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Amino Got More Than the Amiga Name
vigi writes "Despite early announcements, it seems Gateway sold pretty much anything Amiga to Amino. As this executive update points out, Amino (soon to be renamed Amiga Corporation) acquired all trademarks, inventory, licenses, domain names and the Amiga OS."
- Multitasks
- Offers 3D graphics and lots of colours
- Is widely useful for many kinds of tasks
and costs less than $2000.Of course, you can get a Milan or Medusa for probably around that price...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
(In this case, the prize is probably bancrupcy.)
Oh, goody! I can't wait for the next game. I hear it's "Musical Chairs", with a random number of chairs being yanked away each time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They can drive it to bankruptcy, sell it to a PC clone maker, market into oblivion, miss out on a chip technology transition, and sell it again to some guys in a garage - and it JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
It won't die, but it's walking around with knives, chainsaws, and barbed wire sticking to it's zombie hide, and there are gaping holes from the BFG blasts it's taken. I mean, geez!, this is getting to be worse than a bad horror movie - or to use the '80s metaphor, a bad episode of Dallas or Dynasty.
Alright, Amino - we'll give you until the end of CES. Then put up or shut up, I'm begging you!
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I wrote this essay almost five years ago. Some of you may enjoy it.
Personally, I wish the puppeteers would stop coming forward, making the corpse flop around a bit and proclaiming, "Look! It lives!"
I'm really tired of these charlatans playing off (what's left of) the loyalty of the Amiga crowd. If you're going to do something with it, do something with it, and stop jerking people around.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Rumor at the time that Gateway bought the corpse of Amiga was that they were mainly interested in the Patent portfolio. Being a 'screwdriver factory' type clone builder, Gateway was always at a complete disadvantage when dealing with companies like Intel, IBM, Microsoft, etc. which have a large Patent portfolio. Buying a company which had a portfolio is an easy way for a company to level that playing field some.
It would be interesting to see how the Commodore/Amiga patent portfolio is transferred with this sale. I would guess that Gateway may have already gotten all they needed to out of the Patents and felt it was time to cash back out.
Amiga's main advantages were in its hardware (which was cheap, for the time, and powerful)
Unfortunately, some of the design compromises made to make the Amiga cheap at the time came back to haunt it later when the price of hardware changed. Too much of the hardware shortcuts that seemed cool in 1985 made it difficult for Commodore to keep up with other systems by the early 1990's. Too many things were tightly interwoven around things like NTSC/PAL video, which became a problem when cheap high resolution SVGA displays in the PC/Mac world changed people's expectations when it came to non-interlaced resolution and palate size. PC/Mac hardware started including powerful graphics coprocessors and stereo sound. With the advent of huge clock speeds, memory sizes, caches and hard drives, the PC made up in brute force with cheap off the shelf components what had once required custom hardware. Commodore/Amiga users had to deal with higher prices due to a smaller market for software and add-on peripherals such as network cards, SCSI adapters, etc.
As for the community, unfortunately, like most semi-grass-roots movements (Mac, OS/2 and Linux for example), the Amiga community was saddled with their share of the bad sort of zealots. That probably isn't such a big deal though, because even the 'establishment' such as DOS/Windows have their own problems in that area.
It was fairly unique, as far as home computing went.
To say it was 'stable' is a misnomer. The software running on them was also simpler (and I saw enough meditating amigas..)
They had thousands of colors, not millions (4096 in certain graphics modes)
And the stereo digital sound was great too. It took the IBM compatable world several years to catch up with that idea.. the *only* way an a500 could produce sound (other than using the floppy drive) was digitally, through one of it's 2 dac's... a concept that the rest of the world completely missed. THey spent all their time on FM synthesis and other wierd things....
I must say. The magical quality this machine had is unparallelled. Never has a machine caught my attention like the amiga. It was completely mystical.
And even today, the graphics on the amiga 500 have a certain quality to them that I've never seen on another machine. The mac comes close... I think it has to do with the way they blend colors.. but I'm not sure, and certainly not an expert.
And the sound was superb.
Well it's good to know that the Amiga will live on in Press Releases and Executive Statements.
LONG LIVE AMIGA!
No, that question is right on target. As somebody who actually went thru the " good old days " of ..Why?
non-interoperability, i quite agree. So the question really is
One answer may come from the shift in home entertainment/game console systems. Amiga needs to compete from the ground up to be competive up with todays PC..and for what gain? a (small) piece of the sub $1000. market ? Why waste 5 million on a
(old) name brand... No way Jose...
Suppose however, that you were after a much bigger market..one dominated by only three or four players..like Sony, Sega and Nintendo. Now dumping 5 million into brand recoginition is a drop in the bucket compared to the potential payoff.
The Amiga home system... a nice American name..good technological references..viola ! instant player in a big field. Before you hurt yourself laughing...think of the Dreamcast in sheeps clothing. After all..the X-Box stills needs a home.
Yet another round of people saying, "Here we go again."
I'm wondering if the only reason that Slashdot still covers the Amiga is that it makes good drama. Y'know, kinda like a soap opera for the keyboard-enabled culture. There can't be THAT many amiga owners anymore, can there? Do 500 Amiga owners and falling deserve this kind of attention on slashdot?
I should've known better than to believe that Gateway would have actually created a new desktop for people that was different than the generic PC they usually produce. Of course, the Amiga community never did learn their lesson with ESCOM, which pretty much did the same thing, apparently trying to get people to buy ESCOM branded PC's. And now everyone is supposed to take Amino on faith, that they will actually do something, anything, and release a computer that lives up to the AMIGA name.
Sorry Amino. It's not you. After following the Amiga story for 5 or 6 years, I know better. There's no way in hell that you can create a decent machine that lives up to the Amiga name. Even if you release a computer it better be fast, and it better capture the excitement that the Amiga did a decade ago, otherwise we'll just be laughing ourselves to the grave.
What an embarassment.
What does Amino do...or produce..or whatever. I am looking forward to new Amigas. However I don't know if they could ever be as groundbreaking as the originals were. When they came out they had a unique GUI that was stable, supported multitasking, used millions of colors and proved to be incredible powerful at a wide range of tasks, even production quality 3D, from a machine costing less than $2000! I just hope that no matter who owns Amiga the spirit of the machines stays alive.
When I got my hands on an Amiga 500 back in 1987 (has it been that long?) the machine was incredibly powerful compared to anything else I had ever tried.
Finally, I abandoned the Amiga in 1994 for educational purposes, even though I viewed the Amiga as a more powerful and user friendly platform.
Today however: I don't think there is room for Amiga hardware even loosely based on the original technology. There are numerous reasons for this
To sum it all up: I don't really think there is room for a new Amiga. If there will be a new Amiga I mainly think it's going to be an entirely new computer, with some ideas and behavior preserved from the old one. I hardly think it will attract the original Amiga owners.
http://virtuelvis.com/
At this rate the amiga OS will be out of *copyright* by the time the make another amiga.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Maybe it's because the Amiga does certain things "right" that no one has gotten right since?
Yeah, that's it: the total package. It's not stapled together. No disconcerting shifts between text and graphics screens, no 50-foot barrier wall between apps with a GUI and apps without. The GUI is integrated, but lightweight enough that it isn't at all like having a 12MB X server running all the time. The interface looks and works consistent, MENUS ARE ALL GENERATED IN THE SAME PLACE, there's drag-n-drop, the system is configurable, and so on. There's cross-application scripting. There's interrupt trickery and display hacks to make things FEEL faster than they are (hence the illusion so many Amiga lunatics quote as gospel, that an A500 is faster than a Pentium). It boots QUICKLY; indeed, loading applications, opening and closing windows, and switching workspaces are all trivial and don't involve lots of swapping to disk.
It seems like nostalgia, even to us. But it's actually a thinly disguised disappointment that we are, in 2000, NOT fifteen years more advanced than what the Amiga was in 1985. In an age with machines with 10 times the pixels, 100 times the memory, 1000 times the MIPs, and 10000 times the disk space, to the Amiga user's eye, modern software has yet to CATCH UP with the combination of integration, simplicity, power, and efficiency we had two decades back. Therein lies the nostalgia: they literally don't make 'em like they used to.
Rant: we continue to look to Amiga-derived startups for The Way Forward, because no one else particularly cares. The Linux crowd is SUPPOSED (according to the hype) to be providing some grand unified theory of computing, but for every Linux shortcoming someone points out, we get either "write it yourself" or an explanation of why we don't want it. I thought it was the Microsoft way to give excuses instead of Products People Want.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I think this means that Amiga has officially had more incarnations than Doctor Who.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
After opening up the shring wrap on my new BeOS I couldn't believe how fast and responsive the machine was. Made my humble AMD K6-2 350 run like a champ.
:)
I have never done audio/video production, but to me it is a very solid OS that has proven to be quiet stable.
I believe that if Amiga was to make a come back, it would have a hard time matching what BeOS has, and further more not only having to compete with BeOS, but deal with the loss of there cult following to other more interesting Hobby OS's. (I have the privilige of working on a Linux box at work all day, so I can't really refer to it as a hobby box anymore
$.02
http://www.amino1.net/
Not much there, tho'.
Look, I know we're all getting fed up with the problems at Amiga, the missed promises, the bad feeling. So am I.
BUT...
Gateway bought Amiga to strip the patents, then got a lot of people asking what they planned to do with regard to new Amigas. Hence the delays, the confusion and the rather half-hearted approach. It wasn't what they really wanted to do, and it showed.
I don't know Bill McEwen, but I DO know Fleecy Moss reasonably well and I'd trust him. I can think of almost no-one with more drive, more ideas, more enthusiasm. He loves the Amiga and wants to do something with it. And I'd say he's got as much chance as anyone of pulling this one off.
Maybe nothing will happen, just like before. Maybe I'm a dreamer. But this gives the Amiga the best chance it's had for years, as it's controlled by people who know and love it.
Give this one a chance please, guys. Don't be cynical until this bunch have proved themselves worthy of only cynicism. If they fail, I'll join you in the moaning. But they don't deserve that yet.
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
As exciting as the idea that yet another handsome stranger will come and sweep the poor destitute Amiga (which means girlfriend in Spanish, I think) and save her, I think that it is really time for all of us Amigans to realise that she is well and truly dead.
The crucial upgrade that Commodore missed was the upgrade to PowerPC. Some companies came up with PowerPC cards, but they were all horrendously late, poorly constructed, had non existant support and always had underpowered chips compared with what was currently available on the market.
The Amiga has basically seen no development at all since Commodore went belly up. From the hardware standpoint, absolutely nothing, from software, well, OS 3.5 could have been thrown together by a group of open source people (who would have done a better job). Trying to make anything new from circa 1992 parts would be completely unworkable, even if you had lots of money (like say, Gateway).
Gateway was a huge disappointment. With huge amounts of funds available, they did basically nothing with the Amiga. Every week you would hear something completely new and different. New PPC Amigas, Amigas on a card in your PC, new Amigas with the Magical Mystery Chip (transmeta was the best rumor), new console type systems, then no new hardware, but a new AmigaOS, then no AmigaOS, but Amiga environment running on top of Linux. It made you think that Amiga, the company, consisted of five guys that went to lunch each week and came up with a new crazy idea to throw out to us hopefulls they drew up on paper napkins. Hell, I have even seen some of those paper napkin drawings on websites heralded as "the New Amiga".
What I really wish would happen is that the AmigaOS would be released to Open Source so that if there is anything still usefull or interesting in the code, it can be used for things such as window managers, etc.
Even though part of me wants to hope that something could come of this, I have to admit to myself that the Amiga is gone forever.
This is quite sad because, as much as I love Linux, I realise that it is not suited to be a home users OS. The Amiga was great for this, with it's GUI and standardised install program (which I loved, gave you 3 levels to choose from: expert, intermediate, beginner. I wish Linux had such a standardised way to install.) What the world desparetely needs now is a good home system, that does multimedia as well as the Amiga did (Windows will always suck at this, no matter how hard they try, as I found out with one of those Gateways that are designed to be multimedia), has as straightforward and simple interface as the Amiga, and as kick ass graphics as the Amiga.
But unfortunately we live in a world in which only one OS matters and we have to live with mediocracy.