Amiga

Overview

The first Amiga computer model, the A1000, was released in 1985 by Commodore Inc.

The design team was headed up by Jay Miner and development of the system began in 1982 under the Amiga Corporation company. Commodore acquired Amiga Corporation in the summer of 1984, snatching the Amiga chipset from under the nose of Atari, who originally funded the project. Commodore filed for bankruptcy in 1994, despite the success of the A1200 and CD32.

Hardware

The Amiga range was based on the Motorola 68000 chipset, but made use of proprietary graphics and sound co-processors (codenamed Denise and Paula respectively), which took the load off of the CPU and allowed the Amiga to process more than just gaming graphics extremely efficiently. The Amiga revolutionized video production, providing an affordable CG solution with the Newtek Video Toaster (which later evolved into the Newtek TriCaster, the core of Giant Bomb's video production). It was the first consumer grade computer to be able to sample and record stereo audio in 44.1khz (CD quality) at the time. Over the lifetime of the computer, three graphics and sound chipsets were used: OCS (Original ChipSet), ECS (Enhanced ChipSet) and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture).

Models

Released	Model	Codename	Chipset	Memory	Kickstarter	Variants	Colours
1985	Amiga 1000	Lorraine	OCS	256k onboard, upgradable to 512k	v1.0-v1.3, on floppy disc		32 on screen, 4096 palette
1987	Amiga 500	Rock Lobster	OCS	512k onboard, upgradable to 1MB	v1.2 or v1.3, in ROM	A500+ - ECS variant A600 - v2.05 variant (codename "Junebug") A600HD - includes hard drive CDTV - Hi-fi case and CD-ROM A500+ variant	64 on screen, 4096 palette
1987	Amiga 2000	The Boss	OCS	1MB onboard, upgradable to 8MB	v1.3 or v2.0, in ROM	A1500 - UK only, second floppy instead of hard drive A2000C - ECS variant A2500 - Pro variant with 68030 CPU "accelerator"	64 on screen, 4096 palette
1990	Amiga 3000	B2	ECS	2MB onboard, upgradable to 16MB	v1.3 or v2.0, in ROM	A3000UX - bundled with Unix A3000T - tower variant	256 on screen, 4096 palette
1992	Amiga 1200	Channel Z	AGA	2MB onboard, upgradable to 8MB	v3.0, in ROM	CD32 - CD-ROM + no keyboard variant, not RAM upgradable (codename "Spellbound")	4096 on screen, 262,144 palette
1993	Amiga 4000	Pandora	AGA	2MB onboard, upgradable to 16MB	v3.0, in ROM	A4000T - Tower case, 68040 CPU	4096 on screen, 262,144 palette

Operating System

AmigaOS

is the native operating system for the Amiga family of home computers, earlier known as Workbench (the name Workbench was used as the name of the file manager in AmigaOS 3.1 and onwards). It is an multitasking capable system, using a workbench metaphor (rather than a desktop, as most current operating systems), where files and icons were stored in "drawers", which displayed a window with contents when they were pulled out. One unique feature with AmigaOS was it's ability to run software in windows using different color depths, palettes and resolutions in each, whereas Windows and MacOS at the time used a system wide color depth which could only be circumvented by full screen applications.