The Amiga

The Amiga is a computer – formerly owned by Commodore – that has been around since 1985, with the release of the Amiga 1000.
On this page, I'll give some personal information about the Amiga, and my setup and the like!!

In the early '80's, a group of designers in Silicon Valley, calling themselves Hi-Toro, decided to build a console - this being the early 80's, consoles were all the rage, so they dedicated themselves to this task, but they lacked one thing - self-control! Every time someone thought of something, they bunged it in and so the first Hi-Toro (soon to become Amiga) machine was a full computer. There are some great stories circulating about these guys, - but I'm not sure how true that they are.

It's been said that the Amiga's custom chips were called "Agnus", "Paula" and "Denise" so that if anybody overheard them, they would think that they were talking about their girlfriends, a hint of paranoia, perhaps? .
Just when things were looking up for these guys, the money ran out, so they ran to Atari and were on the verge of an agreement, when they fell out and Commodore jumped in and Amiga became Commodore-Amiga.

The first prototype of the new machine was unveiled at some computer show in 1985 and a year later, Commodore released the Amiga 500, that would go on to be one of the best selling home computers/games machines of the 80's. First, though, it had to beat off competition from the Atari ST, which cost about £500 opposed to the A500's £800. Although cheaper, the ST was inferior to the A500, as was shown after the Amiga had a success of price drops and began outselling it's rival.

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