> It might be related to the death of Klaus Burkert who has been working for
> VillageTronic on the Picasso boards and was hired by met@box later on
> AFAIK. He died in 2001 after a heart attack.

Thanks for your reply. I knew that Klaus Burkert passed away on April 4th 2001 and that he was working for Met@box at that time but it never occured to me that he was somehow connected to the AmiJoe project, and as Thomas Rudloff often talked about the AmiJoe project in the years after its scrapping but never ever mentioned Klaus Burkert in this context I don't think there's a connection.
I can now see however how the connection might have emerged in the mind of the one I quoted, as only 8 days after Klaus Burkert's death the following message appeared on Met@box website:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021003132416/http://212.96.44.74/de/amiga/news.html
http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2001-04-00197-DE.html

While this might imply causality at a quick glance I think it's not justified when looking more closely into it, because of two reasons. Firstly, the AmiJoe project was not cancelled on its own but together with the whole JoeCard division, which was much bigger and had real products that were on sale. It doesn't seem likely that such a division would be closed just because of the death of one individual. Secondly, the closure of the JoeCard division and others was already publicly hinted at on March 30th, i.e. 5 days prior to Klaus Burkert's death, effectively eliminating the possibility of a causality (at least in this direction, which is not implying there was a causality in the opposite direction, even if we assume he might have been among the one third of Met@box employees that were to be sacked):

http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2001-03-00295-DE.html

So in summary, I think you're spot on that the one I quoted indeed refers to Klaus Burkert's death in his claim. But I'm confident now that he's wrong and that actually there was no connection between Klaus Burkert and the AmiJoe project, let alone his death being the cause of the project's scrapping.
Nevertheless, thanks for your valuable input on this matter.

> I have my doubts that this was the only reason that amijoe never
> went on sale, though.

I even doubt that it was a reason at all ;-)

> Personally, I have seen a hardware prototype of it

Yes, it was also publicly shown at the HEW'99.

> but I have never seen it working ....

Me neither. But there were prototypes floating around which were functional on a basic hardware level (picture of serial output). Claus Herrmann said he got one for developing his PowerOS:

http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-1999-11-00110-DE.html

Years later even users got their hands on some and they were offered at places like eBay or AmiBay:

http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/thread.php?id=15135
http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/thread.php?id=15692
http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/thread.php?id=16579
http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/thread.php?id=19409#192475
http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/thread.php?id=19409&start=31#192541
http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=49217
http://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=74109.0

According to Thomas Rudloff, there were two revisions of the card, with three samples of rev 1 and a whole box full of samples of rev 2.
For AmigaOS application developers and users these prototypes are useless obviously as there is no PPC kernel or m68k emulator for AmigaOS available for this card. Furthermore, the card is crippled due to the non-working PCI and memory controller. So the card can't make use of PCI cards and more severely the memory it uses is the fastmem installed on the Amiga mainboard, making the card crawl, probably to a degree that it's slower than the slowest BPPC card.


Edit: added AmiBay link.
Edit2: added amiga.org link

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 22.05.2019 - 15:59 ]