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.
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.
;D 
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