Quite a few posts on social media recently reminded me that on July 23 the Commodore Amiga turned 40 years old – specifically the first incarnation, the Amiga 1000. It was the beginning of one of the most powerful computer systems of the late 80s and early 90s that ran circles around the competition for almost a decade. With its trio of custom chips called Agnus, Denise and Paula it was able to run a colourful operating system with a graphical user interface that allowed a multitasking, multiwindow desktop in 1985 that almost no other computers had. Excellent graphics and sound made it a true multipuropse computer that became a powerful gaming platform, multimedia system and even business machine at the same time.
While the original Amiga 1000 wasn’t a huge success yet and had to battle against the Atari ST spearheaded by former Commodore owner Jack Tramiel and the Apple Macintosh, the Amiga 500 and 2000 released two years later were a real breakthrough. The Amiga 500 was the affordable gaming machine and became the successor of the Commodore 64 – which was also still being sold – while the more expandable professional Amiga 2000 was a proper personal computer. I got late into the Amiga world at the end of 1990, but the Amiga 2000 was my main computer for almost five years until the sad demise of Commodore in 1994 made it impossible to ignore the PCs anymore.
My own Amiga 2000 is still my favourite computer next to the Commodore 64 today because at its peak it could do things no other computer was capable of. There were a lot of great programs and many memorable games and it was also very expandable. Even the Amiga 1000 came with the sidecar that contained a fully-functional IBM-PC! In the final form my Amiga 2000 had two disk drives – briefly even three! -, a harddrive, a RAM expansion, a scan doubler that allowed it to work on VGA monitors and even the A2386SX bridgeboard card which was my first contact with the PC world. Sadly the harddrive died at some point – it was a 120 megabyte Quantum SCSI – and one of the floppy drives has some problems but the actual machine still works 35 years later. I don’t switch it on very often anymore because emulating Amiga games and programs has gotten much easier nowadays but still knowing that it works is worth having it around. Maybe I will get the parts
Together with my 8-bit Commodore collection, my Amiga 2000 is one of my most treasured computers today. It was such a lot of fun and I’m glad I was able to witness this part of computer history firsthand.
The history of the Amiga and Commodore in general is very complex and it’s impossible to tell in a few words. For more I can recommend the Commodore books by Brian Bagnall, a trilogy that starts with the early days how Jack Tramiel started out in the 1950s and ends with the sad bankruptcy in 1994. All three volumes are real page-turners – the focus is not just on the technology, but also on the many people behind it. While there are a few other books of that nature around, this trilogy is simply the best and most truthful account of Commodore’s history.
The famous launch party of the Commodore Amiga on July 23, 1985 in New York’s Lincoln Center was consigned to history in a video recording that is still floating around on Youtube today. While slightly pompous and clearly an attempt to copy the January 1984 Macintosh launch party, it actually seems tame compared to how Microsoft or Apple are presenting their products nowadays. Andy Warhol painting a digitized image of Debbie Harry is probable the most memorable part of the show, but everything else is actually a very fair and unexaggerated demonstration of the computers abilities. For 1985, it was simply amazing.
