if you haven't see the previous part of this blog post be sure to check out the blog post. here are the links: part 1, part 2, and part 3
The first was the chip design. Daphne was renamed to Denise, Portia to Paula and a lot of refinement began, including some technical improvements, an increase of memory from 128K to 256K, and of course condensing the massive prototypes on an actual silicon chip. although the team, particularly RJ Mical had completed some exemplary work on the exec kernel, graphical interface intuition, and the new operating system, which as a whole which was dubbed CAOS (Commodore Amiga Operating System)at this point, it was still taking time to develop into a suitable OS.
The amiga OS needed Operating System fundamentals such as file handling and resource routines. as a part of the buyout, commodore had imposed their own strict deadline to get the system to market and so employed MetaComCo to port a version of TripOS and incorporate it into the intuition code. TripOS was originally developed at Cambridge University on IBM 3081, this was then ported to the Motorola 68K by Dr. Tim King. it's fit with the Lorraine chipset was reasonably straight forward, however, the final results were still far below the original visions of Jay and his team, lacking many of the features they had intended, including resource tracking which would free up resource on the fly and a technically advanced file system.
Still, workbench working alongside the kickstart Boot ROM still made for a cutting edge Operating System experience compared to rival system. this was still a time when windows 1.0 had even been released. Aside from the technical aspects, there was also the aesthetics of the new computer to deal with. Jay, had a whole wave of design drawings which he had already progressed, showcasing an elegant system in line with a desktop system like the IBM pc jr, but with some additional tweaks were put into place including a garage unit which allowed the keyboard to fit under the machine, suggested by Dave Morse, who was still present and managing the subsidiary, along with a pencil holder on the keyboard and a stereo start-up tune. Not only did Amiga put a lot of effort and time into the machine, but commodore did as well, fully in the belief that they had hit the holy grail of the computing world.
The live demonstration of the new Amiga computer
Just 11 months after the purchase of Amiga Incorporated, the Commodore amiga was unveiled at a lavish New York show on Lincoln centre on 23rd July 1985. For this grand event, a full orchestra was hired, all commodore and Amiga employees were shipped over and a lavish display was presented. Commodore's vice president Bob trukenbrode hosted the show but it was Bob pariseau who took charge of the machine's real demonstrations. In many respects, the event was designed like a flamboyant version of the Apple machintosh launch, and it showed the key stand out abilities of the new machine, but purpose and direction felt a little lacking. To end the display, the old faithful boing ball demo was back, this time running on full-blown AmigaOS with workbench file management and intuition windows allowing a task to be run simultaneously in the background whilst the ball bounced on regardless.
The ball had become so synonymous with Amiga that it was originally used for its official Logo, but commodore decided to replace it with a rainbow checkmark, similar to the style of their earlier commodore 64 detailing in a bid to identify the amiga as a continuation of their earlier, and somewhat equally as impressive hardware.
The artist enter the Amiga demonstration
The show was finalized by Andy warhol and deborah (of Blondie fame) joining each other on stage to showcase some of the machine's graphical abilities, along with a helping hand of resident Amiga artist, Jack hager. the paint program in question, called ProPaint was still in its alpha stages and had known bugs with the flood fill tool, however blissfully unaware warhol went off on a flood fill pandemic, seemingly pushing the software to breaking point, but thankfully for amiga, no freezes or glitches occurred on that day.
Press coverage of the show seems somewhat mixed. people were clearly impressed with Amiga's abilities, but the system was perhaps so far ahead of its time, that many didn't know what these features could even be used for. it seems a little absurd now, but the industry is quite well entrenched in the IBM PC compatible landscape of blandness. the Amiga was just pissing all over that and people didn't know how to react
that's all for part 4. part 5 can be found here
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