Last Updated on January 7, 2026 by Dave Farquhar
On this day, 39 years ago, on July 23, 1985, Commodore introduced its Amiga 1000 computer. And let’s just say the world wasn’t ready for it yet. Dave Haynie, a Commodore engineer who worked on the later models, has said there was no such thing as a 1980s computer. There were 1970s computers and 1990s computers, and it was the Amiga that dragged the rest of the industry into the 1990s.
Ten years ahead of its time
It is not hyperbole to say the Amiga 1000 was 10 years ahead of its time. Its custom chipset had color graphics with up to 4,096 colors, stereo sound, a graphical user interface. Its operating system had full preemptive multitasking. The combination of the chipset and the operating system meant it could run on a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.14 megahertz and 256 KB of RAM. And it could boot and run off a single floppy drive. Amiga demonstrated it in January 1984, when the chips existed only as prototype circuit boards. By the end of 1985, it was a shipping product.
Realistically, an ideal configuration had dual floppy drives and 512k of RAM, and a megabyte was a lot nicer.
But dual floppies and a meg of RAM wasn’t an outlandish machine in 1985, and in that configuration, it was smooth and pleasant to use. Commodore commissioned artist Andy Warhol to demonstrate it by using it to create digital art to show off its capabilities.
Multitasking: The Amiga 1000’s secret
Graphical user interfaces weren’t exactly new in the summer of 1985. Apple had introduced the Macintosh about a year and a half earlier, and the Lisa predated even that by a nearly a year. Atari released its ST computer three months before the Amiga, and the ST also had a graphical operating system with a mouse and color.
It was multitasking that put the Amiga on the map. And it wasn’t the cooperative multitasking that Windows 3.0 and 3.1 did or Apple System 7 did. It was full preemptive multitasking like Windows 95. The only thing Windows NT did that the Amiga didn’t was memory protection.
The Amiga’s operating system wasn’t based on Unix and it certainly wasn’t based on Windows NT. Its direct ancestor was an operating system called TRIPOS that originated at Cambridge University.
Adding memory protection would have been a nice touch, but it also would have increased costs. And the Amiga at its debut was not exactly inexpensive. The base system cost $1,295 without a monitor. A color monitor, which you definitely wanted, cost another $300. Add the additional memory and a second floppy drive for another $150 to $200 each, and you soon learned the Amiga you really wanted was more like a $2,000 computer. Living in the future was expensive, but compared to the $2,495 Apple wanted for a less capable machine, the price wasn’t unreasonable.
Living with an Amiga
I’m not sure I even saw an Amiga in person until 1987, but I knew just from reading about it that I wanted one. I wasn’t able to make it happen until 1991, so I was pretty late to the game. But even in 1991, an Amiga felt like living in the future. I could load several programs and switch between them effortlessly, with the only limit being the amount of memory I had. I could connect to a BBS with a terminal program, start a download, then switch it to the background, fire up a word processor, and do my homework while the download was happening. In some cases, I could even fire up a game and play a game while a download happened in the background. I could download stuff while I played Civilization, which was pretty great.
Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable. But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue.
But it wasn’t long before the software developers learned how to write code that behaved in this brave new world. Certainly by the time I was in the scene in 1991, the software generally behaved very well. When I bought a Windows PC in 1994, it felt like a serious downgrade. If I treated it like an Amiga and launched a terminal program, connected to a BBS, started download, and then switched over to Microsoft Word, it didn’t always work reliably. More often than not it was fine. But something would crash often enough to make me hesitate doing something I took for granted on an Amiga.
Why the Amiga makes me mad
And that’s why I almost everything about the Amiga makes me mad. With a good product marketing team behind it, it would have been the greatest computer of all time. When anyone asks its engineers why they built it, they tell you things like they wanted to build the very best computer that they could with the technology that was available to them at the time. That’s how engineers think, so it’s a perfectly good answer, engineer to engineer. But that answer doesn’t sell. You have to come up with something about wanting to change the world. And you have to word it in a way that sounds believable if you are going to attract a mass audience. Apple does that very well. Microsoft was never as good at it, but they were better at it than Commodore.
Commodore didn’t have a Steve Jobs or even a Steve Ballmer. They had an oligarch named Irving Gould who was only interested in looting as much from the company as possible as he ran it into the ground. It is a testament to the quality of the product Commodore had that it took him a decade to do it after Jack Tramiel left the company and left him unchecked to rob it blind.
Commodore ran a few ads, but it was clear from their advertising they had no idea what they were selling. The most effective marketers were the people who bought one. Sit down for an hour with an Amiga and someone who knew how to use it, and you’d want one too. But there weren’t enough of us to sustain the platform or the company.
How the Amiga 1000 and its successors were like a kick in the face
Commodore went bankrupt less than 9 years after introducing the first Amiga. And the company they sold it to went out of business about 15 months after buying it. So instead of getting the greatest computer of all time, it felt like we were getting kicked in the face repeatedly. And then we tried to switch to Apple or Microsoft, and waiting years for them to catch up felt like getting kicked in the face by two people.
If you missed out on it, it sounds like I’m being overdramatic. I get it. Nobody knows exactly how many people got to experience it. In the end Commodore sold around 4.91 million Amigas, but at least in the United States, Amiga owners were prone to buy more than one. That makes it hard to say how many distinct owners the machine had. But the people who owned one and lived in the future waiting for the rest of the world to catch up know exactly what I’m talking about.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Small typo: Apple had introduced to the Macintosh about a year and a half earlier, and the Lisa predated even that by a nearly a year.
s/to//
I had an Amiga 500 as a teenager. While I mostly did play games, I also had my first interactions with online services via a 2400bps modem (CompuServe, BBSes) and fiddled with some other stuff. It was some of the most fun I’ve had with a computer (the most fun being teaching myself Linux just a couple years after the Amiga experience ended, which I parlayed into a career doing UNIX systems management.)
Thanks Greg, spoken like a Unix expert. I also found learning Linux had a lot of parallels to learning the Amiga, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence so many Amiga owners ended up becoming Unix or Linux admins or at least working with those operating systems in some way.
Yep! It was going off the beaten path and using and learning something that was sort of “rarefied.” Another coincidence is that I actually heard about Linux at an all-Amiga computer shop in my town that I used to hang around as a teen. One adult was telling another “Have you heard of this new thing, Linux?” This was around 1993-1994. I then got into a lot of trouble using my parents’ phone line to download Slackware from a long-distance BBS. They eventually forgave me. 🙂 Cheers.
This is how I feel about smartphones. (Too young for Amiga as an elder Millennial.) I liked my original BlackBerry (with that scrollwheel!) and I loved my Z10 (the one with the new BlackBerry 10 OS that was supposed to compete with Android and Apple.) The OS was just so intuitive. But it came out too late in the smartphone duopoly. And like Microsoft with its phone, they didn’t market it well at all.
Indeed, there’s an expiration date on achieving critical mass, and if you miss it, your product is done. Amiga, Blackberry, and Microsoft’s phone all did that. I have a blog post on Microsoft’s phone, I’ll revisit that sometime.
I think there were many millions of people who actually used Amigas.
Maybe there were a million or two that bought Amigas, and owned more than one, but there were many more who had them second, or third hand.
I have owned 5 Amigas – 2 1000’s, a 3000, and a 1200, and my current A500 that I built from parts mostly from Germany, and i bought none of them new. I also sold all but my current on to other users.
Amiga made a mark…. mostly as its users were a bit too passionate, but it did.
how did the Amiga 1000 computer compare with the Acorn Archimedes in 1987
how did the Amiga OS compare with RISC OS
could Acorn Archimedes in 1987 with RISC OS be successful than the Amiga 1000 in 1987
why was Apple Computer more successful than the Amiga 1000 in 1987
The Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, not 1987. By 1987, Commodore had released the Amiga 500, which had more memory and cost $699.
I am not familiar enough with the Acorn Archimedes and RISC OS to comment on how they compared.
As for why Apple survived and why Commodore failed, I’ve written several blog posts about that, some of them very long. The short version is Apple chose a niche, desktop publishing, sold into it, and had no qualms asking for up to $10,000 for a computer and $5,000 for a printer that replaced $50,000 worth of other equipment. The Amiga was excellent for video production but Commodore was stuck on trying to repeat the Commodore 64 again, when their management had any direction at all. I have a blog post on Irving Gould that explains a lot about Commodore. I’ll be revisiting him in late September.
thanks
$10,000 for a computer and $5,000 for a printer
iirc the mac se in 1987 was $3500 and lasers printer went down in prices like intel cpus
The Archimedes was a lot more expensive than the Amiga. Acorn relied on selling to the British education sector, the BBC and other niches in its domestic market. This wasn’t surprising as the company had its origins in Cambridge, England and the computing scene associated with its famous university.
In 1992 Acorn did launch a variant targeted at the home user (the A3020) but by then it was game over for the wedge-shaped home computer. And the A3020 was still much more expensive than the Amiga 1200.
In terms of technical specs, the Archimedes with its ARM RISC processor was a lot faster than the Amiga. It could display 256 colours from a palette of 4,096 and had various high-res, non-interlaced modes. If I recall correctly sound capabilities were similar to the Amiga, maybe a little better.
Acorn’s machine didn’t have any custom chips for sprite handling but received plenty of ports of Amiga games which, thanks to the power of the ARM CPU, run similarly to the Amiga versions. The Arch is a lot faster than the Amiga or ST when displaying 3D polygons.
RISC OS was a nice operating system but single-tasking. The GUI relied on a three-button mouse and has some quirks compared to the Amiga or other contemporaries. If you went to school in Britain between 1987 and 1996 you’re very likely to have used the Archimedes and RISC OS.
The Archimedes was a lot more expensive than the Amiga. Acorn relied on selling to the British education sector, the BBC and other niches in its domestic market. In 1992 Acorn did launch a version of the Archimedes targeted at the home user (the A3020) but by then it was game over for the wedge-shaped home computer. And the A3020 was still much more expensive than the Amiga 1200.
In terms of technical specs, the Archimedes with its ARM RISC processor was a lot faster than the Amiga. It could display 256 colours from a palette of 4,096, had various high-res, non-interlaced modes and 8-channel stereo sound. Acorn’s machine didn’t have any custom chips for sprite handling but received plenty of ports of Amiga games which, thanks to the power of the ARM CPU, run similarly to the Amiga versions. The Archimedes is a lot faster than the Amiga or ST when displaying 3D polygons.
RISC OS was a nice operating system but single-tasking. The GUI relied on a three-button mouse and has some quirks compared other contemporaries. If you went to school in Britain between 1987 and 1996 you’re very likely to have used the Archimedes and RISC OS.
Adding memory protection would have been a nice touch, but it also would have increased costs
how much Adding memory protection would have increased costs?
in 1987 QNX have Adding memory protection
They would have had to add an MMU chip like the 68000-based Unix machines had, which would have increased the hardware cost. The OS was already a very tight squeeze in 256K of RAM, so they might have had to increase the minimum to 512K. So now we’re no longer talking about a starting price of $1295 for the computer.
okay didn’t QNX first work on a floppy ?
Something else besides memory protection that I remember the Amiga didn’t do was clean up a programme’s resources if it crashed, or if it wasn’t programmed properly to close all its handles. So if a programme died unexpectedly any memory it allocated or files that it opened would still be in use.