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Amiga Update (1994-06-27) a
940627 Good rumors, bad news {This line added when newsletter was archived.}
Everyone,
I have some bad news and some good (?) rumors to pass out today. The bad
news first: Jay Miner, the "Father of the Amiga" died on the 20th. The news
was just sent out yesterday. "The Padre" had received two kidney transplants
and had been very ill for some time. Jay was the designer of the Amiga custom
chip set, the heart of the computer. Before that, he designed the custom set
that made the Atari 800 arguably the best 8bit graphics machine of them all.
Jay was always open and aproachable. If you ever made it to an Amiga trade
show, you might easily have wound up sitting next to him in the cafeteria
sharing a coffee break and gossiping about the Amiga community or grousing
about Commodore. He is greatly missed already.
The good rumor (and it IS just a rumor with NO substantiation): over the
weekend multiple sources talked about a consortium composed of Samsung,
CEI (the large wholesale distributor), NewTek and James Dionne buying the
remains of C=. Dionne, if you're unfamiliar with him, was the CEO of Commodore
Canada for 10 years or so and did very well there. He was also the President
of C= US where he ran into conflicts with the Chariman of the Board (Irving
Gould) and President of International (Mehdi Ali). They let him go and he sued
for breach of contract, and won.
According to the rumor the group finalized the deal on Friday and will either
make an announcement this morning or at the end of Commodore's fiscal quarter,
which is the end of this month.
Even if true, we should wonder what the results of such a group buyout might
be. It could mean only the dismantling of the company, or it could be a
rebirth. Other rumors indicate Samsung's interest all along has only been in
the Commodore distribution network in Europe. Stay tuned, more to come ...
Brad
