last part on our story about amiga we talked about the big names wanted to purchase amiga such as commodore and atari and if you haven't seen the last part, part 1 and part 2 can be found in these links: part 1 & part 2
There is 2 company that wanted to purchase the Amiga and that is Atari and commodore. atari itself is amiga's origin company. you see amiga came from atari's own worker. Jay miner was once an atari worker, he just left atari to pursue his dream of building a computer-based around the brand spanking Motorola 68000 CPU. to do that he found Amiga while commodore was a different story for another time.
so anyways the two company that is willing to buy amiga was commodore and Atari who were eager to jump onto the 16-Bit bandwagon, however with commodore kicking its heels, it was atari who stepped up first, offering to buy 1 million shares in Amiga at 3 dollars each whilst keeping the financially struggling company afloat, with a $500.000 loan whilst buy-out preparation was formalized. however, the contract for the loan was a strict one requiring Amiga to repay the entire loan within a month or atari would be able to snap up their company for next to nothing.
Clearly a filthy move designed to work in atari's favor, but Amiga was so desperate, but Amiga had no choice. Strangely atari wasn't even interested in finishing the computer Jay and his team had come so close to completing instead, they were looking to use the custom chips in their own machines. Behind closed doors, however, at atari's parent company, time warner, negotiations were taking place to find a buyer for atari as it was currently losing some $10K dollars per day. James morgan, CEO of atari was even unaware of these negotiations himself, hence operations were business as usual.
One of these negotiators, in early July was Jack tramiel. having recently disagreed Commodore over disagreements he was looking for a new venture to sink into and atari seemed ripe for the picking. a deal was quickly drawn up and Jack became the owner of Atari's consumer division which was renamed to atari corporation. he would have also become the proud new owner/investor of amiga incorporated at this point too, if it hadn't been for his former company... commodore.
With jack and his team, of engineers left commodore, the company was keen for a new machine and although late for the party, swept in before June was out and bought out Amiga right underneath atari's noses. this included the repayment (with interest) of the $500.000 loan and a $4.24 per share investment in amiga, taking ownership and bringing them in the house as the new commodore amiga incorporated. Upon finding this out, Jack was a little scythed and set about suing both Jay and commodore for breach of contract for $100 million dollars on August 13th, which would be finally settled out of court in Atari's favor after shouting a few legalities at each other.
Still, disruption was minimal for Jack as he began work on his own, new 16-Bit machine, which would soon become known as the Atari ST. Back at Amiga, Commodore set about investing a further $20 million in the development of their new machine. Jay and his team may not have been running things exclusively anymore, but they were on stable footing for the first time since 1983 at the company Jack tramiel had first founded in 1955 and things were looking good.
The first task was to move the team out of their pokey little office into a spacious facility down the road in Los Gatos, California. More engineers were brought on board to expedite proceedings and their single workstation was subsidies to another 10 so that everyone could work simultaneously. work quickly progressed on two vital areas.
and that's it for the part 3. part 4 can be found here