The inventor of the Amiga 1000 was Jay Miner, who created the Atari 800 many years before. He wanted to make the most powerful computer ever, then he joined a small Californian company called Amiga. He used the principle of the three coprocessors (again) to help the main processor.
At the beginning, the Amiga had only 64 kilobytes of RAM! The original "Amiga" called the Lorraine was meant to be a game machine with some computer capabilities.
Atari initially invested the money in the Amiga Corp. to do the R&D on the Amiga computer line. Naturally, when the design was finished, Amiga Corp. gave Atari the choice to purchase the technology. Atari passed in favor of their own project. Amiga Corp. then offered the technology to Commodore, Inc., who were quite pleased to purchase it, seeing that their own 16-bit computer was so far from reaching the shelf.
After the loss of a major legal battle for control of the Amiga chip set design, Atari launched the ST series (Sixteen-Thirty-two) as a competitor for the upcoming Amiga.
The operating system (AmigaDOS) was done by MetaComCo, a British company who specialized in the 68000 processor (they also made languages for the Sinclair QL). It is a fully multitasking system which looks like UNIX with a graphical user interface.
It was the very first personal computer with great graphics and sound capabilities with a GUI environment.
The Amiga BASIC was written by Microsoft (like most other versions of BASIC), but the first models were shipped with a non-Microsoft BASIC called ABasiC.
The Amiga 1000 was to lose popularity one year later with the creation of its two main successors: the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000.
There were two versions of the Amiga 1000. The first one sold only in the USA, had a NTSC display and no EHB video mode. Later versions would have this built in. The second one had a PAL display, the enhanced video modes (EHB) and was built in Germany.
The official name for the A1000 was the Commodore Amiga. It was only when the A2000 was launched that they officially began to refer to the machine by its model number.
NAME
AMIGA 1000
MANUFACTURER
Commodore
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
July 1985
END OF PRODUCTION
January 1987
KEYBOARD
full-size typewriter style, 89 keys, 10 function keys and numeric keypad
CPU
Motorola MC68000
SPEED
7.16 mHz
CO-PROCESSOR
3 : Denise (video), Agnus (memory manager, blitter & copper), Paula (sound and disk access)
RAM
256kb, upgradable to 512k internally. Extensible to 8.5 MB with extension card (512 KB CHIP RAM + 8 MB FAST RAM) and to 10 MB
ROM
8 KB (The Kickstart isn't in ROM but loaded at the boot in RAM, where it takes 256 KB)
TEXT MODES
60 x 32 / 80 x 32
GRAPHIC MODES
320 x 200 and 320x400 (32 colors), 640 x 200 and 640 x 400 (16 colors)
COLORS
up to 64 colors among 4096 (EHB mode) The Amiga can display 4096 colors simultaneously (HAM mode)
