Wk1 Show Me What You Know Project
The Amiga Computer
The Amiga ( the spanish word for female friend) was a family of PC's (personal computers) originally developed and released by Amiga Corporation in 1982. Jay Miner was the principal hardware designer, and many people consider him the father of the Amiga. Commodore International bought Amiga Corporation and introduced the machine to the market in 1985. The name Amiga was chosen by the developers specifically because it occurred before Apple and Atari alphabetically.
Based on the Motorola 68k series of , the machine sports a custom chipset with then advanced graphics and sound capabilities, and a pre-emptive multitaskingoperating system (now known as AmigaOS). While the M68k is a 32-bit processor, the version originally used in the Amiga, the 68000, has a external data bus so it must transfer 32 bits of data in two consecutive steps, a technique called — all this is transparent to the software, which was 32-bit from the beginning. The original machine was generally referred to in the as a 16-bit computer. Later models featured fully 32-bit designs. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers such as the , and the Amiga quickly grew in popularity among computer enthusiasts, especially in Europe, and sold approximately 6 million units.
It also found a prominent role in the desktop video, video production, and show control business, and was a less expensive alternative to the Apple Macintosh and IBM-PC. The Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer, although early Commodore advertisements attempted to place the Amiga into several different markets at the same time.
The most succesful product made for the Amiga was the NewTek Video Toaster, which revolucionized the Video Production market in the late 80's, offering a cheap alternative to create a complete post-production house in a box.
In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T.
However, Escom in turn went bankrupt in 1997. The Amiga brand was then sold to another PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, which had announced grand plans for it. However, in 2000, Gateway sold the Amiga brand without having released any products.
Amiga Technologies Logo. (1996)
The current owner of the trademark, Amiga, Inc., licensed the rights to make hardware using the Amiga brand to a UK computer vendor, Eyetech Group, Ltd, which was founded by some former UK employees of Commodore International. They were previously selling the AmigaOne via an international dealer network. The AmigaOne is a PowerPC computer designed to run the latest version of AmigaOS, which was itself licensed to a Belgian-German company, Hyperion Entertainment.
Amazing article on the brief rise and fall of the Amiga computer system and Video Toaster. I ran a video journalism studio for a Magnet school in Southern California in the late 1990s and we used a Tricaster, which was the follow-up to the Video Toaster. Ours was a three-foot cube stuffed with electronics and connectors, that required a Windows NT PC to run. Many video podcasters including CNET-TV and Leo Laporte's TWIT network use Tricasters to produce their shows. Amazing technology.
ResponderEliminarThe question is, however, how does this relate to what you've learned over the past eight-months of the emdt program? Is this part of your thesis exploration? I note that there are articles on the Amiga on Facebook fan page, and Answers.com that are very similar to the article that you've posted. Please be careful about posting information that is not in your own words and is not attributed to the source material. You may respond to this comment via email or here in your blog. I'm withholding a grade for this project until I hear from you.
I'm am very open to this work and the revolution that the Amiga/Video Toaster produced.
I picked to talk about the Amiga for this assingment for what this computer represented for many people. It was the first attempt in the history of the computers to create a machine that could be used for many things, and not only to do calculations, like the old PC's used to do. It was the first computer to have mutimedia capabilities like the ones most computers have today. It was also a computer backed up and developed by a community of fans who loved the computer and were worried of not letting it die. Finally it was the first computer I owned and where I learned many of the concepts that we are applying in this class.
ResponderEliminar