LOL! yeah, musta been that horrible mac - afterall the CD couldnt have been mislabled!!! ;D

I can't believe it was mislabeled. It was funny seeing him pissed.

hey i know that this thread is old but i want to know what Amiga is, and y it was so awsome. well thanks for the information.

Commodore Amigas are from the good ol' days of computers, one of the first personal computers released back in 1985. Most of the Amiga's followers were early-day computer hackers.

ok now i know what they are jst needed a little memory refreshing. thanks dani

I was there, so I guess I'll try to give more information...

* The Amiga was based on the Motorola MC68000 processor family, but it wasn't crippled like the Mac or Atari ST -- or massively overpriced like the IBM Model 9000, Sun, and Fortune Systems machines.

* It had 4096 colors at a time when the IBM PC had 64 (or less), the Atari ST had 512, and the Mac had 2.

* It had 2-channel sound when the PC had a beeping speaker (or a sound card based on the SID chip from the Commodore 64), the Mac was a bit better, and the Atari ST had a cheap sound chip.

* It could be expanded to 8 MB memory when the PC was limited to about 2 MB of paged, segmented memory -- and the Mac and ST were limited to about 1 MB or less.

* It had a true preemptively-multitasking operating system when the Mac and ST did not (and could not); the PC had MS-DOS (and Windows still does not preemptively multitask).

* Plug-and-Play was invented on the Amiga; Apple and IBM had to license it.

* It was natively compatible with NTSC video (the system clock was 2x the NTSC color clock), which is what made the NewTek Video Toaster possible.

* When John Lassiter of Pixar told an audience at SIGGraph after a showing of Luxo, Jr. that "Someday, people will be doing this on home PCs" Amiga users already were.

* Much of today's so-called "hacker culture" was originally built around the Amiga, the Legion of Doom, for example. Captain Crunch was also an early adherent.

* The Amiga 3000UX remains, to this day, the only consumer PC to run true AT&T Unix (for what it's worth).

* For many years, the last computer still hooked up to the Space Shuttle on the launchpad before launch was an Amiga 500. It was destroyed by the rocket exhaust.

The Amiga died for, basically, two reasons:

* Commodore never properly promoted the Amiga line. During most of its life, the company was run very poorly.

* The hardware platform itself was very specific, so the user was limited as to how the unit could be expanded or upgraded. The upside to this was a strong reduction in compatibility problems.

Nowadays, there are good-performing Amiga emulators for the Mac and PC platforms (UAE, for example) and a goodly amount of freeware and abandonware available.

It's actually making a comeback of sorts. Check http://www.Amiga.org for info.

I hope that you found this interesting.

Very cool indeed. I get lost in history @ about the time of XEROX's days with GUI's.

Hmmmm, I never thought of the Amiga as 'one of the first'. I had a Sinclair Spectrum some time before that. All seems like such a long time ago now .... :shock:

:shock: WOW! :shock:

I must bow down and worship at your feet TallCool1!

That was freakin' awesome.