Amiga 500 Amiga 500+ Amiga 1000 Amiga 1200 Amiga 1500 Amiga 2000 Amiga 3000 Amiga 4000 The Amiga is a personal computer whose development started in 1982. The original Amiga Inc company was bought out in 1984 by Commodore International, who marketed the Amiga as their intended successor to the Commodore 64.
An Amiga A500 computer, photographed in 1988. To its right is a 9-pin dot matrix printer, the Star LC-10.
The first Amiga computer was released in 1985. This would later be referred to as the Commodore-Amiga 1000 or A1000 for short, the number being added when the product range was expanded. A500 (low-end) and A2000 (high-end) followed in 1987. The A500 was the most popular Amiga computer at that time; today the most popular Amiga is the A1200. The last Amigas to be made were the A1200 and the A4000.
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 the mid 1990s (Video editing, 3D graphics rendering etc). Newtek marketed a special graphics rendering solution of the Amiga, called the Video Toaster - Video Toaster were used to render the space ships in the first season of Babylon 5, and were involved in numerous other major movie productions without ever being credited. NewTek also created the Lightwave 3D rendering program on the Amiga, which they eventually ported to the PC and is still being sold today. [1]
The operating system, AmigaOS, was also quite sophisticated, combining an elegant GUI like that of the Apple Macintosh with some of the flexibility of UNIX while retaining a simplicity that made maintenance rather easy.
The Amiga chipsets, OCS, ECS and AGA, were more advanced than other architectures of their time.
The Amiga community contributed a lot to a computer subculture known as the Demo Scene. The Demo Scene was more or less a phenomenon inherited from Commodore C64 times.
The original Amiga was designed by Jay Miner. His machine was many years ahead of its time when it appeared, having features such as IRQ sharing, memory mapped IO, AutoConfig (today known as "plug-and-play"), and preemptive multitasking. Some of these features had been used previously in mainframe computers, but had never been used in a personal computer before.
Amiga models include:
A1000, featuring 68000 processor, OCS chipset.
A500, A2000, featuring 68000 processor, OCS or ECS chipset.
A500plus, A600, CD-TV, featuring 68000 processor, ECS chipset.
A3000, featuring 68030 processor, ECS chipset; the A3000UX shipped with Unix instead of AmigaOS.
AmigaCD32 (68020), A1200 (68EC020) and A4000 (68EC030 or 68040), all featuring the AGA chipset.
Prototypes that were never released include:
Amiga Nyx, 1994, with a prototype AAA chipset;
Amiga Walker, 1996, with AGA chipset but a PCI-like expansion slot.
|
