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The Amiga Portal

The 1987 Amiga 500 was the best-selling model.
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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 is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio compared to previous 8-bit systems. These include the Atari ST—released earlier the same year—as well as the Macintosh and Acorn Archimedes. 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 (a predecessor to Blender) 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 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. (Full article...)

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Workbench is the graphical file manager of AmigaOS developed by Commodore International for their Amiga line of computers. Workbench provides the user with a graphical interface to work with file systems and launch applications. It uses a workbench metaphor (in place of the more common desktop metaphor) for representing file system organisation.

The Amiga Workbench uses the metaphor of a workbench (i.e. a workbench of manual labor), rather than the now standard desktop metaphor, for representing file system organization. The desktop itself is called Workbench and uses the following representations: drawers (instead of folders) for directories, tools for executable programs, projects for data files; and a trash can as a folder intended to contain deleted files. These representations may be considered somewhat unusual by a modern user, but at the time there were no commonly accepted metaphors and Commodore chose to use different idioms from their competitors (Apple had already pursued legal action to prevent other software companies from offering graphical user interfaces similar to its own). Additionally, in 1985 computer graphics capabilities were more common in high end "workstations", and the Amiga was a multimedia/'creative' machine rather than an office machine, which may have provided further inspiration for the metaphor. (Full article...)

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David Shannon Morse (April 15, 1943 – November 2, 2007) was the cofounder of Amiga. In 1982, he left Tonka Toys (where he was Vice-President of Marketing) and became the Chief Executive Officer at Hi Toro, Inc., which he co-founded and which later that year morphed into Amiga, Inc. which he led through the development of the Lorraine Project (a codename inspired by David's wife Lorraine), ultimately, the Amiga 1000 computer. In the 1980s he was a software manager at Epyx, a video game developer and publisher. (Full article...)

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The AtheOS Desktop
The AtheOS Desktop
Credit: Kurt Skauen
The AtheOS Desktop.
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Did you know...

... that AROS implements the AmigaOS API in a portable open-source operating system?
Other "Did you know" facts... Read more...
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