Believe or not, Gateway 2000 will buy bankrupt Amiga Technologies, gaining access to the multimedia features of the 1980's wonder-computer, the ill-fated Commodore Amiga.
"This acquisition is good news for Gateway and customers of AMIGA," said Rick Snyder, president and COO of Gateway 2000. "It will strengthen our intellectual property position and invigorate a company that has been a pioneer in multimedia solutions and operating systems technology."
The Amiga was extremely popular in Europe in the late 1980's and early 1990's and was light years ahead of the Macintosh and IBM compatibles of the time. The Amiga featured a multitasking operating system that ran on floppies and a 512K system, a hardware blitter, a 4096 color mode when 16 and 256 colors were the norm on PCs, integrated stereo sound, and full compatibility with NTSC and PAL video signals, making the machine a natural for video production work and arcade-quality games. There are still some games on the Amiga--such as Shadow of the Beast--that have never been topped on the PC or any "modern" video game systems. Or, to put it more succinctly: "Since the introduction of the AMIGA A1000 in 1985, AMIGA has represented the embodiment of the efficient use of memory and hard drive capacity, while pioneering industry developments in multimedia, 32-bit multitasking and auto-configuration." There you go.
The new company will be known as Amiga International and will likely target European markets, not the United States.
On a personal note, I owned several Amigas myself and still have an Amiga 500 with more software than I care to admit. I have been following the slow and painful death of this technology over the past few years from afar and am glad to see that someone reputable has picked it up.
