company took on the name
Amiga, which being spanish for "girl friend" was an appropriate
name.

When they needed an operating system, the company gave the task to a
company called Metacomco who only had experience of writing operating
systems for mainframe computers.  Hence when they saw the power of the
Amiga system they became very excited and gave AmigaDOS the multitasking
power of a mainframe system.

However, the money began to run out, and the business was taken over
by Commodore.  At this stage Commodore did little but fund the three
designers, but nonetheless it was a very important step.

The first Amiga, the A1000, was released in 1985 and excited many
the world over, but due to its £1500 price tag the sales were not
huge.  It was not until the release of the A500 later that year
that the Amiga really took off.

At this time, the IBMs and clones were huge, monochromatic machines
with the amazingly unfriendly MS-DOS and no Windows.  The Amiga,
on the other hand, had 8bit stereo sound, 4,096 colours and a good
user-friendly operating system.  Now it is 1995 and the PC is only
just getting anywhere near the standards of the old A500!

Commodore's main rivals at the time were Atari, but the war between
Amiga and Atari was a short one and it ws one quite clearly won by
the Amiga.  The Amiga was more expensive than the Atari, but it was
always a better machine and in the end it was that that won the
fight.

Commodore continued to develop the Amiga platform to its full
potential, with the release of machines such as the A2000 which
was at the cutting edge of technology.

However, when the CDTV was released, even the Amiga community
were shocked that Commodore had included the old ECS chipset,
which is the same as the old A500's, and that it was not running
Workbench 2.

Subsequently, the machine failed, even though it was the first
ever CD-ROM computer and true multimedia platform.  Commodore
lost faith in Amiga technology and decided to start making PCs.

Commodore therefore started a large, expensive and ambitious
advertising campaign, they built new factories and opened new
workshops.  But although Commodore's PCs were very popular, they
lost a lot of money and with the advent of the 32-bit Motorola
chips, Commodore gave up making PCs to concentrate on the Amiga
platform again.

It is from the failure of the Commodore PCs that Commodore began
the long, winding road into liquidation.  They produced the A4000,
which, although good, was not good enough, and they just managed
to get the A1200 out in time for the Christmas rush.  However,
the management only ordered a few of these machine to be made, and
they sold out from the shops very quickly indeed.  Because of the lack
of supply, Commodore is reckoned to have lost $350,000,000 that year,
and if you have seen a Commodore profit-and-loss graph, it looks
more like the White Cliffs of Dover.

The management were the ones to blame.  All along they had been saying
that there was absolutely no way that they could produce any new
chips.  Then, they refused to make more than 100,000 Amigas for the
Christmas rush.

On April 29th 1994 Commodore and many of its subsidiaries filed for
bankrupcy in the Bahamas.

After that, Amiga owners went through a year of suspense and
waiting.  Finally, almost exactly a year later, on the 21st April
1995, Commodore and its assets were bought by Escom AG of Germany.

It had been a long year for Amiga owners, waiting to find out what
would happen to their favorite machines, and many did not make it
and transfered to other systems, believing the Amiga dead.

However, Escom's buy-out of the Amiga was a godsend - arguably the
best thing that happened to the Amiga in its existence.  Escom
pronounced the Amiga a "superior technology" and set up a
subsidiary company, Amiga Technologies Gmbh, who would be in
control of researching and developing the Amiga.  Escom also said
that they saw the Amiga as the only true multimedia machine and
that they saw the Amiga as the pathway to making Escom a multimedia
company, rather than just a PC company.

The name Commodore was completely separated from the Amiga.
Commodore is now the name used on Escom's high-end Pentium PCs which
are sold to resellers for distribution in places other than the
Escom range of shops.  Incidentally, Escom do intend to sell the Amiga
through their high-street stores as well as distributing them through
the usual channels, i.e. to mail order companies and computer shops,
in order to maximise distribution.

Converted on 22 Aug 1996 with RexxDoesAmigaGuide2HTML by Michael Ranner.