Commodore introduced the
Amiga
1000 with much fanfare at the Lincoln Center in New York
on July 23, 1985. It was the most advanced computer of
its day. The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few
years earlier by a small California company called Amiga Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors
looking to invest in a killer game machine. The prototype
machine was codenamed 'Lorraine'. During the design phase the company ran
into financial difficulties and ran out of money. They
soon were looking for a buyer to bail them out. Two
interested buyers came to the forefront. In early 1984
Jack
Tramiel, the founder of Commodore Business Machines,
left the company and sold all his stock over a power
struggle with Irving Gould, the CEO of Commodore.
He purchased the
Atari
subsidiary from Time-Warner who was desperate to unload
the money losing division. Seeing that the 8-bit computer
market was beginning to collapse, Jack saw the Lorraine
as a golden opportunity to get a new advanced technology
without spending any money or time on research and
design. Best of all it was ready now and it was cheap! He
made an extremely low offer to buy the outstanding stock
of Amiga Inc. and gain access to the Lorraine technology
behind the computer. Being desperate this offer was
tentatively accepted by the Amiga Company.
Commodore also realizing that
it's position in the home computer market was in jeopardy
unless they came up with the new technology to replace
the aging but still popular C-64
saw the golden
opportunity. A few days before the signing of the sale
papers Commodore made a last minute bid doubling the one
presented by Atari and won the bidding on the Loraine
computer.
This infuriated Jack
Tramiel and
he immediately started work on a 32-bit platform of his
own. Forcing him to use off the shelf components to
construct what will become the ST line of computers. The
Lorraine platform was then renamed to Amiga.
It truly was an amazing computer
in its time, based on the Motorola 68000 16/32-bit
processor and a number of custom support chips. This is
the same processor used in the Apple
Macintosh released
in early 1984. At roughly half the price of a Mac the
Amiga took the technology a step further probably because
the original concept of the machine was to be a game
machine.
It surpassed the
Mac by
including color of up to 4096 colors at a resolution of
640 x 400 bits, while the PC and its compatibles were
still wallowing in CGA with 16 colors at 3 times the
cost. It was not lacking in the sound area either with
its four voice digital stereo capability.
It came standard with 256k
RAM
built into its motherboard and an optional 256k plug in RAM cartridge to bring the total to 512k. The total
RAM accessible by the processor was 9 MB. The 96 key keyboard
of the Amiga 1000 is connected through a port on the back
of the computer and the keyboard slides into a unique
'garage' built for it under the front of the computer
(see pictures).
On the right hand side of the
unit are two 9 pin D-plug sockets for connecting the
joysticks one of which doubles as a mouse port. On the
left hand side is the on/off switch.
The rear of the computer has a
row of D-type plugs for hooking up the peripherals of the
computer. Starting from the left side is the modular
telephone style keyboard plug, next is the industry
standard Centronics parallel port for a standard PC
printer, then the disk drive port for connecting an
external floppy drive, a standard RS-232 port for
connecting a modem, right and left RCA type plugs for
stereo audio outputs, and three video ports.
The video output ports make the
Amiga very versatile. The first is a 23 pin D-plug for
hooking to an analog RGB monitor such as the Amiga 1080
monitor, the second is a 9 pin round DIN
plug (similar to
those found on the C-64) for hooking to a composite color
monitor , and an RCA type plug outputting an RF composite
video signal.
The computer came with a
multitasking OS called Workbench similar to the Macintosh
with Icons and pull down menus. Although the Amiga used
the same processor at about the same clock speed of the Mac, it was considerably faster due mostly to the several
custom chips inside acting as coprocessors to handle such
things as video and sound processing, relieving the
burden on the CPU.
Built into the Amiga is an
880-kilobyte double-sided double-density floppy drive.
The start up files for the computer curiously was not
included in ROM
but on a disk called Kickstart. This was
probably because at the time of its release the OS and
startup program were not completely ready and had a few
bugs.
Commodore was forced to rush the
Amiga out to market early due to pressure from the Atari 520ST(a remarkably similar
68000 processor based machine)
which was released several months earlier by Jack
Tramiel, who felt that
Commodore stole the Lorraine from
him with a last minute bid. Commodore was afraid that
they would lose valuable market share and be unable to
regain it. So the Lorraine prototype was rushed into
production and the buggy Kickstart 1.0 was sent with it.
Commodore figured if they didn't burn it into RAM it
would be easier to fix it later with an upgrade disk
(where have we heard that before!).
