The Amiga would have been 25 today
The Commodore 64 may have been the first computer to sell over one million units, but it was June 24th, 1985 when Commodore debuted the Amiga 1000, a computer that was, for all intents and purposes way ahead of the computing curve. Computer stores in shopping malls across North America and Europe loved showcasing the now classic “Amiga Ball” as evidence of the power under the hood of this high end machine. Over the next 10 years and multiple iterations, the Amiga computer proved to be a versatile creative tool, with graphics that made PCs and Macintosh machines look like toys. It was also a great platform for games, and an all around powerhouse when it came to creating digital media.
In fact, it was the system where I cut my graphic and video teeth, thanks in large part to Newtek’s Video Toaster, while PCs and Macs lagged years behind. Of course, in the case of an Macintosh of that era, you could always emulate one using the Shapeshifter software emulation (since both used Motorola 68xxx series processor). Interestingly, the emulator performed between 7% to 10% faster than an actual Mac with the same processor and memory, and switching between the two OSes was as easy as hitting the Amiga-M keyboard shortcut. In other words, I was an Amiga fanboy. In fact, the Amiga was probably the last time I considered myself as a fanboy of any computer system.
It was a sad day when the Amiga died, mainly due to corporate mismanagement. The running joke at the time was that “Commodore Marketing” was an oxymoron. Since then the company and its properties were split into pieces, and the name is all but dead. There are still hardcore fans out there though, and if you have a hankering to relive the glory days, or never had a chance to mess around with the Amiga Workbench, Amiga Forever can hook you up.
*sniff* See the ‘boing ball’ demo after the break…
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Thank you for sharing this news… Amiga is still in my heart as I work sometimes as 2d graphician. I still use Deluxe Paint, nothing get even close to this master piece !
Amiga : generations ahead…
It’s good to see that people are keeping Deluxe Paint alive. Was such a great package in its day.
Cool article Doug! Ya, I still miss the ol’ Amiga. I still have my Amiga 3000 tower, but it stopped working a couple years back, but it was working for a good couple decades. Now and then over the past decade, I used to fire it back up to use Deluxe Paint and ImageFX.
To this day, no other machine can multitask quite as well as the Amiga did back then.
*sigh*
Cool seeing the Boing Ball again. 🙂