Happy Birthday, Amiga

Sebby writes "Today is the Amiga's 20th anniversary. Commodore officially introduced the Amiga 1000 with much fanfare at the Lincoln Center in New York on July 23, 1985. It was the most advanced computer of its day. The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few years earlier by a small California company called Amiga, Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors looking to invest in a killer game machine."

Comments

Had my cup o' pedant this morning..

[grub]

It was the most advanced computer of its day.

Funny, I always thought the Cray-2, also released in 1985, held that title.

All that I can say

[0xdeaddead]

is that Commodore snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with this one.

The real problems that plagued the Amiga was the lack of cheap hard disks from Commodore, Later in the Amigas life the lack of memory protection started to plauge the users too... If they actually released, standardized the platform perhaps it would have helped...

On the otherhad the killer is that everyone that has bought the IP has either died, or promised to do something with it, and done nothing.

As a plus Amiga's gave rise to smart GPU's, offloaded IO & a better less cpu centric design of cheap computers.

Guru Meditation

[EQ]

What I liked best?

Debugging. Coolest system error name...

Software Failure. Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation #0100000C0.000FE800


Sigh.. had they marketed it right, we'd not be talking about MS Windows at all. A machine and OS far ahead of its time.

How are you measuring "advanced"?

[CyricZ]

The most "advanced" computer at that time depends on what your criteria are. The systems from Cray and Amiga are very different, yet still both very advanced.

While the Cray-2 may have been the most efficient number crunching computer in 1985, the Amiga was the top of the line when it came to multimedia and workstation applications. So while the Cray-2 didn't offer the amazing multimedia capabilities of the Amiga, and the Amiga didn't offer the pure crunching power of the Cray-2, it isn't correct to say that either is more "advanced" than the other in all ways.

The problem with specialzation

[jockm]

I loved my Amiga 1000 and even did some professional development for it. I kept it running for a great many years before it finally gave up the ghost. There were many things that contributed to it's demise, but one of them has to be it's over specialized hardware.

Part of what made it so awesome was how incredible it was at graphics. How perfectly tuned it was to making a video signal. Unfortunately that limited the design of the hardware, the speed of the processor. Even if you had a faster processor for it, everything had to slow down to 7.xxxx MHz (IIRC) when you hit the video interface.

Then the PC got better video cards, and I could just upgrade that one part. The Amiga was always playing catchup with custom designed chips tuned to the hardware. After a while it felt like they were always a day late and a dollar short. It was still an amazing machine for video, but for a general purpose system it had seriously lost it's luster.

Still I miss it...