Commentary
New Products From . . . Amiga?
LAS VEGAS -- At CES, scouting for new products, 0ne of the names you definitely don't expect to hear is Amiga. Surely that's ancient history, a footnote in the family tree of the PC. Yeah but don't say that around Bill McEwen. He's president of Amiga and he's announcing a new write-once-run-anywhere development platform, AmigaAnywhere 2. And even better -- or more bizarre - he says he's got new Amiga hardware coming, too.LAS VEGAS -- At CES, scouting for new products, 0ne of the names you definitely don't expect to hear is Amiga. Surely that's ancient history, a footnote in the family tree of the PC. Yeah but don't say that around Bill McEwen. He's president of Amiga and he's announcing a new write-once-run-anywhere development platform, AmigaAnywhere 2. And even better -- or more bizarre - he says he's got new Amiga hardware coming, too.The history of Amiga is a rich one. The Amiga OS and its graphics capabilities were way ahead of their time. But then Microsoft came along. The PC market went to Wintel and Amiga was eventually sold to Gateway.
It wasn't a bad deal. Amiga had some important intellectual property, and was just one of several software companies Gateway scooped up, said McEwen during a meeting at a CES event Sunday night. That was when McEwen joined Amiga, in fact -- then Gateway changed direction. McEwen bought the rights to the Amiga name and IP and wound up running a PC company you probably thought was defunct.
More Insights
White Papers
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
Reports
More >>Webcasts
- Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
- Outsourcing Security: What Every Potential Cloud Security Customer Should Know
The years since have been quiet ones. He brought out a first version of AmigaAnywhere, which lets developers write applications using Amiga's strong graphics tools and then run them on a variety of platforms. Today that includes Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux (both desktop and embedded. Soon, he said, those will be joined by Symbian, and support for the Macintosh is nearing the end of the pipeline. That list pretty well covers not only desktop computing, but mobile phones and devices as well.
And soon, it will include new Amiga hardware, according to McEwen. It will be Power PC-based, and run a new version of the Amiga operating system - "an OS that can do everything that Windows can do in 1.2MB," he said.
McEwen's struggles with the business side of developing of new versions of the Amiga OS are documented in a open letter addressed to the Amiga user community on the
Related Reading
| To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy. | |
|
|
T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting! |
Subscribe to RSSResource Links
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows












