Amiga - History

History

Development of the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner, developer of the Atari 800 chip set, as the principal hardware designer of Amiga Corporation. It was initially intended to be a next generation video game machine, but was redesigned as a general purpose computer after the North American video game crash of 1983. A prototype of the full computer was shown to the public for the first time at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1984. In order to bring the design to market Commodore International bought Amiga Corporation and funded development. The first model was released in 1985 as simply "The Amiga from Commodore", later to be retroactively dubbed the Amiga 1000. The following year the Amiga product line was expanded with the introduction of two new models: the Amiga 2000 for high-end graphics and business use, and the Amiga 500 for home use. Commodore later released other Amiga models, both for low-end gaming use and high-end productivity use.

In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T. However, Escom in turn went bankrupt in 1997. The Amiga brand was then sold to another PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, which had announced grand plans for it. However, in 2000, Gateway sold the Amiga brand without having released any products. The current owner of the trademark, Amiga, Inc, licensed the rights to sell hardware using the Amiga or AmigaOne brand to computer vendors Commodore USA, Eyetech Group, Ltd. and A-Eon Technology CVBA. Unofficial AmigaOne clones were developed by Italian hardware company, Acube.