The Amiga was originally designed by a team led by
Jay Miner at a company originally called Hi-Toro. The name was changed to Amiga primarily in order to appear before
Apple in the phone book.
Atari funded some of the early development, but when Amiga were looking to sell out to a larger company offered less than a dollar per
share.
Commodore were willing to go up to four twenty-five and ended up owning a small
Californian company with some pretty impressive custom
hardware. Amiga had been aiming at something that was effectively an incredible
games machine with some computing ability, while Commodore shifted the focus to a more general purpose machine hoping to mimic the success of the
Commodore 64.
Several Amiga models were released between 1985 and 1994.
1985 - Amiga 1000
1987 - Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 (see also Amiga 1500)
1990 - CDTV and Amiga 3000
1991 - Amiga 600
1992 - Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200
1993 - CD32
In 1994, Commodore US filed for Chapter 11 reorganisation. The Amiga division was bought by Escom in 1995, who went bust in 1997. Gateway then bought the assets, went through several business plans, gave up on all of them and sold the rights to two ex-employees at the end of 1999. Amiga are now developing an operating environment based on the TAO multi-platform OS which is supposed to be released in mid-2001 and is mainly aimed at developers of digital convergance systems rather than replacing existing desktop OSs.