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Amiga

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A personal computer marketed by Commodore Business Machines, and the intended successor to the Commodore 64.

The first Amiga home computer, Commodore-Amiga 1000 (or A1000 for short), was released in 1985 by Commodore. A500 (low-end) and A2000 (high-end) followed in the year 1987. A500 was the most popular Amiga computer in that times, today the most popular Amiga is A1200.


For its time, the Amiga had some of the most impressive sound and graphics (through several coprocessors) available for the home user. Indeed, it was also used for commercial entertainment production till mid 1990s (Video editing, 3D graphics rendering etc).


The operating system, AmigaOS, was also quite sophisticated, combining an elegant GUI like the Macintosh with some of the flexibility of UNIX.


The Amiga community contributed a lot to a computer subculture known as the Demo Scene. The Demo Scene was more or less a phenomena inherited from Commodore C64 times.


The original Amiga was first designed by Jay Miner. He designed a machine that was lots of years after the time it appeared, setting up ideas like IRQ sharing, mmaped io and such things.


Amiga models include:



At least the following operating systems are available for Amigas: AmigaOS, Linux and NetBSD


The thing that make Amiga different than other architectures is its chipsets: OCS, ECS and AGA; and its OS, AmigaOS.


Unfortunately, Commodore thought the Amiga was a toaster (and so did Newtek, but that's a different story), so their marketing didn't do the platform justice. Most retail outlets were toy stores. Compatibility with ordinary household television sets was prioritized over professional grade graphics and memory management. Even "amenities" such as a hard drive (on a 500)or a non-interlaced display had to be had from third party vendors. While it was the only multitasking platform in the consumer marketplace for several years, robustness left a lot to be desired, resulting in frequent "Guru Meditations".


In spite of being sold so short, Amiga was originally supported by such prestigious software titles as AutoCAD, WordPerfect and Lattice C.


Luckily, it's not dead at all, it still have a strong user community and current Amiga owner, Amiga, Inc is developing a new PowerPC based Amiga, and a new AmigaOS version, 4.0.


Official Amiga, Inc homepage is http://www.amiga.com


Different free Amiga emulators exist for variety of operating systems. For example UNIX and Microsoft Windows operating systems:

  • WinUAE (for Microsoft Windows, see UAE site)


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