Amiga
From iA wiki
See also: Computer | AmigaOS | AROS
Home page: http://www.amiga.com
A computer developed by Commodore Business Machines (CBM or Commodore for short). After CBM went bankrupt the Amiga brand eventually ended up with Amiga Inc. First released in 1985 as the Amiga 1000 the Amiga was popular and common in the late 80's and the early 90's. The Amiga comes in various flavors which all have their own advantage and disadvantage. By default the Amiga has its' own custom graphics and sound hardware which was revolutionary for its time. For example the Zorro expanasions. However, there are also mainstream expansions for Amiga computers available: for example a network card, a faster CPU, PCI, IDE, etc.
Unlike the Commodore 64, it doesn't have a SIDchip. The Amiga uses four channels to playback samples of real sounds and instruments. It is still used for tracking and is still very popular in the mod/demo scene which finds its' roots in the C64 and Amiga. It was (and in less extend: is) also used for games, CAD, video editing, 3D rendering and other 3D tasks, like SGI computers were. Many applications such as Lightwave which are now available for Windows and Linux started their life on the Amiga. The Amiga runs AmigaOS, Linux and NetBSD.
It is a fallacy that Amiga stands for Advanced Multitasking Integrated Graphic Architecture. Amiga just means female friend in Spanish.
After a very long period of silence the Amiga is getting a new breath of life. The AmigaONE is a modern architecture based on PowerPC chips of Apple fame. Its operating system will be Amiga OS 4.0, which has been in the works for years now and its final release is highly anticipated (a developer pre-release is currently shipped with AmigaONEs).
