40 Years of the Amiga, from Commodore

In July 1985, 40 years ago, the Commodore Amiga was officially introduced to the world. This groundbreaking computer caught a lot of people by surprise and it has an equally amazing development story.

As an Atari guy in the 80s, I was somewhat aware of Amiga before 1985 because it would occasionally get mentioned in Atari magazines or by an Atari columnist. I remember seeing a brief note about it in ANALOG Computing and also the Atari column in Creative Computing.

Early History

As many people know, the father of the Amiga is legendary chip designer Jay Miner. He also was the main designer of the Atari 2600 / VCS and the Atari 8-bit computers. Around 1982, he left Atari and went on to work for a company that created pacemaker chips.

Not long after this Miner was contacted by Larry Kaplan, formerly of Atari and a founder of Activision. Kaplan wanted to start his own company (eventually called Hi-Toro) to create a video game system and he thought Miner would be a great person to lead the hardware design.

David Morse was brought in from Tonka to help manage the new company, which soon changed its name to Amiga.

Amiga Joyboard for the Atari 2600

While working on the video game system, Amiga sold products for the Atari 2600 to help fund itself. The early code name for this project was “Lorraine” and “Amiga Lorraine” was the name I had started seeing in rumor columns of various computer magazines. At first this was to be a video game system, but Miner always wanted it to be a computer. When the video game industry crashed in 1983, he got his way and the project pivoted to creating a computer system.

I won’t go into great detail about its creation, but developing a computer system is expensive. With the 1983 crash, Amiga was low on cash and needed additional funds. They ended up securing $500,000 in funding from Atari with an agreement that would allow Atari to use the Amiga technology in video game consoles and computers.

The Shakeup

In early 1984, Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel was ousted from the company (or quit, depending on who you ask) due to a disagreement with its chairman of the board. After a short break, he formed Trammel Technologies¹ to investigate developing a new computer. As luck would have it, right around that time Warner (the owners of Atari) was looking to dump it and the two companies came to an agreement with Jack acquiring Atari from Warner Communications In July 1984. He renamed his nascent Trammel Technologies company to Atari Corp.

About a month later, when it realized it had no viable 16-bit computer in development, Commodore swooped in to buy Amiga for $27 million. Not long after that Atari found details about the Warner Atari $500K loan to Amiga. Lawsuits were filed between the two companies, which apparently prevented Commodore from publicly discussing the Amiga for some time.

The Announcement

Regardless, Commodore officially announced the Amiga to the world on July 23, 1985. It is an interesting coincidence to me how that date is just a few weeks after Atari started shipping its new 520ST computer.

The Amiga announcement event was quite a spectacle and was held at the Lincoln Center in New York City with celebrities such as Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol helping to promote the new computer.

Initial marketing for the computer focused on the Amiga name and generally avoided direct Commodore branding. In fact, it was often called the “Amiga, from Commodore” back then. I always thought this was a good idea as Amiga is a great computer name, but by 1987 that idea fell out of fashion and it just became the Commodore Amiga.

BTW, some of the early commercials for the Amiga were incredibly strange.

Although I had heard of the Amiga computer via rumors and speculation, I didn’t really know anything about it. To this day, I’ve never used one so I guess you could say I still don’t know much about it!

The first specific details I read about the Amiga were in the September 1985 issue of Compute! magazine, which had the Amiga on its cover and included a lengthy feature story about it.

I was somewhat salty about this at the time (and might still be a little today) as this cover story about the Amiga announcement came out a month before Compute!’s review of the actual shipping Atari 520ST. I also didn’t like that they headlined the article with “Amiga: An In-Depth Review”, when it was clearly a product preview at best. Compute! would later redeem itself when it launched the spin-off Compute!’s Atari ST Disk & Magazine.

This first Amiga was called the Amiga from Commodore and it is now known as the Amiga 1000. It had a slick, two-piece design that resembled a low-profile PC case. It looked much more sophisticated than the toy-like 8-bit computers and much more professional than the cramped Macintosh or sprawling Atari 520ST.

Photo from Wikipedia

I thought it was a good idea to have a separate name, Amiga, instead of just going with a number² or letters. This was similar to what Apple did with Macintosh and I think it was a smarter move than the confusing names of the Atari ST computers (520ST, 1040ST, Mega ST, STE, Stacy, etc.) Being able to refer to the entire line as the “Amiga” does have advantages. There was an attempt to distance it from the Commodore brand with the “from Commodore” part, but that didn’t really work out. Soon enough, it was just called the Commodore Amiga and everyone was fine with that.

Here is the glowing introduction from the Compute! article:

Commodore’s Amiga is much more than just another new computer. It's a pivotal machine that may well shatter the traditional boundaries and prejudices which for years have divided the microcomputer marketplace. It defies classification as simply a home computer, game computer, business computer, or hacker's computer. In fact, the Amiga's power, versatility, and ease of use may qualify it as the first true personal computer.

The Amiga is not a me-too clone, or a cautious step sideways, or an incremental step forward. It's a genuine leap to a new generation of advanced personal computers. The Amiga will be the yardstick by which all other new computers over the next few years will be measured.

The hype was real!

Byte Magazine featured the Amiga in its August 1985 issue³, months before its Atari 520ST review would appear in January 1986, which was also a frustration. Byte at least referred to it as a product preview, however. The Byte article is full of excellent technical details and restrains the hype, making it a great read, even today.

Creative Computing featured the Amiga in its September 1985 issue:

Their Amiga article was written by John J. Anderson, who also often wrote the Outpost: Atari column for Creative Computing, so it is more skeptical than the others.

The Computer

The Amiga certainly did have amazing graphics that would make for some impressive demos and screenshots. Like the Macintosh and Atari ST, the Amiga used the Motorola 68000 CPU, running at a slightly slower 7.2Mhz. It had 4096 colors and resolutions of up to 640x400! It had built-in multitasking! There were substantial custom chips. It was expandable!

This “mandrill” image was commonly used to show off the Amiga graphics and color details.

The color and resolutions were definitely leading-edge. It also had significant sprite capabilities, but I feel like that became less relevant in the 16-bit era. Native multitasking was impressive, although it was a bit ahead of its time as the poor 68000 didn’t have memory protection and really wasn’t well-suited for multitasking.

Let’s not forget about the Amiga bouncing ball demo that was everywhere back then, and often duplicated on other computers to “prove” they were as powerful as the Amiga. Although this demo seems pretty basic by today’s standards, it was pretty groundbreaking in 1985.

The Amiga was initially somewhat expensive. The Amiga 1000 shipped in the fall of 1985, and with a color display it had a retail price of about $1800 at launch ($5400 in 2025), nearly twice the price of the Atari 520ST, which had shipped at $800 in July ($1000 for a color system, $3000 in 2025). Of course, each cost much less than a Macintosh!

It also bothered me that most magazines would print the Amiga price as $1295, but that did not include the expensive color monitor. Atari systems were always shown in their package price of $799 (mono) or $999 (color), which tended to make the Amiga look closer in price than it really was.

Initially the 520ST sold better, although not by a lot. The new 16-bit computer market had gotten off to a slow start with even the Macintosh not doing as well as Apple hoped.

The video game origins of the Amiga did hurt it in some areas. Its 640x400 graphics mode was interlaced and not really useable for productivity software, unlike the monochrome Macintosh and ST with mono monitor. From my perspective, its windowing OS seemed rather ugly and its reliance on AmigaDOS seemed janky. Reading more about in many years later (mostly via Amiga World), it’s hard drive support also seemed strange.

Weirder still was its “Kickstarter” concept. Back then computers typically had the OS burned into ROM for faster booting and to reduce RAM requirements. The Amiga’s OS was not finalized at launch and needed to boot from a floppy, which meant it loaded into the RAM. The Amiga 1000 only had 256K of RAM, which was not nearly enough to load the OS and any reasonable program.

So Amiga came up with the Writeable Control Store. This creative solution was essentially an extra 256K of RAM that was treated as ROM, of sorts. The OS would boot from floppy, load into the WCS, and could then be reloaded from there on soft reboots. The 256K system RAM was then available for programs. It was an interesting solution that certainly would have noticeably added to the Amiga’s cost.

Contrast this with the Atari 520ST, which came with 512K of RAM and also booted the OS from floppy in its first versions. So initially, both computers would have about 256K to use for programs. But by late 1985, Atari had burned the OS to ROM and made these ROMs available to early adopters to plug into empty sockets on the motherboard. With the OS in ROM the system booted immediately and most of its 512K RAM was available for use by programs.

The Glory Days

The Amiga had a rough start and by late 1986 it looked like Atari’s ST computer line was going to win the 16-bit home computer battle. But in early 1987 Commodore released two new Amigas that changed everything: The Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000.

The Amiga 500 was a cost-reduced Amiga in a case similar to the then-popular Atari 1040ST, although the 500 came with 512K RAM instead of 1024K (1 megabyte).

Photo from Wikipedia

It was a one-piece design with a floppy drive on the right. Unlike the 1040ST, the RAM was expandable via a slot on the bottom. I like the two-tone key colors and more normal function keys. Also note the more prominent Commodore logo on the case.

This was initially introduced at about $1000 with a color monitor, making it much more affordable than the original Amiga 1000. Later its priced would be dropped further as the Amiga became a popular “gaming PC” where it could be used with a standard TV in place of a monitor.

The Amiga 2000 was the more advanced and expensive Amiga and was a big rectangular box that looked much like a standard DOS PC of the time.

It had a detached keyboard and was highly expandable. This was much better design than the Atari Mega ST that was not easily expandable and announced around the same time.

Later Years

I am far from qualified to write anything about the later models such as the Amiga 600, 1200, 3000 and 4000. From an outsider’s perspective it seemed like they each moved the needle in noticeable ways, more so than later Atari ST models.

Sadly, selling non-PC clones in the early 90s was not a great business to be in and Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. Atari also disappeared in 1996. Apple almost followed in 1997, but was saved by Steve Jobs and NeXT.

Comparison with the Atari ST and Macintosh

There were certainly battles back then as to which one was better. It didn’t really matter than and it certainly does not matter much now. A more detailed comparison is worth an article all to itself.

To me, the Atari ST felt like a more practical computer with its lower cost, simpler design and good selection of application software and games. I especially liked its monochrome monitor, which is the one I used the most.

The Amiga, once its price dropped, was a great value as well and certainly had better games (except for Dungeon Master, which ruled on the ST). To me, the color display on the Amiga never seemed ideal for application usage or programming, at least until VGA-level graphics and displays started becoming available in the early 90s.

I’d love to get my hands on an Amiga, but I really don’t have room to set one up at the moment. I’m also not really sure I’d end up using it all that much. So for me, my ideal Amiga would probably be the original Amiga 1000 as I think it looks the best on display.

For more about the Amiga:

• The Amiga Years by Brian Bagnell: I read this book a few years ago. Highly recommended!

• The Future Was Here by Jimmy Maher: I haven’t read this book yet, but intend to.

• A History of the Amiga series on Arc Technica: Just wonderful!

I’d love to hear more from the Amiga faithful out there, so please leave a comment about things I should know about and let me know what I got wrong.

1. Intentionally misspelled to match the correct pronunciation.

2. Later models would add numbers following the Amiga name, of course.

3. Due to magazine lead times back then, I suspect this came out about the same time as the Compute! article, although I really don’t know.