Amiga 1000 - Vintage Hardware
Commodore's First Amiga: The Amiga 1000
Date Range: 1985 - 1987
Release Price: US$1,295
The Amiga 1000 was a revolution for its time. It was the first home computer to provide a multitasking operating system with multiple co-processors, blitters and other independent processors. The Mac did not have multitasking until near 2000 and windows waited until 1995.
The A1000's speed is precisely double the 3.58 MHz NTSC colour carrier frequency. All frequencies in the Amiga 1000 are derived from this base NTSC frequency. This made the Amigas perfect for video work.
Product Specs:
- 16/32 bit 68000 cpu
- 7.15MHz
- 640 x 400 video
- 4096 colours
- 4 voices, 2 channel stereo
- 512KB RAM
- 256KB ROM
- 3.5 880KB floppy
- Pre-emptive Multitasking
Commodore-Amiga 1000
 In 1985, Commodore introduced to the world a stunning revolution to the home computer market with the introduction of the Commodore-Amiga 1000 at the Lincoln Centre in New York. Commodore spared little expense in terms of presentations, guests and the venue: they had Debora Harry, a top pop star of the time; Andy Warhol. This was the first time and the last time that Commodore seemed to have a grasp at marketing the Amiga.
The Amiga had a 68000 at 7Mhz, had a 16/32-bit architecture, had 4096 colours, 512KB of memory, 3.5 inch floppy, operated at 7MHz, stereo sound, had a colour GUI and it was the first home computer that had true 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking.
The 68000 The Amiga was an amazing computer in its time and for several years thereafter. It was based on the Motorola 68000, a 32-bit processor with 16-bit pathways. The Apple Macintosh used the same processor in its 1984 Macintosh computer. However, the Amiga was half the price of the Mac and offered several technology improvements that had it stand so far apart from the competition that most people did not know how to utilise the system.
Like the Macintosh, the Amiga came with a graphical operating system, however, the Amiga's operating offered a pre-emptive multitasking with colour and stereo sound. The Macintosh never truly had Pre-emptive multitasking until they released OS X and Wintel did not have it until they released Windows 95.
While the Amiga used the same processor at a clock speed of 7.14MHz, it was considerably faster due several custom chips that were responsible for video, graphics, IO and sound processing. This had the Amiga performing graphics and video functions that later 486 could not perform well. Now this might sound like a bit of a stretch, but while the 486 performed a lot faster, the CPU did all the work. There were not any applications on the Wintel platform that could effectively compete when it first came out.
With a 4096 colour pallet with a maximum resolution of 640 x 400 pixels, it greatly outshone the tiny black and white Mac screen. Contemporary Wintel boxes had CGA graphics, which had an amazing four colours.
The Amiga came with a four-channel 8-bit stereo sound capable of sampling rates of 44KHz.
The multimedia capabilities of the Amiga were handled Agnes, Paula and Denise. These chips were so advanced that they could perform tricks that PCs and Macs still could not manage some ten years later such as displaying multiple screens with independent pixel resolutions and bit depths on a single monitor.
The Amiga 1000 came standard with 256KB RAM, but were often sold with at least 512KB and could support as much as 9 MB. Running with anything less than 512 would cause significant delays and performance issues.
The Amiga's video output was synced to allow it to connect with genlock and offer video editing due to the computer's frequency being close to that of the HTSC video signal.
So revolutionary was the Amiga that it kicked off a new market: the desktop video market. Later Amiga's would see such successful products as the Video Toaster and Lightwave 3D pioneered on its hardware.
While the technology behind the Amiga is impressive, the back story is compelling in its own right. For the back story, see http://vintageamiga.com/. There you will find out about people like Jay Miner, without whom, the Amiga would have never been.
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