Article URL: https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-time/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49017265 Points: 31 # Comments: 13

On July 23, 1985, Commodore introduced its Amiga 1000 computer. And let’s just say the world wasn’t ready for it yet. Dave Haynie, a Commodore engineer who worked on the later models, has said there was no such thing as a 1980s computer. There were 1970s computers and 1990s computers, and it was the Amiga that dragged the rest of the industry into the 1990s. It is not hyperbole to say the Amiga 1000 was 10 years ahead of its time. Its custom chipset had color graphics with up to 4,096 colors, stereo sound, a graphical user interface. Its operating system had full preemptive multitasking. The combination of the chipset and the operating system meant it could run on a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.14 megahertz and 256 KB of RAM. And it could boot and run off a single floppy drive. Amiga demonstrated it in January 1984, when the chips existed only as prototype circuit boards. By the end of 1985, it was a shipping product. Realistically, an ideal configuration had dual floppy drives and 512k of RAM, and a megabyte was a lot nicer. But dual floppies and a meg of RAM wasn’t an outlandish machine in 1985, and in that configuration, it was smooth and pleasant to use. Commodore commissioned artist Andy Warhol to demonstrate it by using it to create digital art to show off its capabilities. Graphical user interfaces weren’t exactly new in the summer of 1985. Apple had introduced the Macintosh about a year and a half earlier, and the Lisa predated even that by a nearly a year. Atari released its ST computer three months before the Amiga, and the ST also had a graphical operating system with a mouse and color. It was multitasking that put the Amiga on the map. And it wasn’t the cooperative multitasking that Windows 3.0 and 3.1 did or Apple System 7 did. It was full preemptive multitasking like Windows 95. The only thing Windows NT did that the Amiga didn’t was memory protection. The Amiga’s operating system wasn’t based on Unix and it certainly wasn’t based on Windows NT. Its direct ancestor was an operating system called TRIPOS that originated at Cambridge University. Adding memory protection would have been a nice touch, but the additional required hardware would have increased costs. And the Amiga at its debut was not exactly inexpensive. The base system cost $1,295 without a monitor. A color monitor, which you definitely wanted, cost another $300. Add the additional memory and a second floppy drive for another $150 to $200 each, and you soon learned the Amiga you really wanted was more like a $2,000 computer. Living in the future was expensive, but compared to the $2,495 Apple wanted for a less capable machine, the price wasn’t unreasonable.