Amiga

In computing, Amiga is a range of home/personal computers primarily using the Motorola 68000 processor family, whose development started in 1982, initially as a game machine. The original Amiga hardware was designed by Jay Miner; his machine was ahead of its time when it appeared in 1985, having a custom chipset with advanced graphics and sound features and a sophisticated multitasking operating system, now known as AmigaOS. The Amiga eventually became popular among computer enthusiasts, especially in Europe, as they upgraded from 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64. It also found a business role in video production.

Operating systems

The operating system, AmigaOS, was also quite sophisticated for its time, combining an elegant graphical user interface (GUI) like that of the Apple Macintosh together with an elegant Command Line Interface (CLI) which then eventually evolved into a very powerful Shell. This gives the user of Amiga some of the flexibility of UNIX while retaining a simplicity that made maintenance rather easy. While its operating system was the only preemptive multitasking platform with an efficient message-passing kernel in the consumer marketplace for several years with an efficient memory management, robustness left something to be desired, mainly due to the absence of protected memory, resulting in the famous "Guru Meditation" errors.

Related Topics:
AmigaOS - Graphical user interface - Apple Macintosh - Command Line Interface - UNIX - Preemptive multitasking - Memory management - Robustness - Protected memory - Guru Meditation

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The Amiga operating system was resurrected in 2000 as AmigaOS 4, which currently runs only on AmigaOne computers and on A1200s and A4000s with a PowerPC accelerator card.

Related Topics:
2000 - AmigaOS 4 - AmigaOne - A1200 - A4000 - PowerPC

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Other, still maintained operating systems are available for the classic Amiga platform, including Linux, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Commodore Amiga Unix (based on AT&T System V Rel. 4) was available only for the A2500 and A3000.

Related Topics:
Linux - NetBSD - OpenBSD - Commodore Amiga Unix - A2500 - A3000

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MS-DOS on Amiga via Sidecar or Bridgeboard

MS-DOS compatibility was a major issue during the early years of the Amiga's lifespan in order to promote the machine as a serious business machine. In order to run the MS-DOS operating system, Commodore released the 'Sidecar' for Amiga 1000, basically a 8086 board in a closed case that connected to the side of the Amiga. Clever programming (a library named Janus, after the Roman god of doorways) made it possible to run PC software in an Amiga window without use of emulation. At the introduction of the Sidecar the crowd was stunned to see the MS-DOS version of Microsoft Flight Simulator running at full speed in an Amiga window on the Workbench.

Related Topics:
MS-DOS - 8086 - Roman god - Emulation - Microsoft Flight Simulator - Workbench

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Later the Sidecar was implemented on a expansion card named 'Bridgeboard' for Amiga 2000+ models. Bridgeboard cards appeared up to 486 processor variants. The Bridgeboard card and the Janus library made use PC expansion cards and harddisk/floppydisk drives possible. The bridgeboard card was manufactured by Commodore, later third party cards also appeared for the A500/1200 expansion slot such as the KCS Powerboard.

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