Commodore Amiga celebrates its 25th birthday, Andy Warhol still dead
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted July 23rd 2010 5:09PM
posted July 23rd 2010 5:09PM
It was on July 24, 1985 that the Amiga 1000 computer had its debut at Lincoln Center in New York City. As you're no doubt aware, we have quite a fondness for Commodore in general and its Amiga offspring in particular, so it's only fitting that we would make a note of this auspicious anniversary. And if you're an unrepentant Amiga fanboy (the original fanboys), there was so much to love: color graphics! Stereo sound! Something called "multitasking!" This was a machine that took on all comers, and it coulda licked 'em, if circumstances (and some wonky decisions) on the business end of things hadn't got in the way. For a trip down memory lane, hit up the source link. As for us, we're going to go fire up our copy of Neuromancer and take it for a spin. Some things never change, indeed.
Amiga I Will Love you for Ever !!!!
/me pours one out for my Amiga 500 I bought in HS.
Thing got me thought a lot, I'll never forget it! I even still have some 'digitized' pics I enhanced with Newtek software!
I've always been sorry for Amiga not becoming the standard personal computer instead of Windows/Intel with x86 PC's...
Amiga have been years ahead of PC's in almost every way.
Hopefully now there is hope for Linux/Android/ChromeOS to regain the trust and conquer the heart of many users ;)
Loved and still love the Amiga. Owned a 500, 1000, 2000. Spent days playing Magic vs Bird basketball, Interceptor and Ports of Call. Never did get was a "Guru Meditation" error was.. ;)
So many game disks ruined by boot sector viruses :(
All I can say is, FA18 Interceptor.
After watching the demo in a shop for about an hour, I knew I had to start saving.
Wow, what a memory! Still remember seeing A1000 in Vancouver with the bouncing box demo. Immediately punked down couple grands to buy the whole set and ended up didn't have enough money to pay for school, lol. What make this machine so special is really all its multitasking, dedicated GPU, some parallel processing (still remember Jay Miner and his crews explaining that in their Los Gatos's day) in a 128K platform (256K if you get the expansion). Still remember this is a first computer that I could see a photo like picture (while the Mac II could barely display 256 colors...)
Man, was I so broken as a poor foreign students kept trying to upgrade to A2000, A3000 and all the RAM (remember it costed my $1K just to get the chips to upgrade to 2 meg?!!)
I cannot love anything like the way I loved an Amiga...
Ahh, the mid-late 1980's. For us in the UK, it was all about the 2nd fanboy war, between the Amiga and the Atari ST(the first being the Commodore 64 vs the Amstrad CPC).
Like the Amstrad, the ST was slightly inferior, but was also a great machine, with some awesome games.
Then came the Sega Megadrive(Genesis) vs the SNES, but that's a story for another day.
I am a huuuuge Amiga fan! I just love it so much! I wish it was alive :(
On the side note: I love 80s commercials. They are so weird and out of this world like.
My god where it all began , 5 years old sitting in front of a Commodore 64 then an Amiga. Maybe its better Commodore/Amiga are gone now, i would have hated for them to ever become just another faceless company or release a really bad product.
So in a way its better we just have the nostalgia, and yea it may idealized and over the top, but to the people who had them , they will always be remembered as great machines.
Still Alive
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q
Well, if you've read this far, don't forget that the Amiga (and Newtek) basically created the entire industry of desktop video. I produced at least 100 commercials using an A1000 with a genlock module, TV-Text and Deluxe Paint. They were at least as bad as most of the local TV stations' productions. And the early 90s were a fantastic time for starting production companies. The equipment got cheap enough to produce video that no one ever thought possible before... Weddings, special events, proms, corporate video, looping video for kiosks, long form commercials (hey a guy's gotta eat), all these forms of video were much too expensive for all but the biggest players until the Amiga. Not sexy, no, but many producers were able to earn a living doing what they had to do so that they could later do what they wanted to do.
But it is interesting to note that 25 years later we see a similar thread playing out in the cell phone industry: Nokia looks a lot like Atari and Commodore these days. Ignoring the changing marketplace, but still producing hardware that's way ahead of the "new players." I guess there's room on the shelf next to the A500 for my N95 and N900. I still get a laugh over the latest iPhone "innovation" like video calling, knowing that my N95 had it 4 years ago.
I used to work in a store which sold Amiga 500's and PC's. During our wonderful Australian recession back in 1989, neither sold very well. However, the Amiga killed the PC in most aspects, especially the graphics and sound. Part of my job was to play the games, so I knew enough to answer customer questions.
To illustrate the difference, I spent many productive hours playing Larry Bird vs Dr J on the PC (EGA! Mostly purple and white!), and Cinemaware's TV Sports Basketball on the Amiga. Much as I loved Julius and Larry, the Amiga game was in a different universe. I too still wish I had my 500, just to play that game.
@gargravarr Download an emulator and play away!
didn't the amiga 1000 come after the 500 chronologically.
unless the 500 was not sold in US, I cannot see the 1000 anniversary being an event, the 500 should b that event.
@D1Only1
The Amiga 1000 was first by two years. The 500 and 2000 were next followed by the 2500 and 3000. The CD32, 1200 and then 4000 were last.
I'll listen to b-52 Rock Lobster in remembrance.
I spent so many hours on Geoff Crammands F1GP, Elite 2, Cannon Fodder, Sensible Soccer and Hired Guns :-). Probably my fondest gaming memories are with the Amiga. Peoples comments on here are normally really negative but you can really feel the love for the Amiga :-)
The Amiga still lives on any many ways not apparent to most.
Ever hear of a game called Battlefield: Bad Company 2?
Those guys were originally in a demo group called the Silents that later went on to code Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies who went out to do a lot of PC stuff. Recently, Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
In fact, many PC industry veterans got their start on the Amiga.
Another little cool Amiga history tid-bit, ever hear of a company called Futuremark and their PC benchmark application 3dMark? Of course you have. Well, those guys use to be another Amiga demo group called Future Crew.
I turned on my Amiga 1200 for the first time in 5 years the other day and was surprised when it booted straight up flawlessly. It's probably 15 years old. I originally had an Amiga 500 and friggen loved that machine. Speedball2, FA 18 Interceptor, TV Sports Basketball, Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder... those were the days.
I wish the X1000 was going to be more affordable.
We were so impressed with the Amiga that we offered to design and develop for Commodore (UK) a compelling dealer demo application. They accepted, and http://www.owonder.com/amigamagic was born. Alas, just as our software was being installed nationally, they pulled the plug on the whole product conceding to the success of the Mac and PC. Amiga was way ahead of it's time and could have been Xbox or PlayStation if Commodore had focused on it's core competencies in sound and graphics instead of trying to pitch it as a business machine against said Mac and PC. Know your customer!
Oh yeah! I just bought a brand new used Amiga 3000D and I'm currently waiting for the 3.1 Kickstart ROMs to arrive :)
Also got the Amiga 1000 and 500 here. And for all those who says "it's before my time"... that Amiga 1000 launched 7 years before I was born.
People always seem to forget that the Amiga was used for CGI on Babylon5 and across the US for TV new stations. IIRC, Video Toaster was the main software.
Video Toaster on an Amiga4000 with LightWave-3D was a computer graphic artist's dream machine.
Still got my Amiga 1200
16MiB fastram (in addition to the 2MiB chip ram)
68030 28 accelerator (with MMU)
20GB Hard drive
Multisync monitor
Excellent machine, even now and with whdload you can play almost all your old games from the hard disk
It's also possible to port a lot of GNU console software via geek gadgets which give you gcc, a proper shell, libraries etc. no fork() though, only vfork() as most Amiga machines lacked an MMU
Whaaat!? Andy Warhol is dead? Noooooooooo!!
Its true we were the original fan boys and cool ones at that. Not like these douche bag Apple fan boys who praised their closed off platform built on top of a framework (Unix) that is antithesis of that thinking.
Good stuff. My dad still has an Amiga 500, 2000, and 4000 sitting in his office.
@SolidSnake Even those old enough to remember the Amiga may not be old enough to remember the source joke being referenced.
Chevy Chase, on the first season of Saturday Night Live (1975?), frequently used the joke "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead" during the Weekend Update segment as either a non-sequitur or transition joke.
It's too bad the AmigaOS isn't open sourced and updated to utilize modern equipment.
@JustMe42 I'd love to see it go native x86 as well. Have you played with AROSthough?
I still have my A1200...But I miss the good old times :)
What would happen if Google bought the Amiga brand?
You know what amazes me? The number of hardcore techies that grew out of the Commodore series of computers. Whenever, you mention Amiga you get the sense that a lot of those in technology today had one, used one or really wanted one.
Is it just me?