Amiga Inc: 25 Questions answered by Bill McEwen

[Zetr0]

I am tring to track down information on the company KMOS before it aquired AMIGA's IP Wrights.

this is what i have so far..

Ownership of the Amiga line passed through several owners, from Escom of Germany in 1995, and then to U.S. PC clone maker Gateway in 1997, before being licensed to Amiga, Inc., a Washington company founded by former Gateway employees Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss in 2000.

On March 15, 2004, Amiga, Inc. announced that on April 23, 2003 it had transferred its rights over past and future versions of the Amiga OS (but not over other intellectual property) to Itec, LLC, later acquired by KMOS, Inc., a Delaware company.

On March 16, 2005, KMOS, Inc. announced that it had completed all registrations with the State of Delaware to change its corporate name to Amiga, Inc.

you know those names <<billy boy and fleece you fleecy>> crop up a lot dont they... how can two former gateway employes be CEO's through a further subsequent 3/4 other companies..

as i cannot find a dsiclosed sum for the price paid for Amiga Inc I personally think Gateway (whom sold the commodore brand of label for $22 million got *ahem pun here* fleecy mossed for the Amiga brand)

[snowman040]

Gateway never had Commodore, after Escom died i think Dutch company (Tulip Computers or so) bought rights and name. IIRC 25million USD was first sum paid by Escom for Commodore and Amiga. I can't remember how much Gateway paid for Amiga brand/IP/patents, but anyway - the price can be only what company is worth - and today it's close to nothing

The main problem in my cunning plan (apart from finding few million $ ) is the unknown zone of what Gateway owns now ? And how much is Amiga Inc standalone company (not being tied with legal s**t).

Would be enough to just buy Amiga Inc, and to get ownership on Amiga OS 1-3.x, Amiga classic hardware, future development.... etc...

There has been a rumor that Gateway intended to develop Amiga OS for x86 machines but M$ gave them big "no-no" and threatened them to brake Windows OEM contract with GW. If this contract is still valid, and GW is owner of Amiga OS classic or some part of it - then it would be a mess to solve (and would cost a lot of money)...

[Doc Mindie]

So, basicly...... what needs to be done is:

1: Raise money (if we got everyone in UK to donate £1, we would have close to £60mill, right?

2: Buy just about everything that was under C= in Feb. 1993. (Which includes, c64, c128, Amiga, production machinery, etc)

3: Get hold of some some visionaries (It's the Amiga, the userbase KNOWS what it want, so this shouldn't be a huge problem)

4: Employ Tony :look (What? his a damn fine coder, he's brought us WinUAE :P )

5: Make OS1 through 3.9 opensource so real oldschoolers can have something to play with

6: make some nice new hardware that'll make Intelbased compies look like what they are, expensive heaters.

7: get software companies to make/port their software to the new computer/OS.

8: Sue MicroSoft for bullying companies into NOT making software for our computer.

9: When MicroSoft seems to be loosing the courtbattle against us, make them either pay us £5.000.000.000.000 OR release every piece of their sourcecode to us.

10: Release the newly aquired Windows sourcecode into public domain

[DamienD]

... not much then

[Zetr0]

it seems like Doc mindie just found my TODO list....

[Doc Mindie]

WTF, Zetr0....... I've had this on me todo-list for YEARS :P

[Zetr0]

LOL a TODO list that has evolved in paralellism.... facinating....

but just to check... does it say in the top left corner made by zetr0 1993 aged 7 ?

just checking )

[pbareges]

according to the members list of this venerable assembly, we're about 900 lost souls !! soit divide 20millions by 900 and you get about an average of 22,000 by persons...let's say the amiga community is at large 5 times the members list of this forum ...it still means that the average donation would have to be 4400...let's forget about it! even if amiga inc is willing to sell only stuff of interest to us at 1m (i can't honestly think about anything below this level)...we need average 220 by user...i think even amiga inc knows that this copyright stuff is well overrated given the potential demand for it!! from a pure technical point of view, i would say it's worth it AS AN AMIGA FAN...but i don't think anyone is really willing to buy the asset at the accounting book value..so there's no market for it (best bid and best offer will never match!)

[snowman040]

I doubt there isn't a market for hardware company (even making USB lamps)... It's true that making classic HW/SW isn't a 'vision of future' but if Ainc delivered AOS4 and PPC machines 2 years ago, we could have us some nice live community today and company able to switch to actual HW platform like Apple did.

Donation is fine, but why that ? Ainc could sell stocks and get money that way... if they can sell their stocks that is

[Unknown_K]

From what I have seen once a company has been sold 3-4 times in a short period the older documents and software tend to get lost. While I am sure the source code for OS 3.1 is probably around, I would think the documentation of the older hardware and older OS is probably stuffed in a box at a previous owners wearhouse waiting for the trash bin.

Some well known people can raise money for a company even without a business plan (Woz of Apple II fame is one of them), the poeple who own Amiga now are nobodies so nobody will loan them a dime without one hell of a business plan.

I hope once Amiga Inc goes bankrupt somebody could but the patents and documentation for the A1200/4000 extremely cheap ($100K) and make a PCI card for an x86 system that the rest of us could use. Even this would probably not be worth it econically.

[viddi]

Why not start an attempt?
It´s crazy. But who cares?

We love a computer and we stick to it for decades.
So, getting money for it is the result of what we did and do.

Or in short:
It´s not more crazy than being an Amiga-Fan!

[Unknown_K]

If you want to throw away money, go ahead. I liked the original 68K Amigas, not the newer PPC stuff with Amiga stickers slapped on it.

[mr_a500]

So, basicly...... what needs to be done is:

No, no. Here's what needs to be done:

1. Raise petty cash. To raise the cash, Fred and Dizzy can give blowjobs for $1 (about the most any reasonable person should expect to pay). Once they have made $20,000 they can stop (...if they want).

2. Take said $20,000 and hire some petty thugs to go to Amiga Inc. and "make them an offer they can't refuse" for the rights to all Amiga properties.

3. Raise more cash (Fred and Dizzy can relax this time) by opening a fake charity - something where musicians will donate their services for a concert for the "poor underprivileged Amiga users of the world" (and singing something like "Don't you know it's Christmas... where's my new Amiga"). That should raise a few million.

4. Take few million and hire lawyers. I read somewhere that Commodore Amiga had the patent on the two-button mouse. Use lawyers to sue every computer maker that ever made a two-button mouse (and even the ones that didn't). This should raise a few billion.

5. Take billions and hire Dave Haynie to create new Amiga custom chips - not AAA ...that's old now. He can skip a few generations and go straight to the AAAAAAA chip (A7 for short). Also hire the top chip designers from Intel and IBM to help Dave.

6. Hire Steve Jobs (...or, if unavailable, his non-union Mexican equivalent) to run the new Amiga Corporation. Jobs (or his Mexican equivalent) will know how to market the Amiga and make it "cool" again. How about a super small "Amiga in your pocket" (Marketing tagline "The new Pocket Amiga is so small, it'll make your genitals look HUGE.").

7. Use leftover cash to hire hordes of miscellaneous petty thugs to go randomly to competing companies and "take care of business". (sort of what Microsoft does)

...and that should just about do it.

[DamienD]

ROFL PMSL

Nice game plan (and probably more realistic than the rest of the shite floating about)

[Unknown_K]

Will the AAAAAA! chip be called the Fonzy?

[Paul]

Ermmm...OK

[Doc Mindie]

the 7A chipset will have the customchips Kylie (Sound), Britney (memory/blitter/copper) and Madonna (Gfx) andthen there'll be a new custom 3Dchip called Milla.

The expansion ports (which should be called ZorroXI) Will now be called "Batman" instead, due to their mysterious way of managing to install cards by themselves and do it in the shadows.

Software shipped with the A7-based AmigaG3 (Generation 3) will include an updated version of AmigaBASIC by MicroSoft, now able to do even LESS on MORE POWERFUL computer than ever before, before it crashes.Also shipped with the new OS, is EdEd, a texteditor which lets you write sourcecode for useless texteditors, and very little else.

New OS features: Upon poweron, the A7 chipset will hack MicroSoft's Linuxservers and format them using "Format Drive MicroSoft: Name Dumbarse NSFS" NSFS is short for "No Shit on this FileSystem" and prevents any program made by MicroSoft from EVER being copied/installed onto the HD ever again.

[blade002]

Bill McEwen is about as useful as a turd floating in a toilet bowl. So McEwen, just piss off.

[mr_a500]

the 7A chipset will have the customchips Kylie (Sound), Britney (memory/blitter/copper) and Madonna (Gfx) andthen there'll be a new custom 3Dchip called Milla.

Madonna's too old to be the graphics chip. She can be the chip that handles "disk" access.

It's best if Britney is the 512Mb graphics chip because then the 1Gb version can be "Fat Britney" and the 2Gb version the "Fatter Britney".

[Doc Mindie]

Paula handles diskaccess now, so that would be Kylie

the new gfx-chip then...... Christina. Prepare for some lightly dressed sexoriented gfx :P