What the Amiga Got Right (That We're Still Copying)
What the Amiga Got Right (That We’re Still Copying) The Commodore Amiga was not the most successful computer. It was not the fastest. It was not the cheapest. It was introduced in 1985, bought by Commodore in a panic, and discontinued by 1994 as the company collapsed. By most commercial metrics, it was a failure. Yet almost every good idea in modern computing traces back to the Amiga. Preemptive multitasking. Graphics layers and compositing. Named pipes. Memory protection. Hardware acceleration. Plug-and-play peripherals. Scripting languages. Digital audio and video editing. Networking. The Amiga did these things in 1985 when IBM PCs were still running in 8-bit mode. ...