A brief history of the Amiga
Bidder after Bidder after Bidder... (or is that "Bitter?")
About a year after the launch of the Amigas containing the AGA chipset, Commodore went into liquidation. Although they had just released the CD32, they didn't have enough resources to really market or produce it, and only produced 100,000 units.
After a long period of speculation and on-going Bahamas court sessions, a German PC-Clone builder known as Escom bought the rights to the technologies and the trademarks of Commodore Business Machines. Amiga Technologies was established, and the hopes were high for AT to develop the next-generation Amigas. They came up with the Walker, an AGA-based machine. Walker had a new, standard AT-size motherboard, so that it could be used with a normal PC case. (Unlike typical bland PC cases, however, the standard form of the machine was a stylish machine that reminded one of Darth Vader's helmet.) In terms of features, not much was changed from the A1200 (of which the controversial casing was, unfortunately, the most noticed). The Walker was never commercially produced.
Escom went bankrupt and once again, Amiga's intellectual property was up for grabs. The Commodore name was bought by the Dutch part of Escom, who were the mail-order division and one of the few parts of the German company that was profitable. During this period, other companies started to announce that they would be bringing the successor of the famous Amiga. German Phase 5 announced its A\Box, which was an Amiga-compatible PowerPC-based computer with an advanced custom chip design. It initially got a lot of media attention, but delay after delay didn't help the credibility of the system.
This was a hard time for the Amiga enthusiast. Demoralization caused many to proclaim the Amiga a dead platform and move on, while others still appreciated the Amiga for what it was and kept hope alive. However, only the real die-hards kept using the Amiga as their primary computer platform.
During this time, the liquidators were trying to sell the Amiga Technology to the highest bidder, and along came VIScorp who placed a bid to buy the Amiga name and intellectual property. VIScorp made plans to turn the Amiga technology into a set-top box. Although the buyout lasted a couple of months, a lot happened during that time as the CEO resigned and the company had financial difficulties. They abandoned their bid for Amiga, but continued to produce A4000Ts.
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