 |  | AmigaWeb - About Amiga |  | | Amiga was originally developed by Amiga Corporation as an advanced home entertainment and productivity machine. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer.
Commodore International introduced the machine to the market in 1985, after having bought Amiga Corp. The machine sported a custom chipset with advanced graphics and sound capabilities.
The machine was delivered with a pre-emptive multitasking operating system known as AmigaOS.
|  (The original Amiga 1000, 1985) | Commodore later released several new Amiga models, both for low-end gaming use and high-end productivity use. Throughout the 1980s, the Amiga's combination of hardware and operating system software offered immense power
Based on the Motorola 680x0 CPU series of 16 and 32 bit microprocessors, the Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64.
Many consider it "years ahead of it's time" due to multimedia and multitasking capabilities that made it a less-expensive alternative to the Apple Macintosh, but allegedly suffered from poor marketing.
After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, many companies have owned the rights to the Amiga name and patents.
In 2002, Eyetech in cooperation with Amiga Inc, began selling a small number of AmigaOnes. These machines where based on G3/G4 CPUs with clock frequencys up to 800 MHz. AmigaOnes are not being produced or sold anymore. It is not known whether more will be made. However there are currently hope in the Amiga community that some other hardware company will produce new and more powerfull systems.
AmigaOS 4 is still under development, and reports are that it is quite stable and usable. It is hoped that it may be ported to other hardware, possibly another evaluation board, the Pegasos or some kind of Cell based device.
| | |
