Here's a longer post...
Many people think that a "PC" running Windows is what a "Computer" is for home users, but they couldn't be more wrong. Amiga is very similar to Apple - when the Amiga was really popular, there were lots of competing systems, like the Amiga, Atari and Apple.
The Amiga was released in 1985. It was special as it was the first computer to completely target the "multimedia" market. How did it do this? With its hardware. When the Amiga was released, people were gobsmacked. It could produce 4096 simultaneous colours at a time when PCs were monochrome or 4 colours. As was said in a magazine:
"The Amiga is potentially powerful enough to make the IBM PC look like a 4 button calculator".
The power to drive all this came from the "Custom Chipset" - a closely integrated set of state-of-the-art microchips with funny names like "Angus" and "Denise". The idea of using seperate processors for graphics etc was in its infancy - nowadays we take it for granted that a graphics card has a GPU, a sound card has a DSP etc, but it wasn't always the case, and the Amiga helped shape that.
Amigas run AmigaOS - a powerful multitasking operating system that is extremely lean and fast. Its still remarkable what it manages to do on the old "Classic Amiga" hardware.
So what happened? Commodore (who owned Amiga) released various improved models until the early 1990s, where it all started to go wrong - the Amiga entered a game of pass-the-parcel, going to several companies, none of which managed to do anything meaningful with it. In the meantime, the Amigas were upgraded with fast processors, graphics cards etc and still used as primary computers.
Now, finally, something is happening. The Amiga eventually found its way to a company now called "Amiga incorperated" who are supervising the production of new machines and an OS - AmigaOS4, which is nearly complete. The AmigaONE is the machine, and is fairly similar to a Mac.
Another development is a company called Genesi, who are producing a computer called the "Pegasos" and an OS called "MorphOS", which is fully compatible with AmigaOS. There is even an opensource version called "AROS".
Amiga was a groundbreaking computer that made it all possible - and its still going today :-D
---edit---
Just read your post above - I'll see if I can write another essay for you ;-)
