Here We Go Again!
by Ron Schwartz
AmiTech-Dayton Gazette, July 2003
Things are getting crazy again in the Amiga Community. Interestingly, as all kinds of crazy rumors surface, we never find out the truth about them before a new one pops up that is even more preposterous taking attention away from the last one. Along the way, all kinds of ridiculous things are going on with respect to equipment. It almost appears that the whole thing is a clever campaign to keep our attention away from the apparent lack of progress on the equipment we are all impatiently waiting for. A couple months ago a rumor surfaced that Bill McEwen was no longer the CEO of Amiga, Inc. While Bill and Fleecy denied it, there was, supposedly, a web site that had a copy of an affidavit, signed by McEwen, indicating that he was no longer the CEO of Amiga. Inc. At that point, Amiga, Inc. chose to ignore the issue and no further information was released so the only information was what was floating around in the discussion groups on the net. The name that surfaced back then as the new CEO was Gary Hare. The implication was that a Dutch company was the majority stockholder in Amiga, Inc. and putting Hare in charge was their initiative. None of this was ever verified or disproven either. Well, hold on to your seats, the new rumor is even more interesting. It also seems to have the same level of verification... none. The new rumor is that Jim Collas is now the CEO of Amiga, Inc. Remember Collas? He was a Vice President of Gateway when they bought Amiga. He was eventually made the CEO of the Amiga Division they established. Gateway initially indicated that they would develop a new Amiga operating system but would not include a new Amiga Computer in the product line. When Collas took over the operation, he initiated the development of a new Amiga. I believe it was also under Collas that the decision was made to change the new OS from using the QNX kernel to the Linux Kernel. Then Gateway made the decision to discontinue their Amiga operation. Rumors abounded that it was due to pressure from Microsoft, however, as usual, they were never verified. As Gateway placed their Amiga operation on the market, less the Amiga patents, Collas seemed to disappear, although the rumor mill tried to place him at the center of arranging the financing for the buy out of Gateway's Amiga operation. That appeared not to be true for a long time as he managed to maintain his anonymity, however, this new rumor will undoubtedly revive that possibility. You know, now that I think about it, could it be that all these ridiculous stories are just that? Could they be stories introduced into the media and subsequently into Amiga Community discussion sites to distract us from being impatient with the parties who are having problems getting parts of the next generation Amiga systems completed and fully introduced to the public.
Ready for some more confusion? Once again we have a Dutch company involved. I tried to gather all the information I could from sources on the internet and, unfortunately, none of them were very clear on certain aspects of what is really going on. First of all, as I recall, a couple years ago, or thereabouts, a lady began showing up at some of the European Amiga shows, demonstrating a new generation Commodore 64 for which, I believe, she coined the name Commodore One. Most recently, I have seen indications that she will be at AmiWest 2003 demonstrating the latest production version of the Commodore One. Suddenly, in the last few days, articles have shown up on the Amiga web sites talking about someone else introducing a new generation Commodore 64. In this case, however, it was not an individual but a Dutch PC manufacturer named Tulip Computers NV. Actually, the articles were really announcing the partnership between Tulip and Ironstone Partners Ltd. It turns out that Tulip apparently does own the Commodore name and trademark and Ironstone will be introducing, or reintroducing a lot of the old Commodore 64 games and software. Will they be developing new items for the 64? That was not at all clear from what I read. It was also not at all clear from the articles, and I read them all twice to be sure, whether Tulip would be introducing a new generation C-64 or if they were developing a new C-64 emulator for the PC. The main thrust of all the articles I read seemed to indicate that Tulip's main priority was licensing Ironstone to use the Commodore name and initiating lawsuits against anyone, including web sites that were using the Commodore name without a license. A major question is whether the Commodore One is a part of the Tulip operation or an independent operation that will have to be licensed to survive and, if so, will Tulip license it if it is a potential competitor. The final question has to be, why is there all this interest in the Commodore 64 anyway. Tulip claims that there is a potential market of 6 million active Commodore 64 users. I know that, like Amiga people, there are a lot of people that still have 64s and even a few that rely on them totally for their computing needs. But that last group is very few. The new generation Amigas and Amiga-like computers, like the Pegasos, being introduced are totally new computers as will the new versions of their operating systems be. There are some that will buy them regardless because of the name attached. For most of us, however, we will stay with Amiga or its clones only if they have the characteristics that were the reasons we have stuck with the Amiga for so long. In the case of the 64 clones, there appears to be no real advantage to the newer generation machines other than, perhaps, an increase in speed resulting from using newer CPUs. If the new 64s just give us a machine with the capabilities of a mid-8Os machine with more speed, I cannot see any possibility of it being successful in the marketplace.