May 9, 2007
Will the Amiga rise from the ashes?
Back in the mid 1980s just as the Mac was beginning to make its presence felt in the world of desktop publishing another computer with a graphical user interface appeared on the scene - the Commodore Amiga.
Unlike the early Mac, the Amiga came with a multi-taking operating system and offered colour graphics. Also unlike the Mac it was marketed largely as a gaming platform and failed to penetrate industry to anything like the degree the Macintosh did, with a few notable exceptions.
In many ways the Amiga prefigured the world of digital media but the era of the the web has not been kind to the 1980s powerhouse.
After dozens of missteps and business mistakes Commodore eventually went bust.
Surprisingly this didn't quite spell the end for the Amiga. The brand name and intellectual propety have been flung around from business to business and every few years promises of a new machine are made. In the meantime the Amiga's market share has dropped to become a rounding error but it has lived on through upgrades and the sheer fanaticism of its remaining userbase.
None of the promises to relaunch the Amiga ever came to anything. Until now. The technology's current owner Amiga Inc. has announced two new computers running the new AmigaOS 4 developed by Hyperion.
The new machine will come in two varieties, one based on the Freescale MPC8349E SoC (system on a chip) PowerPC CPU running at between 400 and 667MHz costing US$489 and one, much more powerful machine, which will be based on a multi-core 64-bit Power CPU from PA Semi. The very family of chips, incidentally, that Apple recently abandoned. Amiga Inc. has stated that the high-end machine will be faster than any PowerPC-based machine Apple ever produced.
So there you have it. The Amiga returns.
Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as that.
It remains to be seen just what the new Amiga's target market will actually be. Is there room for a fourth platform alongside Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux? Is it too late, coming a staggering fifteen years after the last Amiga computer was released? The Inquirer, for one, is sceptical, noting on-going legal troubles over intellectual property ownership, saying:
It looks suicidal, but there's a majestic inevitability to it all. Now, there's a trans-Atlantic battle brewing over the corpse of the Amiga, between North America - Amiga, Inc. in the USA and ACK Software Controls in Canada - versus Europe: Hyperion in Belgium and ACube in Italy. Whoever wins, it's a safe bet they're not going to make much money out of it. At the end of the day, the only people who really stand to lose are the loyal Amiga fans.
Amiga loyalists are discussing the news here: http://www.amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7310.
Posted by: Jason Walsh
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Former designer turned journalist Jason Walsh writes about design,
culture, politics and technology and has contributed to a wide range
of newspapers and magazines in the UK, the United States and Ireland.
He studied fine art at the University of Ulster and currently divides
his time between Dublin and Belfast.
