Interview with Amiga CEO, Bill McEwen

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, October 08, 2006, 11:00 AM EDT

Here's one for the "Blast from the past" department. Well, at least the name of the company is a blast from the past. Current CEO of Amiga Inc., Bill McEwen, has been interviewed by the folks at the TempleOfTech. He answered questions about the state of the next AmigaOS and even talks about running it on the Cell processor...

"The saga of the Amiga continues.. Amiga Inc, thought to be dead after stopping all communication with the Amiga community, have reappeared. The long spell of silence was broken when they answered 25 questions from the readers at Amiga.org. In the answers, the CEO of Amiga Inc, Bill McEwen revealed some information that once again brought back some hope in the Amiga community. Contrary to popular belief, they have been working to fullfil their vision from before 2000, of a "scalable, embeddable, multi-threaded, memory protected operating system or digital environment that would run from a cell phone to a server". In the meantime, Hyperion Entertainment and their partners have been busy working on Amiga OS4, which has been in available in pre-release form since April 2004. The final release is held back by the lack of suitable PPC motherboards to run OS4 on, but this seems to be finally resolved, and a final release is expected this year."

Whether or not the AmigaOS rises from the ashes again is anyone's guess, but it's good to hear the legendary name hasn't completely died.

Tags: CEO, Interview, MCE, bill, amiga, view, IE, AM

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com