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.... on July 23, 1985 technology genuinely changed forever. At New York's Lincoln Center, as a full orchestra scored the evening and all its employees appeared in tuxedos, Commodore unveiled the work of its newly acquired Amiga subsidiary for the first time. The world finally saw a real Amiga 1000 and all its features. A baboon's face at 640x400 resolution felt life-changing, and icons like Blondie's Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol came onstage to demo state-of-the-art technology like a paint program.
Today, Amiga—specifically its initial Amiga 1000 computer—officially turns 30. The Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, CA will commemorate the event this weekend (July 25 and 26) with firsthand hardware exhibits, speakers, and a banquet where the Viva Amiga documentary will be shown. It's merely the most high-profile event among dozens of Amiga commemorative ceremonies across the world, from Australia to Germany to Cleveland.
What's the big deal? While things like the Apple II and TRS-80 Model 100 preceded it, the Amiga 1000 was the first true PC for creatives. As the CHM describes it, the Amiga 1000 was "a radical multimedia machine from a group of thinkers, tinkerers, and visionaries which delivered affordable graphics, animation, music, and multitasking interaction the personal computer world hadn't even dreamt of." It pioneered desktop video and introduced PCs to countless new users, rocketing Amiga and Commodore to the top for a brief moment in the sun.
Amiga fans, assemble!
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by damnbunni on Sunday July 26 2015, @11:33AM
It's a 2009 model with an 800 Mhz Sam440ep chip. Basically a PowerPC 604 with no L2 cache. It just barely has enough processing oomph to play a DVD with a software decoder, to give you an idea of how much raw power that is.
And it's loads of fun. It's more stable than the old Amigas - most 'Guru Meditations' now trip a Grim Reaper instead, and can be recovered from, or at least put off so you can save things and restart cleanly. But it's still a lot more crashy than anything else these days.
But much more so than my Mac or Windows or Linux boxes, it's just plain fun to screw around with. I have no idea how these guys got Intuition screen-dragging to work on box-stock Radeon hardware, but it does.
Compatibility with old Amiga applications is... about as good as my old Amiga 3000 Tower/040 with Cybervision3D video card. It has 68k emulation built into the OS, much like Macs did after the PPC move, and it can launch programs in a full-state Amiga 500 emulator if need be. it usually isn't, though, save for games.
Running AmigaOS 4.1 Final, which came out in December of last year.