Amiga Corporation
Amiga was founded in 1982 as Hi-Toro. The story begins that June when Activision co-founder Larry Kaplan meets with Doug Neubauer, his former coworker at Atari, now working as a game programmer for 20th Century Fox. Although the Atari VCS was a lucrative platform, it was becoming yesterday's technology. Both wanted a new game console. Larry had seen a prototype of the Nintendo Famicom at the Summer CES and felt they could create something better.
Larry calls Jay Miner, another former coworker, now at ZyMOS, and asks him if he wants to make a new video game company. Jay agrees on the conditions that he would get to design the chipset and be Vice President. He then pitches the idea to ZyMOS' president, Bert Braddock, and gets him on board.
Jay puts together a business plan and presents it to his investors, including O.W. Rollins, a major funder of ZyMOS. Rollins agrees to invest in the new game console. He then hires an executive search team to find a president for the new company. They find Dave Morse, then Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Tonka Toys.
That October, Hi-Toro receives $3.6 million in funding from O.W. Rollins. Ownership of the company is 40% employees, 55% Hi-Tec Ventures and 5% ZyMOS. The day they receive the funding, Rollins asks Larry Kaplan to recruit Nolan Bushnell to be on the board. Nolan instead persuades Larry to join him to create their own game console with his funding and hire ex-Atari engineers. Larry opts to go with Nolan instead of Dave Morse and leaves Hi-Toro. However, the venture with Nolan never materializes.
By 1983, Larry Kaplan had returned to Atari. It was also by this time Hi-Toro was renamed Amiga. Jay Miner recalled how the new name was chosen, "The name they wanted was actually Amica, which someone had found in a Latin dictionary. It means friend or friendliness. But it turned out the name Amica was already licensed, so they simply changed the C in Amica to a G. I don't think they had thought of the Spanish word Amiga; it just turned out that way." Jay initially thought that a Spanish name would not be well received for a computer but eventually warmed up to it. [1]
The company's original offices were located at 3350 Scott Boulevard #7 in Santa Clara, CA until August, 1984 when they were sold to Commodore. They then became known as Commodore-Amiga.
References
- Needle, Dave. The History of Amiga - Personal Computing, August 1985 - p. 90
- Bagnall, Brian. Commodore: The Amiga Years Variant Press - 2017
