Amiga, Inc.

Amiga, Inc. is a company that holds some trademarks and other assets associated with the Amiga personal computer (originally developed by Amiga Corporation).

Brief history of Amiga brand

In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari, Inc. staffers, set up another chip-set project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga, Inc.), where they could have some creative freedom. Atari, Inc. went into contract with Amiga for licensed use of the chipset in a new high end game console and then later for use in a computer system. $500,000 was advanced to Amiga to continue development of the chipset. In a breach of contract Amiga negotiated with Commodore International two weeks prior to the contract deadline of June 30, 1984. In August 1984, Atari Corporation, under Jack Tramiel, sued Amiga for breach of contract. The case was settled in 1987 in a closed settlement. (See "Amiga Corporation".)

In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who in turn went bankrupt in 1996. The Amiga brand was then sold to another PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, which had announced grand plans for it. However, in 1999, Gateway sold Amiga to Amino Development for almost 5 million dollars. Gateway still retained ownership to all Amiga patents.

Amiga, Inc. (South Dakota)

Amiga, Inc. of South Dakota was a personal computer company, originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Gateway 2000, Inc, predating the Amiga, Inc. of Washington. It was based upon the intellectual property of the German company Escom AG, and had descended from the original Commodore Amiga personal computer series from the 1980s and 1990s.

History

This instance of Amiga, Inc. was incorporated in South Dakota in 1997, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Gateway 2000, Inc. (later renamed Gateway, Inc.) After acquiring from the German company Escom AG certain Amiga-related intellectual property assets in 1997, Gateway decided to keep the patents, and try to run Amiga, Inc. as a separate unit. It was originally intended to develop two new operating systems, announced as "AmigaOS 4" and "AmigaOS 5". Amiga, Inc. was initially led by Jeff Schindler, then by Jim Collas, and later by Tom Schmidt. Other employees included Darreck Lisle (event coordinator), Marylin Flint (operations manager), Joe Torre (senior engineer) and Kelli Newby, née Macomber, (executive administrative assistant). Independent subcontractors who also briefly worked (without being hired) for Amiga, Inc. included William "Bill" McEwen and Barrie Jon "Fleecy" Moss.