This article is about the first Amiga company. For other uses, see Amiga (disambiguation).

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. The initial start-up financing of Amiga Corporation was provided by three dentists in Florida, who later regained their investment once Commodore bought the company.

To raise money for the Lorraine project, Amiga designed and sold joysticks 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. However, much of their working capital was supplied by Atari, who gave them $500,000 in return for a one-year license to the resulting chipset design.

During this period a downturn started in the video game business that would soon turn into an outright rout known as the Great Videogame Crash of 1983. By the end of the year, Atari was losing about $1 million a day, and their owners, Warner Brothers, became increasingly desperate to sell the company. For some time, no one was interested.

Meanwhile, at Commodore International a fight was brewing between Jack Tramiel, the president, and Irving Gould, the primary shareholder. Tramiel was pressing the the development of a 32-bit machine to replace their earlier Commodore 64 and derived machines, fearing a new generation of machines like the Apple Macintosh would render the 64 completely obsolete. The fighting continued until Tramiel was summerily dismissed in January 1984.

At first, Tramiel followed his plan and started development of a new 32-bit design. He soon learned of Warner's intent to sell Atari, which he purchased in May for a bargain price, primarily for their overseas manufacturing and distribution system. It was only after the purchase that he learned of Amiga, and decided to use their chipset instead of developing their own. 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, Tramiel 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.

From this point on the former Amiga Corporation was a division of Commodore. Over the next few years Commodore's management proved to be as annoying as Atari's, and most of the team members left or were fired.

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.

See also

• Amiga computer
• Amiga, Inc. — current holder of the Amiga trademark

Defunct computer companies of the United States | Home computer hardware companies | Computer hardware companies | Defunct computer hardware companies | Commodore Amiga

Amiga Corporation