Amiga

Back for the future!

Imagine my suprise as I was surfing the web when I tried out the address http://www.amiga.com. I found that Amiga had indeed risen from the dead. Welcome back! It reminds me of the disk recovery on our old A 1000. If a disk died and you recovered it, it was named Lazarus.
Here is a run down on what I have gathered so far:
  • Gateway made a bold step and bought the rights to the Amiga.
  • Supporters and fans were overjoyed
  • Amiga, Inc. became active
  • Amiga is slating the release of OS 5.0 next year, and a "bridge" machine in November. The price for the machine is estimated to start at $500.
  • The "bridge" machine is going to x86 based instead of Motorola based. This is done to speed up the release. The machine will be backwards compatable with the older models through an expansion card.
  • Rumor say that the next generation will be based upon either a linux or java kernel, or possibly a mixture of the two.
  • The machine will come out in full force, having expected benchmarks above modern desktops.

    History

    The Amiga 1000 was released in 1985. The group that developed the Amiga went bankrupt and was bought by Comadore. Comadore spent more time pushing it's own junk and left the Amiga on the back burner. When my family purchased our A1000 in 1985, we had the coolest machine on the block. My friend had an Apple IIgs, wich is just a glorified Apple, and IBM was still dinking arround with CGA graphics. The Amiga came out with built in sound, midi, and video. The sound had RCA stereo out and the video was capable of doing 4096 colors at once, with 16.7 million possible and had output that would connect to a vcr. The software that came out for the Amiga was small and powerfull. The OS fit on two disks and had a stronger GUI than MS's Win 3.0. The machine did true multi-tasking and ran on 512k ram, but took advantage of more. Our machine had 2.5 MB ram and no hard drive, yet I was able to create animations and images that would bog down a similar PC. My first experience with DOS was with the Amiga DOS emulator that was provided with our 5 1/4 drive (while the Amiga used 3 1/2 floppies). The Amiga was noted for it's graphic and video edditing abilities and went on to be a strong workstation for many profesionals. The home intrest fizzeled out due to poor marketing (IMHO) or else we would all be using Amiga compatables instead of IBMs, and Motorola would be the microchip king.
    More info later...