The Commdore Amiga - Why was it so Special?!

[AmigaBruno]

It was ahead of its time. Don’t forget PC’s of the time period were no where near to doing what Commodore were releasing hardware wise. The Amiga had a custom chipset which produced Sound and Graphics. It can multi-task. Okay it wasn’t PC compatible so therefore you couldn’t run things like WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 etc… But things like games and the Demo Scene started because of this system.

The Amiga already had PC emulation software at its launch event in 1985! It was shown running MS-DOS or IBM PC-DOS. I think this was the Transformer software. Later on, there was PC Task.

Of course, PCs are crap and have only continued because they came equipped with lots of slots for plug in cards, which the most popular Amiga models didn't have.  Obviously, the less popular A2000, A2500, A3000. A4000, and A4000T models, as well as any more rarely produced variations on those models, such as the A1500 and any I may have missed DID have expansion slots! The A1200 trapdoor slot is actually a Zorro II slot, but I'm not sure if the A500, A500 Plus, or A600 trapdoor slots are Zorro II. Third party expansion units such as the Bodega Bay and Checkmate Digital A1500 didn't produce enough units to give all Amiga A500, A500 Plus, A600, or A1200 users an upgrade path of various Zorro II cards. I once phoned a company advertising in Amigaworld magazine to try and order a Bodega Bay expnsion for my A500, but they just said "Uh, we have not been able to get a hold of those lately". I didn't even know that the Checkmate Digital A1500 added any Zorro II slots to the A500!

[AmigaBruno]

It was so special because it was much more powerful than other computers of the time, except for very expensive specialist computers, like Sun workstations used by Lucasfilm, or the Gould 9080 computer used for the opening titles of the series "Amazing Stories". The first in the Sun range was the Sun-1 which you can read about on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1 , but I can't find any information about the specs of the Gould 9080. I could only find the US prices, but the Sun-1 cost US$8,900 when it was first released in 1982, and the Gould 9080 cost $385,000 at launch "in the mid 1980s". The original Amiga cost about US$1,295 in 1985 at an extra US$300 for a monitor, but the later A500 model was released at US$699 in 1987.

I was interested in creating artwork, doing word processing, and programming, not just in playing games. I’d heard a bit about UNIX as a way to unleash real power. I sometimes found Amiga ports of UNIX programs on Public Domain disks, so this really impressed me. At one point I thought I could even run UNIX on my A500, but later on, I read that only special Amiga models ending with the letters UX could do this.

I bought an Amiga with a 1084S monitor and got the 4,096 colour HAM mode graphics package Photon Paint, as well as ten games. I was creating artwork in HAM mode for some time before getting a copy of Deluxe Paint which only used the non HAM modes.

The Amiga was also a professional quality computer, which was more powerful than PCs or the early MacIntoshes. I was able to run MS-DOS on it, although I didn’t do much with MS-DOS on the Amiga. I’ve never run the MacIntosh System Software OS or UNIX on any Amigas I’ve owned.