Amiga

Amiga is the name for a family of computers originally developed as a video games machine but launched as a general-purpose personal computer for the home market by Commodore International in 1985. The name Amiga was chosen both because of its meaning in Spanish and Portuguese and because it preceded Atari and [Page 20]Apple alphabetically. Like its main competitors, the Atari ST and Apple Mac, the Amiga was built around the Motorola 68000 processor chip, which, although incorporating 32-bit architecture, featured a 16-bit external bus. The generation of computers therefore became generally known as 16-bit machines. The Amiga incorporated a custom chipset with advanced audio and graphical capabilities and an operating system featuring a graphical user interface (GUI), and was capable of pre-emptive multitasking, allowing two or more programs to run simultaneously. It was the first computer targeted at the home market to support multi-tasking. Production of the Amiga ceased in 1994 when Commodore International went bankrupt.

The development of the Amiga is entangled with that of its main rival the Atari ST. The Amiga was originally designed in the early 1980s by the Amiga Corporation, a small company that had received development funding from Atari Inc. in return for some rights over the design. In 1984 Atari was acquired by Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, who had departed from Commodore in the same year after a dispute with its chairman. At about the same time, Commodore entered into negotiations to buy the Amiga Corporation outright. Commodore settled (in its own terms) the outstanding contract with Atari by reimbursing the $500,000 funding provided to the Amiga Corporation. However, Atari Corporation subsequently sued Commodore International, delaying the release of the Amiga by long enough to allow it to develop and release a direct competitor, the Atari ST. The ST was released to market in 1985 several months ahead of the Amiga and the two machines became the subject of an ongoing rivalry. The case was eventually settled in 1987 with an undisclosed out-of-court settlement, with both parties claiming victory.

The Amiga represented a considerable advance in performance and power over the previous generation of home computers, and this led to its adoption as a gaming platform. However, although generally considered more powerful than the Atari ST, their similar architecture meant that most games were produced simultaneously for the two machines. Notable games released for the Amiga during the late 1980s and early 1990s include Dungeon Master, an early fully immersive first-person perspective fantasy adventure game; Sid Meier's Civilization, a turn-based strategy/simulation game; Lemmings, a real-time puzzle game in which the player leads groups of lemming across innumerable obstacles to safety; Stunt Car Racer, a three-dimensional driving simulator; and Populous, an isometric strategy/simulation “God” game. The release of AMOS Basic in 1990, a high-level programming language geared toward game development, allowed hobbyist computer users to easily create their own games, distributed through bulletin boards and public domain software libraries.

Although architecturally similar, the Amiga, Apple Mac, and Atari ST carved out very different niches in the productivity sector. Apple's computer became synonymous with design and desktop publishing. The ST was widely adopted within the music recording industry, largely because of its inbuilt MIDI ports. The Amiga became widely used within the film and television industries not only because of its advanced graphical capabilities but also because of its ability to genlock—adapt its own screen output timing to that of a television signal. Notable uses of the Amiga within television production include the series Max Headroom, ITV's The Chart Show, and early episodes of the science fiction series Babylon 5.

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