We pay homage to a computer that was years ahead of its time
We looked at the glorious Atari ST last week, and lamented it's fate as an underappreciated computer of the era. The other side to the 16-bit coin was of course, the Commodore Amiga, and consequently the winner of the 16-bit battle, and probably one of the most popular home computers to have ever been sold.
I'll admit here, I only owned an Amiga 500 for the last few months of my time in the 16-bit years, before I got rid of all the 'old' stuff to be replace it with a 386 PC. So I never really got to know the machine in the way I loved the ST or Spectrum. Saying that, in the little time I did own one I never saw it as less than a staggering machine. It interested me back then, and still does to this day - I regularly read Sven's Amiga section in Micro Mart, to see what's going on with the scene.
The Amiga really was years ahead of its time. When the 500 version was launched in 1987, it featured multitasking capabilities, amazing arcade quality graphics and sound, an incredible GUI (in the form of the Amiga OS) and windowing system Workbench. It's stuff we take for granted today, but that it wasn't realised by the mainstream PC until some years later.
Beyond the hardware, the other thing about the Amiga that always amazed me was the immense public domain and community offerings. If you connected with the right people, and bought the right magazines, you'd find markets with exclusive Amiga stalls, individuals creating their own content on disk, and just about every mail order example you could possibly imagine. Most of the content was sold for mere pence, some of it was even free, all you needed was to pay the postage. It was the community that was the backbone of Amiga development, and the life and soul of the 16-bit era.
History
The story of the Amiga goes back to 1980 where integrated circuit designer Jay Miner as developing 8-bit chips for Atari. Apparently, when his idea for a computer based on the Motorola 68000 processor was rejected by the company (in its ultimate wisdom) he decided it was time to move on.
He teamed up with another former Atari employee, Larry Kaplan and an ex-VP of marketing from Tonka Toys, Dave Morse, to create the company Hi-Toro. It was divided into two sections, one for developing peripherals and games, and the other computer development. The idea that Miner had was to build a high powered home computer, with keyboard and floppy disk, that software developers could have freedom to work with. The end result was the Lorraine Project (named after Morse's wife).
In 1982, Hi-Toro - primed and ready to begin work on the the Lorraine Project, and already having a motherboard complete with Blitter-like chip - renamed itself as Amiga Incorporated. The history after that gets a little rough. There are a few versions, depending on who you talk to or what you decide to read; the gist of them all is that the crash of 1983 brought massive cashflow problems to computing, and Amiga was in dire straits. According to the more popular story, Atari lent Amiga $500,000 to keep going, on the proviso that if they didn't pay it back in one month, the Amiga was theirs.
Eventually, and after much suing and lots of Jack Tramiel, Commodore Amiga launched the Amiga 1000. About eighteen months later, the bestselling Amiga 500 was launched and with it the winner of the 16-bit battle.
Did You Know?
• All Amigas from the first A1000 right through to the A1200 had the names of B-52s singles burned onto the motherboards
• The Amiga HAM Mode was not actually supposed to exist in the final product, but the developers gave it a reprieve when they found out that half of the graphics chip would have to be removed
• According to rumour, the Amiga was to include an internal phone answer machine, but it was considered too expensive at the time.
• The first malware was the SCA virus on the Amiga