Death of the Amiga

discussion on Amiga. We're going to be cramming a whole lot of history in this episode, because we focused a lot on the politics that surrounded the launch of the Amiga one thousand and then the Amiga five hundred and two thousand. By the time the Amiga five hundred in two thousand had debuted in seven, the story of Amiga had changed considerably. The original people who had led the design of that first computer, that Amigo one thousand, we're

pretty much out of the picture. There still a few Amiga engineers and developers who were around and we're working at Commodore, but they had been more or less incorporated into Commodore's larger structure. The Amiga five hundred debuted at a pretty attractive price, It was sold for the princely sum of six hundred dollars. If we use an inflation calculator to figure out how much that would be in today's money, that would be close to about one thousand,

five hundred seventy bucks. The Attari st had debuted at one hundred dollars more, but it also came with a monitor, and that was for the monochromatic version. If you wanted the color monitor version, it was three hundred dollars more than the Amiga five hundred. But again, if you bought an Amiga five hundred, you had also get a monitor, so you could also use a television if you really

wanted to. Unlike the Amiga one thousand, which Commodore had only sold in computer stores, the Amiga five hundred actually found its way onto retail shelves like in sears. The lower cost and the superior performance in graphics and audio, and the wider availability made it a popular gaming platform, particularly over in Europe. It did okay in the United States, it always did better in Europe than did in the US.

Developers like Bill Williams would create games that could leverage the specialized chip set in the Amiga five hundred to accomplish stuff that left the Macintosh and the IBM compatible machines of that era in the dust. It was around this time that I first got a chance to play

stuff on an Amiga. I was immediately floored with how advanced gaming was on those machines compared to the Apple two that I had at home, or even the IBM two eighty six that my father was using to write books, and whenever he wasn't writing, I was playing games on it. It was like nine day when you compared the Amiga to other computers. At that time, I could not understand why the Amiga was not the dominant computer in the

consumer market. But to be fair, I was also twelve years old, so my capacity for understanding the complexities of corporate maneuvers was even less developed than it is now, and that's saying something, but I was incredibly impressed. Some games, like Williams's title mind Walker, would allow the user to run other applications in the background, so you could actually

take advantage of the Amiga's multitasking capabilities. But soon among game developers it became common practice to create software that would tap directly into Amiga's hardware. Bypassing the operating system and locking the computer into a single task just playing a really awesome game. It was a justifiable trade off, and I'm pretty sure most gamers didn't really care. Other games like Defender of the Crown showcase the Amiga's ability

to present high resolution, colorful images. Defender of the Crown was a strategy game in which you would lead armies in a contest for the Crown of England. That game launched as an Amiga exclusive, but later ports of the game made their way onto lots of other platforms, including the IBM PC and even the Nintendo Entertainment System. There were lots of other games coming out for the Amiga

five hundred. The computer system gave developers the chance to make really creative choices without being restrained by the hardware limitations that were everywhere else. So you had games like Shadow of the Beast, which included the ability to incorporate up to twelve layers of parallax scrolling, and you might wonder what the heck does that mean. Well, parallax scrolling is when you can create different speeds of scrolling for different layers of an image on a screen. Gives you

the overall impression of movement. So a lot of side scrolling games would use this to create a more compelling experience. It's kind of an old trick. You have stuff that's in the foreground so close to the viewer moving at a faster speed than stuff that's in the background, and it gives you the sense that the stuff that's in the background actually is further away. That's why moving past it takes longer. And uh the uh. The Shadow of the Beast could actually have up to twelve layers of this.

That's pretty much unheard of during that time. The popular game series Limmings also debuted on Amiga gosh. I love that game. This was one of the games that my

friend had. Limings. That game, in case you're not familiar, was one where you have a group of critters Limmings, little green haired creatures that it was your job to move them from one part of a level to the exit of that level, and you did this by giving different limings various jobs, like they might have to dig through earth to get to the end part, or they might have to parachute to get down to another level and build a platform back up so that the other

Limings can get down and if you lost too many lemmings because they were very fragile, then you would fail the level. And I just I can still remember the sound they would make when you would tell them to self destruct. They do a little no and then pop out of existence with confetti. But while games were starting to take off of the Amiga fire, the system did

not become a mega hit in the US. A different product would really show off how powerful the Amiga platform was, and it would ultimately become a combination of an expansion card and some software, and it was called the Video Toaster. And this was for the Amiga two thousand and here's where the story of Amiga's past really would come into play.

The original intent for the Amiga, back when it was first in the design phase, before any hardware had been built, was that it was going to primarily be a video game system, and as part of that, from the beginning, it was made to be compatible with television frequencies, meaning you could hook it directly up to a TV. Other computers were reliant on computer monitors, and you had sinking issues if you wanted to send a signal out from

a computer to a television. Often the frequencies didn't match up. The gen lock in the Amiga two thousand would let a user overlay graphics on top of a video signal in either in TSC or PAL formats. A guy named Tim Jensen, was an electrical mechanical engineer, would take advantage of this capability. He had already created a program called digit View that would allow him to take a snapshot of a video so he could run a video on his Amiga. Use this program and capture a single frame

and save that to an Amiga floppy disk. He saved some images to a disk which also happened to have his contact information stored on that disc, and he shared it with a guy named Jeff Bruett who worked for Commodore. Soon his work was being spread around, and because his information was still on that disc, he started getting contacted by people who wanted to explore the possibilities of using the Amiga to work with video in a more robust way.

Jennison founded a company called new Tech. His programs did Your You and digit Paint We're both big hits. And then a guy named Paul Montgomery, who really wanted to develop a tool that would allow for video manipulation and editing joined New Tech, and he came up to Jennison and he said, what if we made a program that would let you do stuff like squish a video image or even flip it. So now you're looking at the mirror image of that video. What would it take to

do that? And Jennison's initial response was, you take a hundred thousand dollars. I mean, you're talking about the capabilities that a video editing studio running hardware that's dollars easy, plus software that's way more expensive than that. It's just it's it's financially impossible. But Jennison became obsessed with this idea, like, maybe maybe I could figure out a way to do this using an Amiga. You know, do the same thing that these specific purpose workstation do, but I can do

it with a general purpose computer like the Amiga. So he started thinking about this and Montgomery, Jennison, and a guy named Brad Carvey, who trivia here is the brother of comedian Dana Carvey got together and started working out what it would take to allow an Amiga to manipulate video this way. They created a hardware design that would interface through an expansion slot on the Amiga, and they created some software to give them some early primitive capabilities.

They built out a prototype of this concept and in November they showed off their idea at the Comdex computer trade show. The demonstration was a huge hit, and the team continued to work on their idea with the goal of creating an expansion card and software kit that would be able to handle all the tasks that you would find in a network video editing bay. And it would take three years total and three fifty thousand lines of code, much of which was written in the assembly language of

the Motorola sixty eight thousand chip empowered the Amiga. When the product finally came out, it cost just under two thousand, four hundred dollars. But if you bought Video Toaster, you would get an expansion card, you would get a collection of eight floppy disks holding a set of programs, and you would suddenly have the power to do video editing like a full system. Um. But here's the things that even if you bought a brand new Amiga two thousand and a copy of Video Toaster, that would set you

back less than five thousand dollars. That was a fraction of what it would cost if you wanted a professional system, and yet you would have all the capabilities of a professional system. This turned the Amiga two thousand into the go to computer system if you were working in video. These days, the Mac platform is frequently favored by people who edit video or audio, including people here at how

stuff Works. The Mac isn't quite as dominant in that position as it used to be, thanks to some advances in PC software suits over the last several years, not to mention some decisions that Apple has made with some of its editing software that has let's say, cheese off some long time editors. But you know, for the longest time, you'd say the Mac was the dominant video and audio editing platform. Well, in the nineties it was the Amiga two thousand. I've got more to say, but first let's

take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The Amiga and Video Toaster had an immediate effect on the appearance of video because producers now had access to video effects that would have previously cost them tens of thousands of dollars to use, which led to a saturation of certain video effects. You started to see them everywhere, to the point where they became cliched and a joke. So today, if you were to see a star wipe in a video, you would probably hear a lot of people chuckling, especially

anyone who had worked in video editing. That is a very dated kind of look. It's cheesy, but that's largely because that effect got so much use in the nineteen nineties because the Amiga and video Toaster made it so accessible. Meanwhile, back in the executive offices over at Commodore, chief executive Irving Gould would hire Max Toy to become the president and chief operating officer of the company in the fall of nine. Toy would say that no contract would be

necessary to guarantee his loyalty. That was obviously a dig at at Ratigan, the former CEO of Commodore, who had been fired by Irving Gould earlier that year, and he said that the day he would require a contract would be the last day he would ever work at Commodore. And I guess that day must have happened two years later,

because that's when he got fired. He got the boot, and Commodore then hired a guy named Harold Copperman from IBM, and also he had worked at Apple and now he was there to lead the United States division of Commodore. So why was Max Toy dismissed? Well, for one thing, Irving Gould was still extremely impatient, and he still wanted

results super fast some people would say unreasonably fast. And for another, Toy was apparently on the losing side of an internal disagreement within Commodore, one that would actually revolve around the Amiga. So the disagreement kind of split the company into two big camps. In one camp where the engineers and developers who wanted to continue to develop the Amiga platform, they saw a potential in building out a powerful machine that could outpace all competitors in the consumer market,

specifically when it came to graphics and audio. That camp felt the reason that Commodore continued to struggle as a company was not due to the quality of its products so much, but more in how those products were being marketed and sold. They were sure that the Amiga approach would win out if it was just given the proper chance and promotion. The other camp in which Toy was entrenched was that Commodore should just abandon the Amiga platform

and instead concentrate on producing IBM compatible machines. This was the era of the IBM clone. IBM had used off the shelf components to build its personal computers, so that meant that you could buy those same off the shelf components and build your same machines, very similar to diabem. More importantly, IBM had failed to secure an exclusive license from Microsoft for MS DOSS, so you could then license ms DOS from Microsoft yourself and sell your own cheaper

version of IBM computers to customers. This would technically have been easier for Commodore to do than to create new architecture based off the Amiga architecture, but critics of that plan said, yeah, it's easier, but the profit margins are also much lower. Commodore would have to pit its IBM clones against all the other IBM clones that were flooding the market, and ultimately this side lost, and so did Max Toy. Harold Copperman would come on board. Copperman's appointment

was met with some trepidation from outside the company. I read an article that was very skeptical about the whole situation because at this point the company had a reputation now for having a revolving door. When it came to chief executives because you had Jack Tramiel and Thomas Rattigan, you had Max Toy and now Harold Copperman, all filling that role since nineteen four and now it's nineteen eighty nine.

Nine had seemed to start off well for Amiga. Commodore had announced in January nine nine that one million Amiga computers had been sold up to that point. Also, one other executive took a position at the top of Commodore in early nineteen eighty nine. That would be Medi Ali. That was the man who had come on board of with Commodore as a consultant. He had been an advisor to Irving Gould, and he was the one who told

Gould to fire former CEO Ratigan just a few years earlier. Well, now Ali was able to convince Gould to hire Ali on as the President of Commodore International, which was largely a vacant position for most of Commodore's existence, but now made a Ali would inhabit it. Copperman would be president and CEO of Commodore's US operations. In November nine, Commodore announced the Amiga twenty five hundred. This was essentially an Amiga two thousand with a new pair of coprocessors, so

just a modest improvement over the Amiga two thousand. In n Commodore would offer Amiga one thousand owners a thousand dollar trade and deal if they would upgrade to an Amiga two thousand machine. This is also when the video toaster products became official and you can actually go out and buy it. The company would then announce the Amiga

three thousand. This was a slightly bigger upgrade than the still a modest one, had a new CPU and also had a new chip set, and a brand new Amiga three thousand with a monitor would set you back four thousand one dollars. Truly a princely sum. Commodore would hold a swanky presentation to show off the three thousand. Kind of reminds me of the initial Amiga launch that came out back in Copperman gave the presentation that night, and the focus was on multimedia applications, something the Amiga was

particularly well suited for. There were more changes in executive leadership. Copperman resigned, perhaps he was blamed for the moderate performance of the Amiga three thous and never really took off in sales and it turned out that only the hardcore Amiga fans were buying those computers. Other people were happy to stick with the Amiga five or the Amiga two thousand. James Dion would be named General Manager of US Sales

slash Head of the United States part of Commodore. At this point, it gets real tricky to talk about titles because they seem to be somewhat nebulous at the executive level at Commodore. There were also some pretty dark jokes going around at Commodore at this point because they had seen so many leaders go in and out of that position.

So the joke was, if you were named the head of Commodore US, you would move into your executive office and on your desk there will be three envelopes that say open in case of financial emergency, and they'd be labeled one, two, and three. So the first time you hit a rough patch, you open envelope number one, and inside there's a message that says, blame your predecessor, so you would lay all the aim of all the problems on the guy who was in that position before you.

The second time you encounter a rough financial patch, you open up envelope two, and that one says, blame your vice presidents. So then you go blaming all the people who work underneath you. The third time you hit a financial rough patch, you open envelope three and a message inside says, prepare three envelopes. It seemed like working for Gould was tough, and it probably didn't help that Irving

Gould was frequently changing his base of operations. He was moving around a lot, and I saw at least one guy say that he suspected the reason Irving Gould would pick up stakes and move to a different place and then force shareholder meetings to take place wherever he happened to be at the time was so that he could take advantage of the most favorable tax policies at any given time, so essentially sheltering himself from having to pay

too much tax. That was the allegation. I have no idea if it's true, but he certainly did pop around a lot. Coming or introduced three new computers in the Amiga line. You had the Amiga six hundred, which was a low cost machine that had a base price of five hundred dollars and actually had fewer features than the Amiga five hundred, so very confusing. Higher number, fewer features, and the initial cost at that point, the Amiga five

hundred was actually cheaper than the Amigas six hundred. When the six hundred launched, because the five d been out for a couple of years, not many people wanted to get an Amiga six hundred. There was very little reason too, why would you want a computer that was less powerful than an older machine that was actually less expensive. At that point, the company started producing more Amiga six hundreds.

Then it was producing Amiga five hundreds. Technically both were still in production, but they began to scale back on the five hundreds. That actually led to losses because again people didn't want the six hundreds. Later, the Amiga four thousand would debut. It had a more powerful processor and it had a boosted chip set. The chips had names like super Gary, Super Ramsey, and super Amber, and there

was also Alice Lisa at Good Old Paula. And at the end of nineteen nine two the Amiga twelve hundred came out. The twelve hundred would be a pretty successful machine, but the company was making more Amiga six hundreds than five hundreds or twelve hundreds, so the computers that people wanted were being made in fewer quantities than the computers

nobody wanted. By nine two, Amiga sales were on the rise, with a seventeen percent over figures, and it looked like it could be a turning point for a Commodore, And I guess it kind of was, except it wasn't a good turning point. In James Dion would resign as the head of US operations, so once again that place was vacant. So now we have Tramuel Ratigan, Toy Copperman, and Dion as the various heads of Commodore in the United States, since medi Ali and Irving Gould were still at the

tippy top. Gould was still the dire act. Medi Ali was still the head of Commodore International. During all of this, the engineers and developers who were down at the base level, we're still doing their best to make the Amiga platform as good as they could possibly make it with the resources that they had available to them, but those resources were getting cut back year over year. It was getting increasingly difficult to do. Commodore also had a reputation for

not treating their engineers and programmers very well. They were underpaid compared to others in their industry, although just to be totally fair, most of their competing companies were based in California, and that's a more expensive place to live than Pennsylvania, so some of that was cost of living, but they were still underpaid compared to their peers. In ninete, Commodore would post a loss of three hundred sixties six

million dollars. Sales dropped by twenty percent. In nineteen, after the first quarter of the fiscal year, Commodore posted another loss. This time it was eight point two million, which was technically an improvement from the previous year, but still a loss. And then Commodore sent out a warning message to investors saying that the company might have to prepare for bankruptcy proceedings, and the stock price took a nose dive. It all

came to a head on April nine. That's when Commodore International Limited stated it would begin liquidating all assets and would file for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, including Amiga, was at the beginning of the end, but not quite the end. Amiga would limp on sword of I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, these episodes are supposed to

be about Amiga, not Commodore. But to understand why Amiga never managed to establish itself as a viable alternative to the Macintosh or the IBM PC clone here in the United States requires a lot of talk about Commodore because the problems were largely based in corporate politics. Again, not the technology of the Amiga, which was pretty darn cool, but because of managers and executives and the shuffling that

was going on constantly at Commodore. Irving Gould, the investor who had been pulling the strings at Commodore ever since he convinced the board to kick founder Jack Tramial to the curb, is often blamed for Commodore's ultimate failure. Now, he didn't take a hands on approach to managing the day to day operations of the company. He had no

interest in doing that. But at the same time, he wanted dramatic and rapid returns on his investment, and when he didn't see results that were fast enough for him, he would come in and change leadership. Those leaders would often make changes themselves sometimes that helps establish their new

role at a company. You probably have experienced something like this at the point, you might have gotten a new boss sometime or seen a new boss come in and make seemingly unnecessary changes to a away a company or a division does things. Sometimes that's to make a mark on a business, to say, well, this way I can set myself apart from my predecessor. Often it means disrupting things, sometimes just so that you can establish yourself, and meanwhile

the company starts to fall behind. Well, that happened a lot at Commodore because Gould kept replacing the head of US operations, and he would get impatient when he wasn't seeing good results, and he would do it all over again, and that would just keep things going in a state of chaos over at the corporate level. In addition, Commodore owed debts to many companies, and several of those companies

happened to be owned by Irving Gould himself. So back when Jack Tramiel was still with Commodore, the founder of Commodore, when he was the head, he argued that Commodore should issue more shares of stock. At one point, what he wanted to do was issue shares of stock to raise more money to pay off some of Commodore's debts. So essentially he was saying, let's increase the percentage of ownership out there on the market. Irvin Gould said, no, that's dumb.

But he was doing that for two very selfish reasons. One was, Irvin Gould was a majority shareholder in Commodore. So if you put more stocks out there on the market, offering up more ownership of Commodore, that means that Gould's percentage would get smaller because now there's more of the ownership out there on the market, and unless Gould was to buy up those shares, it would mean he would

have less leverage over the company. Secondly, he didn't want those debts paid off because it gave him leverage over the company, so he would shoot down this idea of issuing more shares of stock. Then you had Medi Ali, the consultant who was picked by Gould to serve as the head of Commodore International. He also played a really large role in Commodore's failure. According to many people who worked for Commodore, one of Ali's big moves as leader was to increase his own salary and that of Irving

Gould's as well. The two wouldn't make an awful lot of money. They were making more money than pretty much every other CEO in the computer industry, so that money had to come from somewhere. One source was Commodore's research and development departments. Ali would gut the funding for that over the years, cutting back research and development year over year, but he also torpedoed what could have been a lucrative

licensing deal. There was a point where Sun Microsystems wanted to license a Mega technology and use them in their workstations, but Ali said, oh, sure, we'll let you do that, but he set an unrealistic fee, a ridiculously high licensing fee, and Sun microsystem said, pound sand, We're going to go somewhere else, and they left. When the company would actually fall apart, there was a new chip set that was

actually in development at that time. It was called the Advanced Amiga Architecture or Triple a A. It was the most dramatic overhaul of the original Amiga chip set to date. The previous chips that had been tweaked in the past had all been what they called enhanced versions of the earlier architecture that J. Minor and his team had developed in the nineteen eighties. But while this project was in development.

Medi Ali kept cutting the department's funding, so by the time Commodore was declaring bankruptcy, there was only one engineer left working on that project. And as you can imagine, having a project to redesign the architecture of chips fall on one person shoulders means that it's never gonna get done. There's just only so much work one person can do. Meanwhile, PC graphics were starting to catch up to Amiga's position.

The v g A graphics standard allowed PC manufacturers to incorporate hardware that was capable of running fast action games at a pretty low resolution three by two pixels with two fifty six colors. And I know that sounds like nothing compared to today's graphics, and it really isn't anything compared to today's graphics, but back then it was a

big deal. Just trust me on this. Now. Amiga, however, could display up to four thousand, ninety six colors if it was running in HAM mode, but that mode could not respond rapidly to changes, so while it could show more colors than PCs, it couldn't do it in these applications like a fast action game. It was fine for slower moving games, but the fast action. The computer just couldn't keep up with it, so you wouldn't be able to play a game like Doom with four thousand, ninety

six colors on an Amiga. You would have to have something to make the Amiga run faster, so it could not do the same thing that the IBM PC could do um without running at a severe disadvantage where it's displaying like thirty two colors on the screen st of two fifty six. So it was just starting to fall behind, and Commodore wasn't giving the assets to developers to counteract that.

When Commodore was going out of business, there were still engineers hoping to create the next generation of Amiga computers. There was the Ombre project that was meant to incorporate a three D graphics accelerator card with a powerful processor to make the Amiga top in the realm again when it came to graphics, but the project lacked the funding it needed to make any progress and ultimately fell apart. Following bankruptcy was a long process to figure out how

to auction off Commodore's us as sets. This was more complicated than most companies, largely because commodore structure was particularly tricky. I've seen some people suggest that this was by design so that it would provide Irving Gould the equivalent of a tax shelter. I do not know if that's the truth. What I know is that it took a long time to sort everything out so that the auction could actually happen.

Things were different in Europe. By the way. Commodore UK had managed to stay profitable while the U S branch was flailing around, So Commodore UK was still fine, and so if you lived in the UK you could still go out and buy Amiga computers from Commodore while the US side was fading away. The head of UK operations was a guy named David Pleasants, and he had a grand plan. He wanted to purchase the assets of all

of Commodore at auction, including Amiga. So he went to some investors and raised some money, and he reached out to a company in China called new Star Electronics, and his goal was to continue Commodore operations, not just own the assets, but keep building Commodore machines and even develop new computer systems based on that architecture, so the Amiga could potentially have a future. There were a few other

contenders that also we're vying to purchase Commodore's assets. One was Dell Computer, but its bid actually was too late for consideration. Another was a company called s Com, which

made PCs in Europe. As COM's bid was lower than the one that pleasants As Group had made, But then just a couple of days before the auction was to actually take place, the Chinese company New Star would back out of the deal, and Pleasants was forced to cancel his bid, and so s Com would end up getting possession of Commodore brand and all of its assets in the US. As COM's leader, this guy named Manfred Schmidt, who had split Commodore's assets and create two companies. One

of those two companies was Amiga Technologies. He put a guy named Petro Ti Schinko, and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that name. It has got way too many letters in it for a ignorant Americans such as myself to say properly, so I'm just gonna call him Petro. The Amiga would continue on in Europe for a little while longer, but there were no manufacturing facilities left after the collapse of Commodore,

so there's no place to make new computers. They could sell the ones that were in inventory, but they couldn't really make more of them. Work was being done to bring new facilities online, but for the most part the company was existing off selling the Amiga twelve hundred. They did do some tweaks to the twelve hundred to try and remain relevant because the system was quickly aging out. It was a few years old, so they had to keep making minor changes to it, but they couldn't just

make something new yet. S Com, the parent company of Amiga Technologies, followed in the footsteps of Commodore, falling prey to what some people called the Commodore curse, and it too declared bankruptcy. The company had expanded too quickly, it had overextended its reach, and the Amiga assets again went to auction. This time, the company Gateway two thousand, later known just as Gateway, would win the intellectual property and Amiga brand in and the new philosophy would require a

huge change in direction for Amiga. The idea was that Gateway was going to create a line of Amiga products, ranging from tablets to workstations to set top boxes, all of them would run on the same operating system. This would have required new architecture and new software, and so it would not be based off the old Amiga design, but it was meant to follow a philosophy similar to the one that Amiga embodied. Sadly, apart from some prototypes,

this never really got off the ground. Management changed at Gateway and the project was ultimately scuttled as the company moved to all off Amiga to someone else. This time there were fewer contenders. The Amiga was rapidly heading toward obsolescence.

The last new machine to come out was the Amiga twelve hundred, and that had come out in n So a couple of former Gateway employees were able to put together a new company called Amino Development, and they got some investors and they purchased the non patent technologies of Amiga. Then they changed their company name to Amiga Technologies later

Amiga Incorporated. They had big plans, but apart from a game pack that could turn a p d A into an Amiga compatible gaming system, it didn't really pan out. The dot com crash dealt another huge blow. The company partnered with some manufacturing facilities to make some motherboards, and there was a software developer called Hyperion Entertainment out of Belgium.

I believe it was that was designed to or designated to make the next generation of the Amiga operating system, Amiga OS four, but the whole system never really quite coalesced. Amiga Incorporated existed at least in name until two thousand sixteen, but then the owner did not renew the copyright on the name, and now that's essentially gone as well. You can get hold of some of those motherboards, and the

Amiga OS four point oh still exists. But a lot of people say that Amiga is kind of stuck in time now because there's just not enough development behind it, so there's not gonna be any advance in Amiga technology. You could use an emulator and play old Amiga games, but no new ones are going to be developed most likely, or if they are developed, they're gonna have to exist on that older architecture because there's no one there to develop the next generation. So it's pretty sad. It was

a tough, tough story. I mean, it was one of those things that started off so promising back in the early eighties, but multiple setbacks leg Demiga throughout its history. From the video game crash of three, to declaring Commodore declaring bankruptcy, and to this essential fizzling out in two thousand and sixteen, although you could argue that the company was long gone before that. Anyway, maybe one day we'll see a re emergence of the Amiga brand in a

serious way. Maybe it will be able to to hold true to j Minors vision when he first founded the company back in the early eighties. But for now, that is the end of the Amiga story and the end of this series of episodes. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics, whether it's a company, a technology, someone in tech, maybe there's someone you want me to interview,

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