The Amiga was first introduced in 1984. It did what no other computer at the time could do. None came even close to the Amiga for nigh a decade after its introduction.

Think back to the year 1984....

The most powerful microcomputer in the world in 1984 was IBM's AT, based on a new, powerful, 8MHz 80286 CPU running MS-DOS (Blää) and usually equipped with 512Kb of memory, sometimes expanded to 640Kb. Graphics were rarely more than 640x200 in two colors, but EGA (640x350 with 16 colors from a fixed 64 color palette) made in-roads then. All this was rather slow, though. The Macintosh had been introduced at the 1984 Summer Olympics, featuring a black&white graphic user interface, hithero found only on larger workstations, an icon-driven interface, 3.5" floppy drives and the ability to address many megabytes of RAM all at once. And into this world came the Amiga. The Amiga could multitask in 256Kb of RAM, and multitask so well that not even today's Pentiums with Windows 95 manage the same instant responsiveness as a 1984 Amiga. Workbench is the graphical user interface. Take a look at my workbench ....and you will enlightened just by looking at the picture.

Graphics? From a palette of 4096 colors the Amiga could display 16 colors at once on high resolution (736x566) screens, up to 64 colors on smaller screens. A special mode (HAM), mostly suitable for images, allowed all 4096 colors at once!!! And then it could animate its displays, using color cycling for stunning effects, or produce full screen animations at speeds that are still difficult to match on today's fastest Pentium processor machines.

And at top of this stunning graphic abilities the Amiga had stereo sounds. Upon startup, and as part of the power-on self test, the Amiga (A1000) would play a short piece of music, a piece derived from Wagner's Ring der Niebelungen. In fact, the Amiga supported 4 independent sound channels, arranged to provide true stereo separation, digital sound and speech. Programs could play digitized sounds or generate sound waves algorithmically. The widely distributed MOD format is born on the Amiga. What does stereo sound, high speed graphics and video compatibility add up to?

Yes, the answer is Multimedia. Years before the word multimedia was coined, the Amiga offered more multimedia power than most computers that are today sold under that depreciated label multimedia. So, why has the Amiga not conquered the world? In a word: Malice. Malice and stupidity. Well, in two words: Malice and stupidity. And Greed. OK, three words: Malice, stupidity and greed. And a bit of bad luck, Irving Gould, Mehdi Ali and the rest of the upper management.