Eyetech

Last updated

Eyetech Group Ltd is a company founded in 1983, in order to provide commercial companies with automatical data collection systems. They had already been involved in the provision of the automatic toll collection systems used at the Dartford River Crossing, as well as many of the bar code based tracking systems used by UK national parcel service. [1]

Contents

History

Eyetech Group Ltd was founded as a subsidiary of an international UK plc, before trading as its own, standalone plc following a management buyout in 1985. The company has mostly been involved in producing bespoke software systems for commercial use in the transport and distribution sector under Unix/AIX, track and trace systems involving the use of barcodes, which have been used by the majority of UK parcel carriers and bar code decoders and industrial (networked) shop floor data capture and access control systems. [1]

Interest in Amiga

Eyetech took an interest in Amiga, as well as being a registered Amiga developer, in 1993 and developed their Amiga related commercial systems to cover three main areas: as an integrated multimedia development/mass delivery platform for its existing customer base with custom systems built around Amiga architecture, using rehoused Amiga hardware as a low cost multitasking platform for shop floor data collection/control applications in smaller industrial companies and as a karaoke platform harnessing cdrom technology. [1]

During years on the Amiga market, Eyetech manufactured several accessories for Amiga computers including CD-ROM/IDE solution for A1200, [2] custom tower cases based on off the shelf pc towers with replacement backplane metal work to match A1200 ports riveted on. [3] scan doubler/flicker fixer [4] and even attempted to introduce extension to Zorro bus standard. [5]

In 2000 Eyetech and Amiga, Inc. formed partnership to produce hardware for new AmigaOne platform. [6] [7] AmigaOne computers were introduced in 2002, [8] first AmigaOne SE followed by AmigaOne XE and Micro-A1 models. Eyetech retired from the Amiga market in 2005 [9] and subsequently sold their remaining Amiga business to Amiga Kit [10] who claims to have continued manufacturing and distributing Eyetech products to the Amiga market to present day. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amiga</span> Family of personal computers sold by Commodore

Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio compared to previous 8-bit systems. These systems include the Atari ST—released earlier the same year—as well as the Macintosh and Acorn Archimedes. Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Amiga differs from its contemporaries through the inclusion of custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites and a blitter, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS.

AmigaOne is a series of computers intended to run AmigaOS 4 developed by Hyperion Entertainment, as a successor to the Amiga series by Commodore International. Earlier models were produced by Eyetech, and were based on the Teron series of PowerPC POP mainboards. In September 2009, Hyperion Entertainment secured an exclusive licence for the AmigaOne name and subsequently new AmigaOne computers were released by A-Eon Technology and Acube Systems.

Individual Computers is a German computer hardware company specializing in retrocomputing accessories for the Commodore 64, Amiga, and PC platforms. Individual Computers produced the C-One reconfigurable computer in 2003. The company is owned and run by Jens Schönfeld.

WHDLoad is a software package for the Amiga platform to make installation of software to a hard disk easier, for such things as demos or games. Allowing for better compatibility for Amiga software, which can sometimes have hardware incompatibilities making them hard to use in emulated environments due to the widely varying hardware specifications of the Amiga product line across its history. WHDLoad basically circumvents the operating system in the Amiga for greater compatibility and preserves the original program environment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XAD (software)</span> File extractor for AmigaOS

The XAD system is an open-source client-based unarchiving system for the Amiga. This means there is a master library called xadmaster.library which provides an interface between the client and the user application and there are clients handling the special archive formats. Three different types to handle file and disk archives and also disk image files (filesystem) are possible. They can be made by anyone. The master library itself includes some of these clients internally to make the work somewhat easier for the package maintainer and the user installing it.

Aladdin4D is a computer program for modeling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations, currently running on AmigaOS and macOS platforms. A-EON Technology Ltd owns the rights and develops current and future versions of Aladdin4D for AmigaOS, MorphOS & AROS. All other platforms including macOS, iPadOS, iOS, Linux & Windows are developed by DiscreetFX.

NewIcons is a third-party extension to the icon handling system for AmigaOS 2 and newer. NewIcons was first invented and developed by the Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria. Subsequent development was done by Eric Sauvageau and Phil Vedovatti.

Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then dwindled. Most Amiga products were originally created directly for the Amiga computer, and were not ported from other platforms.

In computing, the AMIga Window Manager (amiwm) is a stacking window manager for the X Window System written by Marcus Comstedt.

ReAction GUI is the widget toolkit engine that is used in AmigaOS 3.2–4.1.

WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It runs on PowerUP accelerator boards developed by phase5 which contains both a Motorola 68000 series CPU and a PowerPC CPU with shared address space. WarpOS runs alongside the 68k-based AmigaOS, which can use the PowerPC as a coprocessor. Despite its name, it is not an operating system (OS), but a kernel; it supplies a limited set of functions similar to those in AmigaOS for using the PowerPC. When released, its original name was WarpUP, but was changed to reflect its greater feature set, and possibly to avoid comparison with its competitor, PowerUP.

AHI is a retargetable audio subsystem for AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS. It was created by Martin Blom in the mid-1990s to allow standardized operating system support for audio hardware other than just the native Amiga sound chip, for example 16-bit sound cards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amiga 1200</span> 1992 personal computer

The Amiga 1200, or A1200, is a personal computer in the Amiga computer family released by Commodore International, aimed at the home computer market. It was launched on October 21, 1992, at a base price of £399 in the United Kingdom and $599 in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AmigaOne X1000</span>

AmigaOne X1000 is a PowerPC-based personal computer intended as a high-end platform for AmigaOS 4. It was announced by A-Eon Technology CVBA in partnership with Hyperion Entertainment and released in 2011. Its name pays homage to the Amiga 1000 released by Commodore in 1985. It is, however, not hardware-compatible with the original Commodore Amiga system.

In addition to the Amiga chipsets, various specially designed chips have been used in Commodore Amiga computers that do not belong to the 'Amiga chipset' in a tight sense.

Warp3D was a project founded by Haage & Partner in 1998 that aimed to provide a standard API that would enable programmers to access, and therefore use, 3D hardware on the Amiga.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PowerUP (accelerator)</span>

PowerUP boards were dual-processor accelerator boards designed by Phase5 Digital Products for Amiga computers. They had two different processors, a Motorola 68000 series (68k) and a PowerPC, working in parallel, sharing the complete address space of the Amiga computer system.

Retargetable graphics is a device driver API mainly used by third-party graphics hardware to interface with AmigaOS via a set of libraries. The software libraries may include software tools to adjust resolution, screen colors, pointers, and screenmodes. It will use available hardware and will not extend the capabilities in any way.

Gajits Music Software, also known as Software Technology Ltd., was a software company based in Manchester, England. The company developed music software for the Atari ST and Amiga in the early 1990s.

Aegis Sonix is a music sequencer and a score editor for the Amiga created by Aegis Development and published in 1987. The application offers a combination of a notation editor and an editor of digital sounds and is able to edit IFF music instruments and other digital sound files.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Amiga Inc and Eyetech form partnership". 6 June 2000. Archived from the original on 28 December 2019. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  2. ↑ Taylor, David (November 1996). "IDEal Solutions". Amiga Format. No. 90. Future Publishing. pp. 56–57. ISSN   0957-4867.
  3. ↑ Vost, Ben (May 1998). "Eyetech EZ PC Tower". Amiga Format. No. 110. Future Publishing. pp. 60–61. ISSN   0957-4867.
  4. ↑ Drummond, Richard (September 1998). "EZ-VGA Mk2/Plus". CU Amiga. No. 103. EMAP. p. 64. ISSN   0963-0090.
  5. ↑ "News, Zorro IV - the sequel". Amiga Format. No. 120. Future Publishing. February 1999. p. 12. ISSN   0957-4867.
  6. ↑ "Amiga Announces the AmigaOne" (Press release). Melbourne, Australia: Amiga. 21 October 2000. Archived from the original on 27 October 2000. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  7. ↑ Smith, Tony (23 October 2000). "Amiga unveils next-gen hardware spec But manufacturers support seems very thin on the ground". The Register. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  8. ↑ Lettice, John (27 March 2002). "Amiga returns with AmigaOne PPC hardware". The Register. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  9. ↑ Proven, Liam (3 January 2007). "The Amiga is dead. Long live the Amiga!". The Inquirer. Archived from the original on 9 June 2011. Retrieved 14 April 2016.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  10. ↑ "AmigaKit.com acquires Eyetech Classic Amiga Stock". Amiga.org. 21 September 2006. Retrieved 22 August 2017.
  11. ↑ "History of Amiga Kit". Amiga Kit. 30 June 2017. Retrieved 27 August 2017.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.