July 23, 1985 saw the launch of the world's first truly multimedia personal computer.
| It
was the
dawn of the third age ofmankind, twenty years after the Apple-IBM war. The Amiga project was a dream given form; its goal: to create a platform where IBM and Apple users could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call... home away from home for technophiles, video buffs, serious developers and wanderers. |
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Wires
and microchips wrapped in 50 pounds of solid steel, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last, best hope for peace. This is the story of the last of the Amiga computers. The year should be 2006. The name of the box is AmigaONE |
 The Amiga helped me through many many college classes, thanks to a little ingenuity, C, Assembler, and BASIC. This computer had it all -- 4-channel STEREO audio output, multimedia monitor to boot, which could also double as a video monitor/TV, the GUI you see, Intuitition, is the world's first truly multitasking, multi-threading OS. Windows can't even get it right still. It came standard with 256K of RAM, upgradable to 8 megabytes, unheard of in 1985. And it was memory efficient! You could do more with an Amiga and 1 meg of RAM than you can with 128 meg and Losedows XP today. Oh, and you could get this thing to talk. Can't do that with Windows without extra software. The amiga's speech came with the OS. I even used this baby in a video project, recording directly from the computer to a VHS machine. That impressed me and continues to do so. You simply can't do that on an intel-based piece of shit err, machine without extra hardware. |
 20 years after its debut, afdter being a word leader in the field of multimedia, graphics, video and sound, the Amiga is taking on a new face, and playing catch-up with the other major platforms since Commodore went belly-up. But the new OS under development is the most exciting and up-to-date release yet. The original Amiga was centered around the Motorola 68000 and used 3 specialized chips for graphics, video and sound, so that even with a meager 2 meg of RAM and a 7.16MHz chip it was lightning fast. However, it wqas proprietary. The AmigaONE moves to the PPC platform, and uses either a G3 or a G4 chip. The new OS under development is streamlined and written from scratch for the PPC. It resembles every modern OSout there today, and STILL is more memory-effecient than Windblows ever can hope to be. I can't ever imagine anyone needing more than 512MB on one of these boxes. And it uses industry-standard components. Some say the Amiga platform is dead. Some say this new Amiga is no Amiga at all. I say sod 'em. Hardware changes. |