First Commodore Amiga came out 30 years ago
Thursday marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Commodore Amiga: the Amiga 1000. In the mid-1980s, this home computer brought many innovations in the field of multitasking, image and sound to the growing computer market.
Commodore acquired the Amiga Corporation in 1984, giving it a system that, while rooted in a game system, would allow it to compete with Atari in home computers. The resulting ‘Amiga from Commodore’, later renamed Amiga 1000, got a big launch on July 23, 1985 with a demonstration by Andy Warhol, who edited images of singer Debbie Harry on the system.
Subsequent production and sales were anything but successful. In the months that followed, Commodore managed to manufacture only dozens of them and when production picked up steam in November, it was too late to take full advantage of the lucrative end-of-year period. In addition, the first Amiga was plagued with a buggy operating system. The real success for the Amiga only came with the cheaper Amiga 500, when more programs appeared that could make use of the advanced graphics capabilities of the system.
The Amiga 1000 had a Motorola 68000 CPU, of which the pal version, which was made in Germany, ran at 7.09379MHz. The computer had 256kB of ram, compared to 512kB for the Amiga 500. In addition, there was 256kB Writable Control Store, which loaded the Kickstart portion of AmigaOS via floppy. Commodore housed Kickstart on later Amiga versions in ROM, which significantly reduced launch times. AmigaOS also consisted of the graphical Workbench interface. One of the most vaunted features of AmigaOS was its ability to multitask, thanks to the Exec kernel.
An important piece of hardware was the Original Chip Set, consisting of a central Agnus chip, and the Denise and Paula chips responsible for video and audio respectively. The Amiga 1000 had a palette of 4096 colors and a pal resolution of 640×256 pixels or 640×512i in combination with an interlaced display, when using 16 colors. The chipset could, among other things, show different horizontal resolutions on the same screen. The audio chip provided four 8-bit PCM channels.
The Amiga became known as a home computer for games, but was also widely used by graphic artists and to make music. In addition, a lively demo scene developed around the system, which pushed its capabilities to the limit. In addition, the video editing and animation system was used by television and film studios, among others. However, sales numbers never matched those of the Commodore 64. In time, the Amiga was overtaken by the rise of the PC, to which Commodore had no good answer. In 1994 the curtain fell for Commodore and with it for the Amiga, although AmigaOS is still being developed.
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