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© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
All Rights reserved

 

PIOS 1- TransAM


 
Developer: PIOS
Announcement: 1997

During the dark days of 1996 the Amiga sunk to an all-time low. Escom had entered liquidation, cancelling any development plans that were underway. To keep the Amiga spirit alive, a new company was created by the former employees of Amiga Technologies. Under the name, PIOS systems and led by Dave Haynie, one of the Amigas engineers during the Commodore era, they set about creating an Amiga style computer using the latest hardware. Rather than making the mistake of completely redesigning the entire system from the ground up, they combined some of the movers in the hardware and software industry to create a powerful machine with a great deal of software support.

The TransAM was the Amiga-oriented version of the PIOS One (unlike the Maxxtrem and Keenya that were aimed at the Mac market). Its name reflected the machines ideology, it was a TRANSitional Amiga system that would move the Amiga market onto the PowerPC without the baggage of legacy hardware.

The company released an initial specification list during 1997, but this was replaced by an updated version in February 1998.

Operating System

Rather than creating their own operating system as Phase 5 had promised with the A\Box, PIOS decided to link into the momentum of alternative operating systems that were available at the time (BeOS, MacOS, and Linux). The desire to build upon the remains of the Amiga market was quite strong, given the companies Amiga background, resulting in discussions with Viscorp to create an AmigaOS PPC. However, the delay in Escom's liquidation resulted in the cancellation of this idea and the adoption of pOS.

TransAM 2001

Since the TransAM specifications were released the computer market has changed considerably. However, the PIOS One design was bought back into the limelight in April 2001 as an example of Amiga Inc's plans for AmigaOS 4 and the AmigaOne. By doing this, Amiga sought to educate Amiga users on the alternative solutions that they can provide and demonstrate the requirements for a contemporary platform. In this respect, the TransAM could be considered to be the spiritual ancestor of the AmigaOne.

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Last Update: 1/11/2001


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