LYCOS RETRIEVER
Amiga: Amiga De
built 634 days ago
The series of New Amiga moves are important steps in reestablishing the Amiga as the computer of choice for the leading edge/imaginative user. Gameheads and websurfers are great to have on board any computer platform because they add sizzle. But the doings of the imaginative users is what captures mindshare of people looking for the next computing advance. The Amiga must once again become the preferred machine of the garage developer start-up in programming, the arts, music, Internet, and multimedia development. Nobody in this group cares about what is a true Amiga. They are interested in capability, sizzle, and price.
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The Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer. Commodore International introduced the machine to the market in 1985, after having bought Amiga Corporation. The name Amiga was selected by the developers specifically from the Spanish word for a female friend,[1] and because it occurred before Apple and Atari alphabetically.[2]
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The commercial death of the Amiga came with Commodore's bancruptcy in 1993. Even though some national 'daughters' survived for another few months (Germany, Great Britain), without the mother company, there wasn't any development anymore. The reasons for this bancruptcy have been the subject of lots of articles and editorials, so here is just a short version: One of Commodore's main credos was something along the lines of "if it's working, don't break it", meaning that if a model still sells, there is no reason to replace it with another one. That lead to a lack of innovation over the years. Even though new models were eventually put out in 1992, it was already too late by then. Additionally, financial disasters like the CDTV fiasco and Commodore's long tries to establish themselves in the PC market took their toll.
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Despite this neglect from the popular press, the Amiga prospered. Its excellent graphics and sound made it the best platform for gaming in the late 80s. Later, when improved, expandable versions of the Amiga were released (such as the redoubtable 3000), the platform found a niche in the burgeoning field of digital video. NewTek's Video Toaster replaced hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of custom video editing equipment with a $5,000 box and opened up the field to a new generation of professionals, much as the Macintosh did with desktop publishing.
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The Amiga was originally designed by a team led by Jay Miner at a company originally called Hi-Toro. The name was changed to Amiga primarily in order to appear before Apple in the phone book. Atari funded some of the early development, but when Amiga were looking to sell out to a larger company offered less than a dollar per share. Commodore were willing to go up to four twenty-five and ended up owning a small Californian company with some pretty impressive custom hardware. Amiga had been aiming at something that was effectively an incredible games machine with some computing ability, while Commodore shifted the focus to a more general purpose machine hoping to mimic the success of the Commodore 64.
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The Amiga was first seen in 1985. A small corporation called Amiga Inc started making a game machine. It was financed using veture capital from local dentists in Los Gatos, CA. They made additional money by making joysticks and keyboards. A man named Jay Miner saw the potential the machine had and convinced the group to turn the game machine into a computer.
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