The Amiga History

For those who don't know, the Amiga once was the most popular small/home computer of all time. To a certain extent, it still is very popular, but only to those who have familiarised themselves with it's excellent list of features. The reason for this is that the majority of people have been sucked in by the quite frankly awful 'operating system' which exists on the PC. Regular readers will know what I'm talking about. Yes, Microsoft Windows.

However, from the humble beginning, the Amiga owners (Commodore, who did not originally start as owners) kept everything about their Amiga project very secret, infact, Commodore were denying the existence of the Amiga 3000 up until 10 minutes before it was released!

This was, in part, a reason for the demise of Commodore. No-one ever knew what was going on. If they were developing a new machine no-one knew, if they were idle, still no-one knew. This had the potential to cause a horrific downfall in interest in Commodore products, the theory being if no-one knew if Commodore were doing anything, they would lose interest.

That is one thing that the new Amiga company have rectified. Latest news of their upcoming products such as OS3.5 are available on their website at regular intervals (www.amiga.com/amigaos35/)

Back to the past now, and how did the Amiga start off? Well a lot of you will know all this from previous features in magazines, so I'll keep it brief. The Amiga was originally started by a group of people, however, they ran into financial difficulties and requested help from various companies, one of which was Atari.

Atari felt they could revolutionise the computer market with the Amiga, but Commodore stepped in and stole the Amiga right from under Atari's nose, which angered Atari and made the Amiga and all future Atari computers bitter rivals, although the Amiga, in most cases, won the battle of this rivalry.

So what did Commodore do with the machine? Released the A1000. A machine with 256K of memory was very powerful back in 1985, but with the staggeringly high price tag of nrealy 2000 pounds, it wasn't particularly successful. The next Amiga was to be the most successful ever. The A500.

The A500 came out with 512K of memory, but when supplies of the machine ran out, Commodore decided to put A500+ machines in A500 boxes, and give a lot of people (including me) a surprise in 1991 when they opened their A500 box and found a completely different model!

Well, this isn't completely true, the A500+ was essentially the same as the A500 except for the chipset and memory capability. The A500+ had Kickstart 2.04 as well... Ok, so not very similar to the A500 after all :-)

THE ESCOM ERA

Anyway, Commodore kept releasing machines, to which the Amiga public responded by buying them until one day, Commodore went Bankrupt. The bit that follows (about Escom) may include strong language... if you are easily offended, please skip to the first occurrence of the word 'Gateway' :-)

Escom made a proper cock up of the Amiga. First thing they did was start producing Amiga 1200's. What happened to developing a new machine! More bloody A1200's in the shops! Although they are responsible for Amigas still being on sale now

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Of course, Escom went bankrupt in the end, and good riddance is what I say! See, not too much strong language (hardly any infact :-)

GATEWAY

While they may no longer want anything to do with the computer, they do own the Amiga assets. Gateway created two new companies to deal with the Amiga side of things, who have now joined as one and moved away from their parent company to a completely different area of America.

Amiga now handles Research and Development, future production, Public relations and all that sort of stuff. They were practically stationary for the first two years they owned the Amiga (97-98), now they seem to be getting on track.

Workbench 3.5 is going to (hopefully) released in August with public beta testing beginning in May (www.amiga.com/amigaos35/ - sign up now!) And we're hoping that thig November will see the introduction of the Amiga Developer machine.

And then, we're cautiously excited about the fact that new Amiga hardware could be available to the masses early next year. I've started saving, so I can give you the low down on the machine when it becomes available.

I hope you'll still be here when the machine arrives

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