The Commodore Amiga 1000

General Overview

The Commodore Amiga 1000 a.k.a. Lorraine was the first Commodore International computer of the family. It was commercialized from 1985 to 1987 and it's well-known because it was the first personal computer using a preempting multitasking, a coloured Graphic User Interface "WIMP" (a user-friendly GUI) and a 2 buttons Mouse.

The Amiga 1000 was near to be the first computer capable of coloured screen: The Atari 520SRT was the first capable of that, but the Amiga still had better quality images.
For that time, Personal Computers had the problem of the price: The Amiga 1000 was one of the cheapest: 1.295,00$ was the launch price.
The Amiga 1000's CPU was one of the most powerful for that time: a Motorola 68000 (available in the 16-bit version or the 32-bit version) which had the power up to 7.16 MHz: Referred to nowadays computers, it was almost 300 times powerless.


In the footnotes you can see another comparation graph of this Computer

The RAM installed into the Amiga 1000 was 256 KiB or 512 KiB, 8.000 times powerless then nowadays. I'm not including this graph for obvious motivations. The presentation day of this model of Amiga was 23 July 1985 in New York: Commodore presented it with one of the most famous pop star of the 80s: Andy Warhol.

The message Commodore would like to send was that a worker could increase his productivity just buying their product.
Here below you can see the Commercial.


Talking about the graphics, those were way better compared to the competitors: The Macintosh had a monochromatic and non-multitasking Operating System, when the Amiga 1000 could display up to 16 of the 4096 available colours at the same time if using a resolution of 640x400 or even better: if using a 320x400 resolution it could display all the 4096 available colours.
The Output Video signal was the same used by TVs, so even if a user hadn't a monitor or had a TV yet, he could connect the Amiga and the TV to obtain a complete computer.
The Amiga was sold without screen necessary for its use: the user had to buy a monitor, which the price was about 200$, or if possible, use a Television which could be connected to the Amiga.
It had a 3.5" DS/DD (Double Side / Double Density) Floppy drive and It was capable of managing up to 4 Floppy disk (See "1983" paragraph).