User:Orion Blastar~enwiki/Amiga
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[[:Image:Amiga logo.svg|right|thumb|265px|The former Amiga logo, as used by Commodore Business Machines]]
The Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer. Commodore International bought Amiga Corporation and introduced the machine to the market in 1985. The name Amiga was chosen by the developers specifically from the Spanish and Portuguese word for a female friend,[1] and because it occurred before Apple and Atari alphabetically.[2] It also was chosen because the Amiga GUI is user friendly and it means the computer is your friend. [3]
Based on the Motorola 68k series of microprocessors, the machine sports a custom chipset with advanced graphics and sound capabilities, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaDOS with the GUI front end called Workbench (now known as AmigaOS). While the M68k is a 32-bit processor, the version originally used in the Amiga, the 68000, has a 16-bit external data bus so it must transfer 32 bits of data in two consecutive steps, a technique called multiplexing -- all this is transparent to the software, which was 32-bit from the beginning. The original machine was generally referred to in the press as a 16-bit computer;[4] later models sported fully 32-bit designs. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64, and the Amiga quickly grew in popularity among computer enthusiasts, especially in Europe, and sold approximately 6 million units.[5] It was started out at Atari by Jay Miner and Dale Luck and others based on sprites or player/missile graphics first as an add on to the Atari 2600 via a keyboard named The Gradulator via a GUI interface cartridge, but Atari scrapped it for the Atari 400 and 800 series computers. The Amiga team later invented the Joyboard and had a meditation program that having the proper balance on the joyboard would make one a Guru, which is where the Guru meditation errors came from. Since the 6502 was based on the Motorola 6500 series (The MOS 6501 was pin compatibile with the Motorola 6500 but due to a lawsuit against MOS from Motorola the 6502 had different pinouts but had the same instruction set. The Amiga team chose the 68000 so the 6502 programmers would be working on a similar instruction set, much like Steve Jobs chose the 68000 for the Lisa/Macintosh teams. Apple was offered the Lorraine project first, but refused claiming the Lisa project was better, and then Atari and Commodore got into a bidding war for the Lorraine Project (The project that created the Amiga. Commodore won the bid but at the same time Atari was bought out by former Commodore owner Jack Tremiel and he had his son Sam made an Atari ST which was like the Amiga but used TOS and GEM. AmigaDOS was based on the Unix like Tripos and used BCPL an ancestor to C and Workbench was based on the video game technology as a GUI with some ideas borrowed from Xerox. [6] It is rumored that in 1985 when Apple's board of directors saw the Amiga 1000 at half the price with twice as many features and true pre-emptive multitasking they felt that Steve Jobs had made an overpriced toy with the Macintosh and fired him, and made John Sculley the new CEO to make a sequel to the Macintosh the Macintosh II. After Commodore released the Amiga 2000, the Macintosh II was modeled after it but with Nubus slots instead of Zorro slots and a more advanced graphics chip and the faster 68020 CPU in an attempt to out do the Amiga, and also the Apple // series got an Apple //GS to compete with the Amiga and a GUI that resembled the Macintosh GUI. Later Commodore countered with the Amiga 3000 having the 68020 CPU. Around the same time the Macintosh went to the PowerPC CPU, Amiga also used the PowerPC CPU as add in cards for legacy Amigas and later the AmigaONE based on a PowerPC CPU.
It also found a prominent role in the desktop video / video production and show control business, and was a less expensive alternative to the Apple Macintosh and IBM-PC. The Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer, although early Commodore advertisements attempted to place the Amiga into several different markets at the same time.[7][8]
Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line. Eyetech sold Amiga hardware under the AmigaOne brand from 2002 to 2005.