Amiga Corporation

Amiga Corporation was a computer company formed in the early 1980s as '''Hi-Toro'''. It is most famous for having developed the Amiga computer, code named '''Lorraine'''.

HISTORY

In the early 1980s Jay Miner , along with other Atari staffers, had become fed up with management and decamped. They set up another chip-set project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga ), where they could have some creative freedom. There, they started to create a new 68000 -based games console, codenamed Lorraine, that could be upgraded to a full-fledged computer. To raise money for the Lorraine project, Amiga designed and sold Joystick s and game cartridges for popular game consoles such as the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision , as well as an odd input device called the Joyboard , essentially a joystick the player stood on.

In 1984 Warner Brothers grew tired of Atari, and sold the company off to the only person interested, Jack Tramiel , formerly head of Commodore International . Prior to Tramiel's purchase of the company, Atari had signed a licensing deal with Amiga that granted them use of the Lorraine's custom chips, the very chips that made Amiga's computer so powerful. Tramiel wanted to use these chips in his forthcoming ST computer, but true to form he wanted those chips at a bargain-basement price. Knowing Amiga was strapped for cash as a result of the crash of the video game market, he held back a scheduled payment Atari was due to pay Amiga in an effort to force it to renegotiate the contract with terms more favorable to Atari.

This strategy backfired when Commodore bought Amiga and canceled the contract, citing Atari's late payment as the reason. In the end, Atari was forced to use off-the-shelf components to complete the ST's design. (A lawsuit over the Amiga license dragged on for years, only to be abruptly settled. Terms were not disclosed, but many speculate the settlement involved Atari obtaining Amiga development systems for use with the Lynx handheld game system.)

EXTERNAL LINKS

On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore (2005), Variant Press. A book describing the formation of Amiga Corporation and subsequent acquisition by Commodore.

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Amiga Corporation