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The Amiga 1000 perplexed the computing industry when it was released in 1985. It was the world`s first multimedia computer which could show up to 4096 colors simultaniously, it supported plug-and-play (called autoconfig) and had many dedicated chips taking the major workload of the main CPU. People in the computing industry could not believe how the orginal designers could have put so much power into one computing device. Other special abilities were genlockable graphics, shared libraries, long file names support with the allowance of spaces, stereo sound and a flexable and fast Graphic User Interface (GUI). But the best feature of all was its 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking. The original designers had to sell the original Amiga technology to Commodore. From then on, the development team worked under Commodore, but the original Amiga designers were very unhappy by many design, funding and marketing decisions made by the Commodore management. Hidden in later AmigaOS versions are Easter Eggs in which the development team states that they made the Amiga and Commodore killed it.

The A2000 and A500 were released in 1987 and were aimed at graphic professionals and gamers respectively. The A2000 is a highly expandable machine i.e. Processor/Graphic Boards, Soundcards, Modems, Video Toasters, etc., can easily be added. Amiga`s special graphic features as well as NTSC/PAL support as standard were important reasons why it became hugely popular at graphic studios (i.e. Disney Studios and Warner Bros) and special effects companies (i.e. later movies include milestones like Total Recall, Terminator II, Jurrasic Park and TV series like Babylon 5 and SeaQuest). But Amigas were also used for critical tasks at, for example, NASA, due to it`s special multitasking abilities and stability. Commodore made much money with its Amiga line of computers without doing major marketing. Most of the profits, however, were spent on IBM emulators for Amigas and support for Commodore`s IBM-clone branch, to the frustration of Amiga fans, developers and original designers. The professional A3000 with a full standard 32-bit hardware architecture was released in 1990 with the support for higher resolutions and a faster CPU as standard. The last computers built under Commodore were released in 1992, namely the A1200 and A4000 which allowed the display more than 640,000 colors simultaniously from a 16.8 million color palette.

Harald Frank demonstrating Amithlon on his PC

Meanwhile, Commodore`s PC branch began to make major losses which resulted in a bankruptcy in 1994. The last product to come from the Amiga team under Commodore was AmigaOS 3.1, which was a very good and stable Operating System. The Amiga technology changed hands several times during many years of legal fights and bankruptcies of new Amiga owners. Then finally in 1997 Gateway bought the Amiga technolgy and promised to bring back the Amiga computer into the stores, but strangely and suddenly, Amiga`s new president resigned and sold all his $11 million dollars worth of Gateway shares simultaniously to when the current Amiga CEO and enthusiast Bill McEwen was fired by the Gateway management team. The project eventually got cancelled but on 1 January 2000. Amiga`s CEO Bill McEwen and Amiga`s CTO Fleecy Moss announced that they bought the Amiga technolgy and products for millions of dollars.

Today, there are many leading Amiga community figures like hardware designers and famous programmers working for Amiga, Inc. Many people will only remember the Amiga computer as an old 1MB 7 Mhz system from the 80s running WB1.3. This is mainly due to many IBM clones companies doing massive marketing for their machines and making the Amiga close to invisible to the general public.

Things have changed much over the years, but even through after many years of having no proper support from an owner company, the Amiga community continued to advance the platform. Today, Amigas are mostly highly expanded machines running with top 68k and older PPC CPUs. AmigaOS developers are currently working with various hardware companies like the Eyetech Group, Elbox, Merlancia Industries, bplan GmbH, Matay and others to further advance the platform with new G3/G4/G5 PPC processor and PCI/AGP hardware solutions.

It is hard to estimate how many Amiga users or fans there are today. However, judging from the existance of thousands of Amiga related websites, thousands of people visiting dozens of Amiga shows annually, and hunderds of thousands of pagehits generated by main Amiga community portal websites, it must still be quite substantial. Amiga users left worldwide are mainly coders, graphic artists, hackers and other computer professionals who are proud owners of their machines but use other platforms as well.

PCI Spy utility running on Amihtlon

About the Author:
Mike Bouma is a long time Amiga user and developer, well known member of the Amiga community, member of the 'Phoenix Developer Consortium', and owner of the 'AmigaRing'. He can be reached via email on mike.bouma@talk21.com.

1. "A preface: The rise of AmigaOS emulation"
2. "The AmigaOS XL package and system requirements"
3. "Installing the AmigaOS XL package"
4. "Using AmigaOS XL (part 1)"
5. "Using AmigaOS XL (part 2)"
6. "The Pros and Cons of AmigaOS XL usage"
7. "The verdict"
8. "Appendix: The Amiga platform and its user community"