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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. When introduced, it was one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, and mouse-based GUIs. These include the Atari ST—the Amiga’s primary competitor—Macintosh, Apple IIGS, and 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 minor updates to the graphics hardware via the Enhanced Chip Set also used in subsequent systems.

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. Many video games originated on the Amiga before being converted to other platforms, such as Populous (1989) and Lemmings (1991).

The Amiga eventually started losing market share to IBM PC compatibles, which gained 256 color VGA graphics in 1987, and the fourth generation of video game consoles, eventually leading to Commodore’s bankruptcy in 1994. Commodore is estimated to have sold nearly five million Amigas. Various groups have since released spiritual successors. (Full article…)

Selected article

DragonFly BSD is a free and open source Unix-like operating system created as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and a FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began work on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on 16 July 2003.

Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the methods and techniques being adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor system performance and cause maintenance difficulties. He sought to correct these suspected problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to ongoing conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the FreeBSD codebase was eventually revoked. Despite this, the DragonFly BSD and FreeBSD projects still work together contributing bug fixes, driver updates, and other system improvements to each other. (Full article…)

Selected biography

Jeremy “Jez” San OBE (born 29 March 1966) is an English game programmer and entrepreneur who founded Argonaut Software as a teenager in the 1980s. He is best known for the 1986 Atari ST game Starglider and helping to design the Super FX chip used in Star Fox for the Super NES.

San bought his first computer, a TRS-80, at age twelve. Within a year he taught himself assembly language for several microprocessors.

San founded Argonaut Software in 1982 as a way to get software consulting jobs with large companies. He worked on security systems with British Telecom and Acorn. In 1984, he started developing his first game, Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64, and also co-wrote a book, Quantum Theory, about the Sinclair QL. He became a wizard (admin) at Essex MUD, the world’s first multiplayer online role-playing game. (Full article…)

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Packet radio on the Amiga
Packet radio on the Amiga
Credit: Denis Apel
Packet radio on the Amiga.

Did you know…

… that Sylvia Pengilly used an Amiga computer to integrate graphics with music and herself dancing?
Other “Did you know” facts… Read more…

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Pen & Earth
Pen & Earth


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WikiProject Amiga

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