Oh look, the AmigaOS baton has been passed yet again. They’re exploring new territory here: standard fantasy necrolore tells us that living things first become dead, then become zombies, then become skeletons, then become ghosts.

When Commodore died, its zombie corpse walked around as Escom for a while, then got discorporated into various Intellectual Property bones that staggered around as a skeleton looking for a brain. Gateway bought the lot, then did nothing for so long that the bones rotted away and the ghost of Amiga drifted off towards Amino Inc, who took the name and pulled it down into a nailed shut coffin for 4 years. They occasionally stuck a ghostly hand out of the lid to take money off loyal fans when they couldn’t pay the rent on the coffin.

Now 4 years and much shady behind-the-scenes dealing later, KMOS prises open the coffin and finds it almost empty! They take what they can scrape off the sides and leave the evil spirits behind to mutter crazy things about mobile phones in 1998-speak.

So what comes after a ghost? Is the Amiga now an apparition? A wraith? Some kind of vague discarnate shade? I’d look it up in a D&D monster manual if I was 3.7 times nerdier.

Law

The interesting thing about this transfer of ownership is that the name has been split. Amiga Inc. still gets to be called Amiga Inc. while it peddles its moronic “content delivery platform”, and KMOS gets to market OS4 as AmigaOS4. Amiga is still in legal spaghetti with Genesi (another bizarre fusion of a company) and the userbase is asymptotically approaching zero. More than 1000 people fell for the T-shirt scam, but that was years ago. I reckon there are about 450 Amiga users left. It will never approach zero, because that would mean death for the Amiga, and as has been repeatedly, excrutiatingly demonstrated, the Amiga just… won’t… die!