.Like the Macintosh, the Amiga was based on the Motorola 68000 processor. The initial model, the Amiga 1000, had 256 Kb of RAM. It was soon phased out by the lower cost Amiga 500 at the low end (shown in the picture), and the Amiga 2000 at the high end. Both offered 512 Kb of RAM standard, expandable to 1 Mb on the Amiga 500 and a whopping 8 Mb on the Amiga 2000.Unlike previous personal computers, the Amiga used three custom chips (Agnes, Denise & Paula) to do advanced graphics and sound. The graphics in particular was amazing by the standards of those days. At a time when PC users thought 16 color low resolution EGA was hot stuff, the Amiga could display 4096 colors, could reach the extremely high resolution of 640x400, and had custom chips such as a blitter for accelerated graphics. It even had built-in video outputs for TV's and VCR's (a decade later this was still a pricey extra cost option for most systems). The Amiga's audio system was also impressive. Building on the audio capabilities of the Commodore 64, the Amiga had four voice sampled stereo sound and was the first computer with built-in speech synthesis. Although it only cost $1200, the Amiga did graphics, sound, and video well enough that many broadcast professionals adopted it for special effects. With a small investment, even a home user could do reasonable quality desktop video production (I remember doing quite a few videos myself for high school and university presentations).The Amiga's operating system, designed by Carl Sassenrath, was just as amazing. From the outset it had preemptive multitasking, a graphical user interface, shared libraries, messaging, scripting, and multiple simultaneous command line consoles. Ten years later, PC and Macintosh users were still waiting for some of those features. Thanks to the custom chips and an efficient operating system, the Amiga even felt fast. The user interface was really quite snappy, much faster than a Macintosh. Five year...
