18.May.2025
Michele Battilana (Facebook)
|
Gail Wellington passed away
On Thursday Gail Wellington passed away at the age of 85. Born on January 14, 1940 in Yonkers, New York, she was one of Commodore International's best-known personalities through her work as head of the "Commodore Applications and Technical Support" (CATS) department, which was founded for her, and her involvement in the Amiga CDTV.
Her career in this field began in 1981 at Commodore UK, as a technical writer - starting with a manual about writing software manuals for external developers of programs for the Commodore PET - where she eventually became head of the software department. Three years later at Commodore Electronics Ltd, she took over software sales to and support for the independent distributors.
In spring of 1985, at the CeBIT computer exposition in Hanover, Germany, her supervisor, Bob Gleadow, asked her to travel to Los Gatos for three weeks to work with the Amiga developers whose company Commodore had bought in August. This turned into three months in which Gail Wellington mediated between the West Coast and Commodore's marketing department on the East Coast of the USA and kept the management up to date on progress and costs. During this time she was also involved in the planning and coordination of the official launch of the Amiga at Lincoln Center in New York on July 23rd, a major event with Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry, which, like many others, required her to work 7-day weeks and travel extensively.
Back in England at Commodore Electronics, she took charge of marketing and recruiting developers for the Amiga, which led to her return to the USA in October 1986 and appointment as worldwide Amiga Product Manager and in 1987 head of CATS, where she oversaw all worldwide developer activities, managed the Amiga DevCon events and ensured the successful sale of Commodore's products by ensuring the availability of high quality third party application software and hardware. CATS consisted of technical, administrative and marketing staff.
These assignments ended with Mehdi Ali's presidency of Commodore International, who made her Director of Special Projects. The first special project was the development and launch of the Amiga CDTV, code-named "Gail's Baby". Gail Wellington and her team oversaw the software side, while Don Gilbreath and his team were responsible for the hardware side. Her tasks included bringing software developers on board and conducting product demonstrations. However, the CDTV was not a commercial success and Gail Wellington was dismissed in 1992.
After a brief stint as Vice President of Sales and Marketing at OptImage Interactive Services, which was involved with Philips' CD-i, she ended up working full-time at "Three Peas in a Pod Florist" in Pennsylvania, which she had previously purchased with her daughter. (snx)
[News message: 18. May. 2025, 09:11] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
