Amiga 1000

The Commodore Amiga 1000 was the first in the Amiga line of personal computers released by Commodore International. Before the release of the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 models in 1987, the A1000 was simply called Amiga.

Introduced on July 23, 1985 at the Lincoln Center in New York City, machines began shipping in September with a base configuration of 256 kB of RAM at the retail price of US$1,295. A 13-inch (330 mm) analog RGB monitor was available for around US$300, bringing the price of a complete Amiga system to 1,595 USD.

In the US, the A1000 was marketed as The Amiga from Commodore, though the Commodore logo was omitted from the case. Additionally, the Amiga 1000 was sold exclusively in computer stores rather than the various non computer-dedicated department and toy stores through which the VIC20 and Commodore 64 were retailed. These measures were an effort to avoid Commodore's toy-store computer image created during the Tramiel era.



The conceptor 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 little California 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!, Atari wanted to buy the Amiga but finally, Commodore succeeded to buy it (then there was a lawsuit, which Commodore won). It was meant to be a competitor to the Atari 520 ST.

The operating system 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. Along with the operating system, the machine came bundled with a version of AmigaBASIC developed by Microsoft and a speech synthesis library developed by Softvoice, Inc.

The Amiga 1000 began to lose popularity one year later with the creation of its two main successors: the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000.