By Sam Ormes, Senior Editor, s.ormes@genie.com
Some may be hoaxes and some may be real, but there seems to be a proliferation of Amigas going on around the world. Anyone who assumed that we would be seeing Gateway Amigas on the shelves must be bewildered by the rampant licensing, cloning and possibly renegade utilization of our beloved technology.
The first three were announced by Amiga International and would seem to have some legitimacy as an outlet for the glut of A1200's and components. I refer to "The Access" by Index, the ICS Amigo and the MicroniK A1500, all in Europe. A large, collective yawn was the reaction from the Amiga community to those.
In mid-July however, things started to get bizarre. A company called ILM Malaysia announced it would soon be selling a lineup of Amigas including A1200's with Blizzard '030/50MHz boards and A4000T's. ILM also promised that they would release OS3.5 by December! Where is all that coming from?
Saving the best for last, Lotus Pacific (?) issued press releases stating that they had acquired all the Amiga patents/technology from a firm called "Rightiming Electronics" for the manufacture of devices in China for sales throughout Asia and the former Soviet Union. Nowhere in those announcements did I see Gateway or AI even mentioned. Is this "right timing" or "wrong timing" ? A sick joke? Part of the Hong Kong takeover package? Escom's revenge? Medhi & Gould ?
By the time you read this, Petro may have clarified everything. On the other hand, maybe this Amiga breeding frenzy will have continued unabated. And keep going...and going...and going.