When it was first introduced, in 1984, the Amiga was nearly a decade ahead of its time. Although the rest of the industry has largely succeeded in matching or even exceeding the Amiga's hardware advantages, many will argue that the Amiga continues to hold true to a goal of elegance in computing even as the rest of the industry has become mired in a swamp of inefficiencies that require more and more hardware to make it work at all.

Multiprocessing Hardware

The Amiga was introduced with a 7.16MHz Motorola 68000 CPU. Working in tandem with the main CPU are several other custom chips (CPUs almost in their own right, and equipped with cute names, too): Agnes, Denise, Paula. These peripheral CPUs handled various input/output (I/O) tasks: memory access, sound generation, floppy disk I/O, display generation, special graphics tricks, etc. These peripheral chips allowed the main CPU to concentrate on other tasks (such as user interaction, decoding sound, etc.) without any slowdown due to graphic objects bouncing around on the screen, or data coming off the floppy disks, or thundering stereo sound pouring out of the speakers. ...the Amiga has always been a multiprocessing computer!

Flexible Memory Architecture

The Amiga was introduced with 512K of Chip RAM and up to 8MB fast RAM could be added. Chip RAM is the memory addressable by the display chips (for those of you familiar with the Intel machines, this is the equivalent of the Monochrome or Color display memory area at B8000 or B0000, and more recently the dedicated memory on graphics cards.) By 1990, the Amiga's Chip RAM address space had grown to 2MB and it could have up to 18MB of memory on the motherboard. More memory could be added with hardware cards. The Amiga's Chip RAM is not for graphics displays only, however. Chip RAM is named so because the Amiga's peripheral CPUs (the custom chips) all access that region of memory. But you can, in fact, even run programs in Chip RAM if your main memory is exhausted. The operating system manages such a case all on its own, of course. When the main CPU and the peripheral chips all want access to Chip RAM, a bit of a "traffic jam" occurs. When there is no contest for that special memory area, however, both the main CPU and the peripheral CPUs can access their respective memory independently of each other and without hurting each other's performance. And so, Amiga's always have some memory reserves when they need it.

Video Compatible

The Amiga's peripheral CPUs are able to generate video compatible signals, meaning that their output is compatible with televisions and VCRs. Every Amiga can generate NTSC and PAL signals at will. A company named NewTek created for the Amiga the Video Toaster, a device that plugs into the Amiga's video slot and provides it with the ability to generate live video effects, such as flipping, bending and twisting images in real time, rolling a video signal up or down as if it was on a roll of paper, etc. The Video Toaster put the Amiga into many television studios and made possible the special effects on shows such as Startrek, SeaQuest, and Babylon 5. To this day, the Amiga is unequaled in the video field.

Future Hardware

Even equipped with today's comparatively slow 680x0 series CPUs (68000, 68020, 68030, 68040, and 68060) the Amiga's highly efficient operating system is able to hide many of the limitations of the aging hardware and provide Amiga users with relatively modern computers that are often as responsive as entry-level Pentiums. An Amiga equipped with Phase 5's new PPC-card will outperform the fastest Pentium chip today.

Amiga Operating System

The Amiga uses AmigaOS, an extremely compact, powerful and Multitasking Operating System. It was the first multitasking and Graphical User Interface (GUI) in color for the mass market which means it was Windows '95 in 1985. 10 Years ahead of it's time.

AmigaOS is modula which means it can be expanded with the use of external libraries. Programs can call the routines and instructions in these libraries to perform special functions and shared features. This makes AmigaOS extremely flexible. A good example of this is Magic User Interface (MUI).

What makes AmigaOS so special is it's preemptive multitasking which means tasks or programs can be running and sharing system resources at the same time. In fact as many prgrams can be running as memory allows.

AmigaOS is one of the only Operating Systems that deals with the hardware directly. Unlike PC clones, AmigaOS has built in graphics functions and these make AmigaOS even more powerful. The ability to allow a program to open on it's own screen or the workbench screen in any number of colours and in any screen resolution available is an extremely powerful feature. It allows the operating system to be able to handle many programs in a limited memory space more effeciently.
For example: The workbench screen can be 800x600 in 256 colours which is memory consuming, but a program can run it's own screen in 640x256 in only 4 colours and this allows the program to save memory. These screens can be switched between very quickly in a couple of mouse clicks or a single key stroke.

AmigaOS is split into two parts, the first is Workbench and is loaded as standard. Workbench is the Graphical User Interface and many parts of this are stored in a memory area called Kickstart. Kickstart is a Read Only Memory (ROM) module which contains all the functions to make Workbench operate. The other part of the AmigaOS is the CLI or Command Line Interface. This is like MS-DOS and is used to type commands into the computer. Both of these systems can be loaded and used at the same time which makes AmigaOS one of the most powerful operating systems available today.