Escom AG

» see escom.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Escom died in july 1996. I was twelve years old and two years short of my first modem, and by the time I could read the arguments about the Amiga they were already being conducted entirely in the past tense. This grave is about a German retailer, but the reason anyone still says the name is that Escom was holding the Amiga when the music stopped.

Manfred Schmitt started it in 1986 in Darmstadt as the computer division of his music business, and it became a company in its own right in 1991. What it did was sell PCs through shops, at a moment when Germany was buying PCs through shops in enormous numbers, and it did that well enough to hold 11.2 percent of the German market by 1994. Then it decided to be bigger than that.

February 1995: Escom took over a large number of Rumbelows branches in Britain, converting an electrical retailer's estate into computer shops overnight. April 1995: Escom bought the remaining assets of Commodore International for about fourteen million dollars, out of the liquidation that had been sitting unresolved since Commodore collapsed the previous year. It wanted the Commodore and Amiga names, and it got them, along with the patents and the operating system.

Fifteen months later it was gone. Escom had forecast a 180 million mark loss for 1995 and kept losing through the first half of 1996, ended up 185 million marks down, and could not get its shareholders to cover it. Insolvency proceedings opened on 2 july 1996 and bankruptcy was declared on the fifteenth. The company was liquidated, and the Amiga went into a receiver's hands for the second time in two years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what fourteen million dollars bought ~

Escom set up a subsidiary called Amiga Technologies in Bensheim and gave it the job of restarting a computer that had been out of production for a year. What that actually produced was reissues. The A1200 and the A4000T went back on sale in 1995, essentially the same machines Commodore had been selling before it died, at prices that made sense to nobody looking at what a PC cost in 1995.

There were plans past that, including a PowerPC direction and a concept machine that got shown around, but plans were all there was time for. The honest read is that Escom bought a brand rather than a business, and a brand only pays if you can afford the years of engineering it takes to make it mean something again. Escom had fifteen months and no spare money, because it had spent the spare money on British shops.

~ the day it died ~

The Rumbelows conversion is the part that killed it and it has nothing to do with computers. Escom acquired a lot of retail floor space very quickly in a country where it had no reputation, and floor space costs money every day whether or not anything moves across it. Growth of that shape only works if revenue arrives faster than the leases do, and it did not.

So the story people tell, that the Amiga purchase sank Escom, is backwards. Fourteen million dollars was not a fatal number for a company with a tenth of the German PC market. The retail expansion was the fatal number. The Amiga just happened to be sitting on the balance sheet when the whole thing went over, which is why it is the part everyone remembers.

~ what got buried with it ~

The estate was picked apart across 1997. Tulip Computers took the Commodore trademarks and spent the following decade licensing the name onto things that were not Commodores. Gateway 2000 bought the Amiga patents and copyrights and the rest of the intellectual property, then did approximately nothing with them, which set off the twenty-year ownership tangle that the remaining Amiga community is still arguing about in court in 2026.

That is the real inheritance here. Escom's bankruptcy is the moment the Amiga stopped being a product owned by a company that made it and became an asset owned by companies that did not. Everything after 1996 is licensing, and there is no version of that which ends with a machine you can buy. Whatever the Amiga had been in Britain or Germany, it was finished, and Escom is the last entity that could plausibly have stopped it being finished.

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