phase 5 digital products

~ the last words ~

phase 5 was founded in 1992 in Frankfurt am Main as a subsidiary of AS&S, Advanced Systems & Software, which Wolf Dietrich and Gerald Carda already owned between them. It built expansion hardware for the Amiga and it tended to build it first. The first DMA SCSI controller for the Zorro III bus was theirs, the Fastlane Z3. So was the first 68060 accelerator, the CyberStorm, and the first 64-bit graphics card for the machine, the CyberVision 64. In 1996 a second subsidiary was set up, phase 5 Elektronikfertigungs GmbH, and it manufactured everything the company shipped from then on.

The move that made the name was PowerPC. The powerUP boards reached the market in April 1997, pairing a Motorola 68k with a PowerPC chip on a single card, and in a 1999 magazine interview Dietrich put sales at roughly ten thousand, a figure that rests on that interview alone. The company was working out of a commuter town in Hessen, selling speed into a platform most of the industry had stopped costing out. Upgrade cards for several Power Mac models followed in 1998 at prices around $800, distributed in the United States through The Software Hut, and they got a decent press.

Then the platform moved under them. In May 1998 Amiga Inc. stepped away from the PowerPC direction, which split an already small market in half. phase 5 announced its answer on 22 July 1999: G3-based boards developed with QNX Software Systems, and beyond them a whole computer, the AMIRAGE K2, with the A/Box and its Caipirinha chipset behind that. None of it shipped. On 26 January 2000 the company filed for protection from its creditors.

~ the record ~

~ two processors at once ~

The Blizzard PPC and the CyberStorm PPC were strange boards and the strangeness was forced. AmigaOS was 68k code and there was no native PowerPC version of it, so the cards ran both processors concurrently out of a shared address space, with the PowerPC working as a coprocessor to a 68k that stayed in charge. The cost was in the cache: every switch between 68k and PowerPC code meant flushing, which made mixing the two ad hoc expensive. Writing software that used the fast chip well took planning that most Amiga developers did not have time for, so mixed binaries stayed unpopular.

It got worse from there, because the kernel split too. phase 5 shipped PowerUP to run the PowerPC side alongside the 68k operating system, and Haage & Partner answered with WarpOS, which did the same job and was not code-compatible with it. Developers now had to pick a side inside a market that was already too small to support one. My own 1998 was a PC in Ankara and a modem, and the Amiga was a thing other people's older brothers had owned; the buyer for a dual-processor accelerator aimed at a six-year-old machine was mostly German-speaking and deeply committed, and I was neither.

~ the fax ~

On 9 February 2000 the German Amiga news site amiga-news.de published what it had received by fax from the company. phase 5 had filed for protection from its creditors on 26 January. Talks were being held with third parties interested in taking over the Amiga technology side so that the running developments, especially the new G4 cards, could continue. If it came to liquidation instead, every customer holding a preorder or a prepayment would be contacted and told what their rights were. Eyetech, a British dealer that had been waiting on those G4 cards for the A1200, posted its own note: following the filing at the end of January, the design and development of the boards had ceased, and no work at all had ever been done on the graphics card meant to accompany them.

The second report ran on 27 April. On 19 April 2000 the insolvency case, filed at the Amtsgericht Bad Homburg vor der Höhe under number 61 IN 18/00, had been abandoned for lack of assets. The chamber handling it was no longer the address for claims; claims now went to the former owners at In der Aue 27, 61140 Oberursel. The editors added a note of their own, saying they had not managed to reach either man to ask what was supposed to happen to the users who had sent hardware in for repair and never got it back.

Some of the hardware outlived the company. DCE, a German manufacturer that supplied Eyetech, secured the rights to restart production of the Blizzard PPC for the A1200, with a contract to keep the ppc.library software updated alongside it.

~ what the dates say ~

English Wikipedia records the filing as 9 February 2000. The Amiga Hardware Database records a filing on 9 February and a liquidation on 27 April. Those two dates are the days amiga-news published, and the events they describe happened on 26 January and 19 April. A company that shipped for eight years, most of them after the Amiga lost its manufacturer, ended up with its death recorded on the days a fan site got around to typing it up.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »