AmigaOS version history

An image of a simple illustration of a hand on a white screen, holding a blue Kickstart floppy, invited the user to perform this operation.

After the kickstart was loaded into a special section of memory called the writable control store (WCS), the image of the hand appeared again, this time inviting the user to insert the Workbench disk.

AutoConfig is a protocol similar to and is the predecessor of Plug and Play, in that it can configure expansion boards without user intervention.

Many improvements were made to the CLI (command line interface) of Amiga which was now a complete text based Shell, named AmigaShell, and various additional tools and programs.

Kickstart/Workbench 1.4 was a beta version of the upcoming 2.0 update and never released, but the Kickstart part was shipped in very small quantities with early Amiga 3000 computers, where it is often referred to as the "Superkickstart ROM".

Workbench 2.0 was released in 1990[5] and introduced a lot of improvements and major advances to the GUI of the overall Amiga operating system.

The Workbench was no longer tied to the 640×256 (PAL) or 640×200 (NTSC) display modes, and much of the system was improved with an eye to making future expansion easier.

Most often, the failure occurred because programmers had used directly manipulated private structures maintained by the operating system, rather than using official function calls.

Workbench 2.1 introduced also a standard hypertext markup language for easily building guides for the user or help files, or manuals.

Release 2.1 was also the first Workbench release to feature a system-standard localization system, allowing the user to make an ordered list of preferred languages; when a locale-aware application runs, it asks the operating system to find the catalog (a file containing translations of the application's strings) best matching the user's preferences.

[7] The version number caused some confusion in the community as it was released after AmigaOS 3.5, 3.9, and even 4.x, but relates to the fact that the codebase is a clean slate building from the original 3.1 source code from Commodore.

The source code for both 3.5 and 3.9 by Haage & Partner could not legally be used due to licensing reasons, and 4.x is built and reserved for the PowerPC platform.

[8] A new version of AmigaOS was released on December 24, 2006, after five years of development by Hyperion Entertainment (Belgium) under license from Amiga, Inc. for AmigaOne registered users.

During the five years of development, users of AmigaOne machines could download from Hyperion repository Pre-Release Versions of AmigaOS 4.0 as long as these were made available.

As witnessed by many users into Amiga discussion forum sites, these versions were stable and reliable, despite the fact that they are technically labeled as "pre-releases".

[1] AmigaOS 4 Classic was released commercially for older Amiga computers with CyberstormPPC and BlizzardPPC accelerator cards in November 2007.