Amiga

Amiga is a family of desktop computers most known for enabling inexpensive video, animations and music production.  This capacity is enabled by custom hardware, and an operating system with near real time properties.  This is distinctly different from most other desktop computer systems, which can sometimes get unresponsive under heavy load.

Some notable uses:  (sourced from Wikipedia)

  • Artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud credits the Amiga he bought for his son as a bridge to learning about "using paint box programs". He uploaded some of his early experiments to the file sharing forums on CompuServe.
  • The "Weird Al" Yankovic film UHF contains a computer animated music video parody of the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing", titled "Money For Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies". According to the DVD commentary track, this spoof was created on an Amiga home computer.
  • Todd Rundgren's video "Change Myself" was produced with Toaster and Lightwave.
  • Scottish pop artist Calvin Harris composed his debut album I Created Disco with an Amiga 1200.
  • Susumu Hirasawa, a Japanese Electropop-artist is known for using Amigas to compose and perform music.
  • Electronic musician Max Tundra also created his three albums with an Amiga 500.
  • Andy Warhol was an early user of the Amiga and appeared at the launch, where he made a computer artwork of Debbie Harry.

The Amiga is based on PowerPC hardware with a custom operating system developed by Hyperion Entertainment.  In the 1980's and 90's Amiga was marketed by Commodore on a Motorola 68000 platform, originally conceived by a team in Los Gatos, CA.  The operating system is in part based on TRIPOS and had portions written in BCPL.  This history makes the Amiga unique in today's market as an alternative to systems originating on Windows, Unix or Java.



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