In 1982 group of programmers / designers got together in a place called Silicon Valley, at Los Gatos, California, west coast U.S.A. funded by three dentists to the tune of 7 Million dollars the Lorraine prototype (for runner of the Amiga) was originally developed by a company named Hi-Torro but was laterchanged to Amiga Incorporated, after they had named there custom chips after girls names, for security, Amiga being the spanish word for girlfriend.
Due to the high cost of hardware development money needed to be saved on the software Operating System a firm called 'Metacomco'based in Bristol U.K. were commissioned to develop it they base it on a operating system they had developed called 'Tripos'and it became known as 'Workbench' and was a full multitasking operating system with icon based interface and direct command line power.
With the Lorraine finish there was now no more money for manufacture and marketing.They needed to sell shares to get capital, Atari's Jack Trammel lent them 1 million dollars while Atari negoiated a deal on a share price of about $1.00 per share.
Commodore stepped in at the last minute put in an offer of $4.25 per share to control it taking it over and renaming the original project to the Amiga. and also invested another 25 million dollars for development.
Jay Minor one of the designers of the Atari VCS see LINKS page
Dave Morse from Tonka Toys
R.J. Michel from an Arcade machine co called Williams
The Amiga Operating System was written by a small team :-
Dale Luck = Graphics and Layers Libraries
Karl Sassenwarth = Amigas Multitasking Exec
Robert J Mical = Intuition (GUI)
The first production Amiga was the A1000 it was launched in 1985 at the New York Consumer Electronics Show and cost �1,700 at the time it came with a colour monitor and 256k of RAM which was later up rated to 512k and run workbench 1.1v it had no kickstart ROM and so its ROM had tobe loaded via floppy disk on power up. It had a Motorola 68000 and the Original Chipset OCS. The A1000 was not successful and was discontinued by Commodore