The Amiga was 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 word for a female friend,

Based on the Motorola 68k series of microprocessors, the machine sports a custom chipset with then advanced graphics and sound capabilities, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (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; later models featured 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.

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.

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. A-Cube currently sell the Sam440 PPC board designed to run the latest AmigaOS 4.1 (as of 2009).

History

main: History of the Amiga The Amiga was originally designed by a small company called Amiga Corporation, and initially intended to be a next generation video game machine, but was later redesigned into a general purpose computer. Before the machine was released into the market the company was purchased by Commodore. The first model was released in 1985 as simply "The Amiga from Commodore", later to be retroactively dubbed the Amiga 1000. The following year the Amiga product line was expanded with the introduction of two new models; the Amiga 2000 for high-end graphics and business use, and the Amiga 500 was for home use. Commodore later released several new Amiga models, both for low-end gaming use and high-end productivity use. Throughout the 1980s, the Amiga's combination of hardware and operating system software offered great value, but by the mid-nineties other platforms, most successfully the PC running Microsoft Windows, reduced this advantage.