The story
In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari, Inc. staffers, set up another chip-set project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga Corporation), where they could have some creative freedom. Atari, Inc. went into contract with Amiga for licensed use of the chipset in a new high end game console and then later for use in a computer system. $500,000 was advanced to Amiga to continue development of the chipset. Amiga negotiated with Commodore International two weeks prior to the contract deadline of 30 June 1984. In August 1984, Atari Corporation, under Jack Tramiel, sued Amiga for breach of contract. The case was settled in 1987 in a closed settlement.
In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who in turn went bankrupt in 1996. The Commodore-Amiga assets were then sold to another PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, which had announced grand plans for the Amiga. However, in 1999, Gateway sold the assets (except for the patents, which were only licensed) to Amino Development for almost 5 million dollars. Gateway still retained ownership to the Commodore-Amiga patents. The last of the Commodore-Amiga patents (EP0316325B1 for "Cursor controlled user interface system", based on US887053) expired on July 14, 2007.
From Wikipedia’s article on Amiga, Inc., shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4
