The Amiga: A Hardware Engineering Story: Advancing Multimedia Computing Capability

The Amiga PC architecture was a child of both home video game consoles and PC systems of the early 1980s. The microcomputer revolution of the mid-1970s had given birth to the video game console market and the PC market, which expanded rapidly. In the fall of 1982, Atari alone had total sales of US$2 billion, including video game consoles, game cartridges, and their own PCs [1]. Many companies in the PC market were competing to establish market standards and attract developer support, beginning with S-100 bus machines [2] and the Apple II [3]. IBM entered the PC market with the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981. The Apple Macintosh arrived in 1984, and the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer, the subject of this article, followed in 1985.