Great Valley Products

~ the obituary ~

Great Valley Products sold the parts Commodore would not build. It was founded in 1987 in Paoli, Pennsylvania, and its first Amiga expansion shipped the year after. The president was Gerard Bucas, who had spent four years as a vice president in Commodore's technical division before he left, and the engineering bench filled up with people from the same place. Jeff Boyer, who had worked on the A590 and the A2091 inside Commodore, joined GVP in 1989. Scott Hood, who had worked on the Amber chip, came later.

The company was owned by the people who ran it and by their families, which is unusual for a hardware firm of that period. It stayed small, 22 employees in 1990, because it only designed. Software came from a handful of freelancers, and the boards themselves were built by outside contract manufacturers, so GVP got modern production lines without ever paying for one. What it designed was most of the upgrade shelf for the platform: the Impact SCSI controllers, the G-Force accelerators, the DSS8 sampler, the G-Lock genlock, the Impact Vision 24 video card, and the A530 Turbo that bolted a 40 MHz 68EC030 onto the side of an Amiga 500.

I was eleven the year this happened and had nothing of my own to upgrade, so this is a shelf I know from manuals rather than from owning any of it. GVP's customer already had an Amiga 2000 or 3000 and was willing to spend several hundred dollars to make it quicker, which was a specific kind of person in a specific set of countries. The Amiga reached Turkey, mostly as a games machine. The accelerator card market did not follow it here.

~ the case file ~

~ the board you could afford ~

The A530 Turbo is the product that explains the company. An Amiga 500 was the cheap model, the one with no expansion slots worth the name, and GVP hung a box off its side port containing a 40 MHz processor against the 7 MHz part inside, up to 8 MB of RAM, a SCSI controller and a hard disk. The optional 286 module made it a slow PC when you needed one. It cost more than the computer did.

That was the GVP pattern. Commodore shipped a machine at a price, and GVP sold you the machine Commodore could have shipped. The catalogue ran from a 16 bit sound sampler up to the EGS 110/24 graphics card, and the company was among the first to get autoboot working on an Amiga hard disk controller, which sounds small now and was not small then.

~ april 1995 ~

Commodore went bankrupt in April 1994 and the Amiga spent a year in legal storage. GVP announced a Zorro III SCSI controller called the A4098 in 1993 and it never shipped. A year after its only customer base lost its manufacturer, GVP stopped trading too; one long running Amiga timeline puts the day at 16 April 1995, the same month Escom won the auction for Commodore's remains, and Wikipedia records the formal liquidation that July. Eight years of work, and the end of it falls inside the same thirty days as the auction of the company whose machine it had spent those years improving.

~ what power computing bought ~

The July 1995 issue of Amiga Computing ran the aftermath under the headline GVP saved. The intellectual rights had gone to M-Tec of Germany working with Power Computing in Britain, and the magazine reported that the only thing buyers could actually get at that moment was GVP branded RAM, with the rest of the catalogue promised in two months. Power Computing told the magazine that GVP had been plucked from the jaws of ruin and that things could only get better. The Amiga press in 1995 had to write sentences like that roughly every month.

What the buyers took was the designs, split fifty fifty, auctioned off with the product lines. They did not take the staff. The successor traded as GVP-M out of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, with an entirely new payroll. It restarted production of some of the old boards and put out its first new expansion in 1996. The name survived and the company did not, which matters more than it looks here: every person who had designed those cards was already gone.

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