Escom acquired Commodore on April 22, 1995 for $14 million. At the time, it seemed like Commodore’s long nightmare might be over. The Amiga had a new owner. Sadly, it didn’t work out that way.
Escom: Well known in Europe, not so much in North America
Commodore had gone bankrupt just under a year earlier. Escom was the only bidder for its assets. $14 million is more money than most of us keep laying around, and it was more money in 1995 than it is now, but it was still a low risk flyer, relatively speaking. Microsoft sunk 150 million into Apple in 1997, and they didn’t even get voting shares, let alone controlling interest, for that.
Commodore’s UK subsidiary wanted to buy the whole company and had $14 million to make a minimum bid, but figured they needed $14 million to cover the first year’s operations, and they couldn’t line up the funding.
Until the announcement, Escom was mostly unknown in North America. When I received the news, my immediate reaction was to ask who is Escom? And that was the first question the American journalists covering it set out to answer. Escom was the second largest PC manufacturer in Germany and 10th largest in Europe.
Why Escom wanted Commodore
Escom had designs on being much bigger than merely #2 in Germany and #10 in Europe. That was one reason they were interested in Commodore. The Commodore brand name had recognition the Escom name lacked, and the Amiga technology arguably still could have become a viable platform in the right hands. The Amiga install base was still sizeable, with about 4.9 million units sold. And the big-box Amigas like the Amiga 4000 owned the video production market at the time, so the Amiga had a good-sized professional niche to sell into.
Escom and Commodore had a short time together
Unfortunately for everyone involved, Escom filed bankruptcy on July 15, 1996, approximately 14 months later. At the time, in 1996, ZDNet called Escom’s quick demise “astonishing.” It wasn’t that Commodore and Amiga were cursed, at least I don’t think so. Escom tried to grow too quickly. It had two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in rapid succession: buying Commodore and buying a UK computer retailer. Unfortunately it didn’t have the cashflow to carry out both acquisitions properly.
The rights to the Amiga changed hands again soon after, landing at another troubled PC maker, Gateway 2000. The cynical joke was that after landing at Gateway, the Amiga would skip another letter of the alphabet, land at IBM, and take down IBM next. After all, the sequence of Amiga ownership went from Amiga to Commodore to Escom to Gateway.
Bits and pieces of Commodore scattered to the winds in the 1990s, especially after Escom went under.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
so who has Commodore ip and Amiga os ip now ?
how does Amiga OS compare with BeOS?
could Amiga OS be open source code and free ?
There’s some legal question who owns which pieces of the Amiga IP. I know a company called Hyperion owns a lot of it. I don’t expect Amiga OS could ever be open source and free. Hyperion and another company called Cloanto are still making money selling it so they have no motivation to open source it.
Comparing Amiga OS with BeOS isn’t really fair. There wouldn’t have been a BeOS without the Amiga.
okay thanks
so BeOS is more advanced ?
btw who’s owner of so who has BeOS ip now ?
is it possible to get Linux to behaving like Amiga OS with BeOS
Advanced is relative. Amiga OS didn’t have memory protection or virtual memory due to hardware limitations in 1985. Be had that. That’s all it had that the Amiga couldn’t do. Keep in mind Be was a late 90s OS. Amiga came out in 1985. 12 years was an eternity back then. Amiga was so far ahead of everyone else it wasn’t even funny. It did end up getting virtual memory but not memory protection since the most popular Amiga models lacked a memory management unit.
Fundamentally no, there’s nothing that can function like Amiga OS. It was so much more efficient than anything that came later. The current build of Amiga OS can still run nicely on a 14 MHz 68020.
BeOS went to Palm, which went to HP. So presumably one of the HPs owns BeOS but whichever of them does may not know it.
David Pleasance has said that he had funding from a Chinese manufacturer lined up for Commodore UK’s bid, but they pulled out at a late stage for whatever reason (I think Pleasance has hinted some Escom skullduggery may have been involved).
Regardless, the Amiga was an ageing platform in 1994/5 and had no viable development path. Commodore’s late 93/early 94 roadmap – which seemed a bit haphazard – envisaged a new PA RISC-based (Hombre) games console, plus a PC add-in card and/or new desktop range based on the same architecture, the latter featuring an “Amiga on a chip” for backwards compatibility but potentially running Windows NT. All of those would have been a tough sell up against their respective competitors.