Amiga
Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model significantly improves graphical and audio capabilities compared to 8-bit systems, and is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, and mouse-based GUIs. These include the Atari ST, Macintosh, Archimedes, and later the Apple IIGS. The Amiga differs from its contemporaries through custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites, a blitter, and four channels of sample-based audio. It runs a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS, with a desktop environment called Workbench.
The Amiga 1000, based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, was released in July 1985. Production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986. While early advertisements cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine, especially with the Sidecar IBM PC compatibility add-on, the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer with a range of video games and creative software. The bestselling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 along with the more expandable Amiga 2000. The 1990 Amiga 3000 includes a minor update to the graphics hardware via the Enhanced Chip Set also used in subsequent models.
The Amiga established a niche in audio and multimedia. The first music tracker was written for the Amiga, and it became a popular platform for music creation. The 3D rendering packages LightWave 3D, Imagine, and Traces originated on the system. The 1990 third-party Video Toaster made the Amiga a comparatively low cost option for video production. In later years, the Amiga started losing market share to IBM PC compatibles and the fourth generation of video game consoles, eventually leading to Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994 and the end of Amiga. Commodore is estimated to have sold 4.85 million Amigas. Various groups have since released spiritual successors.
History
Concept and early development
joined Atari, Inc. in the 1970s and led development of the Atari Video Computer System's graphics and sound chip, the Television Interface Adaptor. When complete, the team began developing a much more sophisticated set of chips, CTIA, ANTIC, and POKEY, that formed the basis of the Atari 8-bit computers.With the 8-bit line's launch in 1979, the team once again started looking at a next-generation chipset. Nolan Bushnell had sold the company to Warner Communications in 1978, and the new management was much more interested in the existing lines than development of new products that might cut into their sales. Miner wanted to start work with the new Motorola 68000, but management was only interested in another 6502 based system. Miner left the company and, for a time, the industry.
In 1979, Larry Kaplan left Atari and founded Activision. In 1982, Kaplan was approached by a number of investors who wanted to develop a new game platform. Kaplan hired Miner to run the hardware side of the newly formed company, Hi-Toro. The system was code-named Lorraine in keeping with Miner's policy of giving systems female names, in this case, the company president's wife, Lorraine Morse. When Kaplan left the company late in 1982, Miner was promoted to head engineer and the company relaunched as Amiga Corporation.
The Amiga hardware was designed by Miner, RJ Mical, and Dale Luck. A breadboard prototype for testing and development was largely completed by late 1983, and shown at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show.
A further developed version of the system was demonstrated at the June 1984 CES and shown to many companies in hopes of garnering further funding, but found little interest in a market that was in the final stages of the video game crash of 1983.
In March, Atari expressed a tepid interest in Lorraine for its potential use in a games console or home computer tentatively known as the. The talks were progressing slowly, and Amiga was running out of money. A temporary arrangement in June led to a $500,000 loan from Atari to Amiga to keep the company going. The terms required the loan to be repaid at the end of the month, otherwise Amiga would forfeit the Lorraine design to Atari.
Commodore
By the end of the video game crash of 1983, Warner was desperate to sell Atari. In January 1984, Jack Tramiel resigned from Commodore, taking some Commodore employees to his new company, Tramel Technology. This included a number of the senior technical staff, who began development of a new 68000-based machine. In June, Tramiel arranged a no-cash deal to take over Atari, reforming Tramel Technology as Atari Corporation.Commodore was left without a workable path to creating a next-generation home computer, and it offered to fund Amiga development. The two companies were initially arranging a license agreement before Commodore offered to purchase Amiga outright.
By late 1984, the prototype breadboard chipset had successfully been turned into integrated circuits, and the system hardware was being readied for production. At this time, the operating system was not ready, and led to a deal to port TRIPOS. TRIPOS was a multitasking system written in BCPL during the 1970s for the PDP-11 minicomputer. This early version was known as AmigaDOS and the GUI as Workbench. The BCPL parts were later rewritten in the C language, and the entire system became AmigaOS.
The system was enclosed in a pizza-box form factor case. A late change was the introduction of vertical supports on either side of the case to provide a "garage" under the main section of the system where the keyboard could be stored.
Launch
The first model was announced in 1985 as simply "The Amiga from Commodore", later to be retroactively dubbed the Amiga 1000. They were first offered for sale in August, but by October, only 50 had been built, all of which were used by Commodore. Machines only began to arrive in quantity in mid-November, meaning they missed the Christmas buying rush. By the end of the year, they had sold 35,000 machines, and severe cashflow problems made the company pull out of the January 1986 CES. Bad or entirely missing marketing, forcing the development team to move to the east coast, notorious stability problems and other blunders limited sales in early 1986 to between 10,000 and 15,000 units a month. 120,000 units were reported as having been sold from the machine's launch up to the end of 1986.Later models
In late 1985, Thomas Rattigan was promoted to COO of Commodore, and then to CEO in February 1986. He immediately implemented an ambitious plan that covered almost all of the company's operations. Among these was the long-overdue cancellation of the now outdated PET and VIC-20 lines, as well as a variety of poorly selling Commodore 64 offshoots and the Commodore 900 workstation effort.Another one of the changes was to split the Amiga into two products: a new high-end version of the Amiga aimed at the creative market, and a cost-reduced version that would take over for the Commodore 64 in the low-end market. These new designs were released in 1987 as the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 500, the latter of which went on to widespread success and became their best selling model.
Similar high-end/low-end models would make up the Amiga line for the rest of its history; follow-on designs included the Amiga 3000/Amiga 500 Plus/Amiga 600, and the Amiga 4000/Amiga 1200. These models incorporated a series of technical upgrades known as the ECS and AGA, which added higher resolution displays among many other improvements and simplifications.
The Amiga line sold an estimated 4,910,000 machines over its lifetime. The machines were most popular in the UK and Germany, with about 1.5 million sold in each country, and sales in the high hundreds of thousands in other European nations. The machine was less popular in North America, where an estimated 700,000 were sold. In the United States, the Amiga found a niche with enthusiasts and in vertical markets for video processing and editing. In Europe, it was more broadly popular as a home computer and often used for video games.
Beginning in 1990, the Amiga overlapped with the European release of the 16-bit Mega Drive, then the Super NES in 1992. Commodore UK's Kelly Sumner did not see Sega or Nintendo as competitors, but instead credited their marketing campaigns which spent over or for promoting video games as a whole and thus helping to boost Amiga sales. Some games were released for both 16-bit consoles and the Amiga, such as Chuck Rock and Zool.
Bankruptcy and aftermath
In spite of his successes in making the company profitable and bringing the Amiga line to market, Rattigan was soon forced out in a power struggle with majority shareholder, Irving Gould. This is widely regarded as the turning point, as further improvements to the Amiga were eroded by rapid improvements in other platforms.Commodore shut down the Amiga division on April 26, 1994, and filed for bankruptcy three days later. Commodore's assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T. Amiga Technologies researched and developed the Amiga Walker prototype. They presented the machine publicly at CeBit, but Escom went bankrupt in 1996. Some Amigas were still made afterwards for the North American market by QuikPak, a small Pennsylvania-based firm who was the manufacturer of Amigas for Escom.
After a reported sale to VisCorp fell through, a U.S. Wintel PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, eventually purchased the Amiga branch and technology in 1997. QuikPak attempted but failed to license Amiga from Gateway and build new models. Gateway was then working on a brand new Amiga platform, likely encouraged by a desire to be independent of Microsoft and Intel. However this did not materialize and in 2000, Gateway sold the Amiga brand to Amiga, Inc., without having released any products. Amiga, Inc. licensed the rights to sell hardware using the AmigaOne brand to Eyetech Group and Hyperion Entertainment. In 2019, Amiga, Inc. sold its intellectual property to Amiga Corporation.