Amiga gets second chance from Gateway

Gateway will revive the Amiga brand by reintroducing the technology for a range of information appliances and PCs, two years after the company acquired the name.

The supplier surprised many observers on 31 March 1997 by purchasing the remnants of the 14-year-old Amiga technology, which was manufactured by the defunct Commodore Business Machines, but promised at the time to resurrect the brand.

Jim Collas, president of Amiga, who joined the unit from the parent company where he was senior vice president of global products, revealed that Linux would be used as the platform for the Amiga operating environment (AOE).

"The main driving objective of our plans is to come out with a truly original product that is capable of driving the next computer revolution," he added.

AOE will run on information appliances such as LCD tablets, internet terminals, set-top boxes, games machines and PCs. The operating system will only run applications written in Java.

The Amiga Multimedia Convergence Computer (MCC), due to ship in November, will include DVD, high-performance three-dimensional graphics, ethernet-based home networking, digital and traditional analogue video and audio, and universal serial bus (USB) ports for digital peripherals.

Although Amiga refused to disclose which processor would be used in the MCC, the vendor revealed that it would choose one that was specifically tuned for use with Linux and Java.