| History |
Where the Amiga came from and what happened to it.
The Amiga began at a small California company founded in 1982, originally called Hi-Toro and soon
renamed Amiga Corporation. Its chipset was designed by a team led by Jay Miner, who had earlier
worked on Atari's home computer chips. The prototype was code-named "Lorraine".
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"Amiga" is Spanish for a female friend. The founders wanted a friendly name, and it also conveniently
appeared ahead of Apple and Atari in alphabetical listings.
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Amiga Corporation ran short of money while developing its chipset and took funding from Atari, which
came with strings attached. In 1984 Commodore stepped in and bought Amiga Corporation outright,
leading to a legal dispute with Atari. Commodore launched the first model, the Amiga 1000, in 1985.
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The Amiga 1000 was unveiled in July 1985 at a gala event at Lincoln Center in New York. In one of the
best-remembered moments, artist Andy Warhol created a digital portrait of singer Debbie Harry live
on stage using the new computer.
Read more: Warhol & The Computer
(Computer History Museum).
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At home, especially in Europe, the Amiga was one of the leading games machines of the late 1980s and
early 1990s, with studios such as Psygnosis, DMA Design, Team17 and Sensible Software making
landmark titles. It also became a creative tool: NewTek's Video Toaster made the Amiga 2000 a
low-cost video production system used in television, including for visual effects in early
Babylon 5. The Amiga was also central to the demoscene and to tracker music.
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Commodore struggled in the early 1990s as PC and console competition grew, and it filed for
bankruptcy in 1994. The Amiga rights then passed through several owners, starting with the German
company Escom, which itself went bankrupt in 1996, and later Gateway.
Development of the operating system continued through other companies, and the community has kept
the platform alive with new hardware, software and updated versions of AmigaOS.
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These books cover the Amiga's story from different angles:
- The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga by Jimmy Maher (MIT Press, 2012) - a thoughtful
history of the hardware design, the culture around the machine, and why it mattered. Maher also
covers the Amiga in his long-running blog, The Digital Antiquarian.
- Commodore: The Amiga Years by Brian Bagnall - a detailed, interview-driven account of the
people and company politics behind the Amiga at Commodore.
- Commodore Amiga: a visual Commpendium (Bitmap Books) - a large, beautifully designed art
book of Amiga games and graphics.
- The Story of the Commodore Amiga in Pixels by Chris Wilkins - a game-focused history built
around developer interviews and screenshots.
- Freax: The Brief History of the Computer Demoscene by Tamas Polgar - the story of the
demoscene, in which the Amiga played a central part.
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