June 6, 2000 - Snoqualmie, WA USA - Amiga Inc. of Snoqualmie, WA is pleased to announce a strategic relationship with Eyetech Group Ltd. of Stokesley, North Yorkshire, UK to manufacture the first release of the Next Generation Amiga Development Machines and to distribute these in Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

This will no doubt come as welcome news to the British Amiga community who have long enjoyed an excellent relationship with Eyetech.

Eyetech is well known as a leading supporter of Amiga - and the Amiga Community - of great integrity. Eyetech's involvement in the Amiga market dates back to 1993.

Amiga and Eyetech both share a vision and strategy to re-establish the next generation Amiga Operating Environment as the leading multimedia hardware-independent delivery platform for the year 2000 and beyond. Both companies believe that this strategy will return Amiga to its rightful position as a leader in multimedia computing, and thereby redeliver the recognition and pride back to the loyal Amiga community that has waved the flag over these last 15 years.

Our relationship with long time company Chairman, Alan Redhouse, proves that Eyetech has a firm belief in our product, our company, and our community. Of particular interest to both Amiga and the community is Eyetechs EZTower Mk5 which networks together - in a single tower system - both an A1200 (with optional PPC/BVision) with a next generation Amiga Development Machine and the Amiga SDK. "The reputation of Eyetech as well as their ability to offer such a high quality and wide-ranging choice to the Amiga community in the form of both the EZTower Mk5 and the EZDev-Plus - Eyetech's stand-alone DevBox - is unprecedented. We wholeheartedly support Alan and his team at Eyetech and join the community in welcoming Eyetech to the Amiga future." said Randall Hughes, Vice President Sales and Strategic Alliances at Amiga.

Alan Redhouse commented: "I am delighted that Eyetech has been chosen as Amiga's partner to help UK companies and individuals take advantage of porting and developing applications under the new Amiga Operating Environment. We will of course continue to service and support Classic Amiga users Worldwide from the 5000 square feet (500 square meters) of warehouse space dedicated to Amiga products here at our UK base.

"The Classic Amiga also forms the basis of our Multimedia Presentation and Kiosk systems as its tightly integrated, purpose-designed preemptive multitasking, multimedia-centric operating system allows us to achieve levels of performance, reliability and cost-effectiveness which cannot even be approached on a PC-based system. We are now looking forward to developing new, high-performance multimedia products around the new generation Amiga Operating Environment, as well as providing continued support for our existing commercial and leisure customers."

Eyetech's developer platforms for the new generation Amiga Operating Environment will be officially released on 1st June 2000. The product portfolio will include EZTower Mk 5 based integrated systems, upgrade kits for existing EZTower users and the stand-alone EZDev-Plus system. All systems will ship with Eyetech's 5-click Amiga - Linux networking software, specially tailored for the new Amiga Operating Environment.

For further details please contact:

Randall P Hughes
VP Sales and Strategic Business Development
AMIGA INC. randy@amiga.com
 

Alan M Redhouse
Chairman, Eyetech Group Ltd
The Old Bank
12 West Green
Stokesley
North Yorks
TS9 5BB, UK
Phone: +44 164 271 3185
Fax: +44 164 271 3634
Email: sales@eyetech.co.uk
 

About Eyetech
 

Eyetech was originally established in 1983 to bring the benefit of automatic data collection systems to large commercial companies. The Company been closely involved in many high-profile projects - from the automatic toll collection systems at the Dartford River Crossing (London, UK) to most of the bar coded track-and-trace systems in use by the UK national parcel services.

Eyetech was founded in 1983 as a subsidiary of an international UK quoted plc. Since late 1985 - following a management buy out - Eyetech has traded as a private limited company. The company has mainly been involved in producing bespoke commercial software/systems - mainly under Unix/AIX - particularly in the transport and distribution sector. Eyetechs specialization has been in track & trace systems using bar codes - in fact most UK parcels carriers that use bar codes use a system designed and/or implemented by Eyetech. The company also manufactures bar code decoders and industrial (networked) shop floor data capture and access control systems.

Eyetech became interested in the Amiga, and became a registered Amiga developer, towards the end of 1993 : Eyetech's Amiga-related commercial systems currently cover two main areas: As an integrated multimedia development/mass delivery platform for its existing customer base with custom systems built around Classic Amiga architecture.

Using rehoused Classic Amiga hardware as a low cost multitasking platform for shop floor data collection/control applications in smaller industrial companies, allowing simultaneous local enquiries and the passing back of data to (typically) an accounts machine as a background process.

In developing Amiga expertise over the course of the last few years or so Eyetech needed to provide hardware and software components which were not commonly available ex-stock, competitively priced or of industrial quality from normal Amiga suppliers. The Company therefore needed to design and/or sourced these products elsewhere, and initially entered the retail mail order business by making surplus stock available to the rest of the Amiga community. This side of the business has continued to develop, resulting in Eyetech becoming one of the largest mail order retailers of Amiga products in the English-speaking World.