History of the Amiga
Development of the Lorraine project was done using a Sage IV machine nicknamed "Agony" which had 64-kbit memory modules with a capacity of 1 mbit and a 8 MHz CPU.
[4][5][6] Amiga Corp. funded the development of the Lorraine by manufacturing game controllers, and later with an initial bridge loan from Atari Inc. while seeking further investors.
The company demonstrated a prototype at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago, attempting to attract investors.
[9] The magazine reported in April 1984 that Amiga Corporation "is developing a 68000-based home computer with a custom graphics processor.
"[10] Further presentations were made at the following CES in June 1984, to Sony, HP, Philips, Apple, Silicon Graphics, and others.
[7] Steve Jobs of Apple, who had just introduced the Macintosh in January, was shown the original prototype for the first Amiga and stated that there was too much hardware – even though the newly redesigned board consisted of just three silicon chips which had yet to be shrunk down.
[7] In a subsequent development, the Amiga group received interested from Commodore, and began discussions of selling the company.
At a relatively affordable base price of US$1,295 (equivalent to $3,669 in 2023), the Amiga could display up to 4,096 colors, produce 8-bit stereo audio, and run several applications concurrently.
These qualities were unprecedented in a consumer-oriented computer and gave the Amiga 1000 a significant technical lead on its three main competitors (the Atari ST, the Macintosh, and the IBM PC).
The public saw both Commodore and Atari selling, as John C. Dvorak wrote, "cheap disposable" game machines,[14] and observers believed that either the ST or Amiga would survive, but not both.
Neither had distribution from major chains like ComputerLand or BusinessLand, or support from large business-software companies like Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, or Lotus.
editorial expressed amazement that Commodore, insisting that the Amiga was a business computer, did not show it at the summer CES.
He criticized many aspects of Commodore's handling of the computer, including selling "not-quite-finished" hardware and software, not supporting third-party developers, poor advertising, and internal uncertainty of the Amiga's target market.
By 1987, rumors spread that the size of the Amiga market disappointed software vendors, which were uncertain of Commodore's intention for the computer.
Today, it's obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a game machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound, and video.
The Amiga did see widespread use in the television and video production industry during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including on popular shows like Clarissa Explains It All and Unsolved Mysteries.
At the same time, the general public preferred cheaper game consoles over both the CDTV and CD-I, and they were not aware of or interested in the multimedia potential of these CD-ROM based systems.
Commodore made a last-ditch effort in saving the system with the CDTV 2 but dropped that design in favor of the much more capable Amiga CD32.
In response to a reader's challenge to find a DOS game that played better than the Amiga version the magazine cited Wing Commander and Civilization, and added that "The heavy MS-DOS emphasis in CGW merely reflects the realities of the market".
In classic Osborne style, consumers decided to wait for the new Amigas and Commodore had to close their Australian office in face of plummeting sales.
This contributed to Commodore's 1992 profits falling to an unimpressive $28 million,[30] and made the need for a successful new Amiga launch all that more critical.
This perception was furthered by the fact that most Commodore retail outlets were toy stores, and marketing campaigns were mismatched with the public's needs and wants.
This caused a raft of PC gaming titles to be introduced during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including many ported from Amiga versions.
Though the machines had been upgraded and had plentiful hardware and software support, the lack of new Amigas meant that vendors sooner or later moved on.
Most of the technology hobbyists and productivity market moved to PC architecture, sometimes running Linux or BeOS in preference to Microsoft Windows.
The size of the FPGA limited the MiniMig to a subset of the ECS graphics, lacking support for productivity modes on the real chipset.
While the V2 was only designed as an accelerator, it was equipped with local memory, Ethernet, microSD and retargetable graphics (RTG), named "SAGA" or Super-AGA.
[39] To accomplish this, Apollo Accelerators has built a cleanroom version of the AGA chipset and added direct support classic DB9-based joysticks and various low or full-speed USB 2.0 peripherals such as mice, keyboard and gamepads.
The contract between Amiga Inc. and this Belgian-German company only allowed for the availability of the commercial AmigaOS 4 license to computers with AmigaOne motherboards.
[48] This version is recognized for its high degree of compatibility at the source-code level, allowing it to make concessions towards the legacy deficiencies of the OS it was based from.
