The story of the amiga | part 9 - amiga 2000 and amiga 500 arrives

In previous part I've talked about the person who has saved amiga, Thomas rattigan. But now I will talk about how Thomas rattigan gets fired by Irving Gould. So sit back, relax, and let me tell you the story.

Armed with this fresh PC knowledge, their idea was to incorporate an open architecture into the new amiga, expanding the bus and allowing ISA cards as well as amiga zoro cards to be added. A dedicated video slot was also introduced allowing a genlock card upgrade, this allowed computer images to be placed on top of video seamlessly and fitted perfectly with the amiga's native video editing abilities.

The amiga was defining the multimedia as it went, and it would pave amiga's way into the standard machine of use in the video industry. The final case and keyboard wasn't as elegant as the original model, but that's in part thanks to another cost cutting measure of using the canceled commodore 900 workstation case as the housing. The new machine launched in 1987 would be called amiga 2000, instigating a name change of the original commodore amiga to amiga 1000.

It retailed for a hefty $2395, armed with 512Kb of ram as a standard and including a monitor from the off. Immediately its path was sown and advertising was launched hitting home the machine's intended niche and selling points.

At the other end of the scale work had also begun on a low end amiga, dubbed the 500. Engineer George Robbins was keen to jump on the project from the go having pitched for such a machine from the start, fitting much more with commodore's earlier systems and indeed the expectations of developers and consumers alike.

Commodore's core group of engineers were put to task on the machine with Jeff porter in charge who had been previously working on a canceled commodore laptop along with Robbins, bob welland headed up the engineering who set about shrinking the amiga 1000 hardware, along with subtle improvements. one of these was the upgrade of Agnus to fat Agnus, allowing the system to be upgraded with 512kB of pseudo fast ram. the motherboard was codenamed after a B52 song rock lobster, which you can find printed on the board... a trend which would continue with future amiga variations.

the new case design was very much conceived to flow on from earlier commodore machines and the recently revamped commodore 64C model, and so a sleek wedge case was molded offering floppy disk access on the side much like Atari's also updated 520STFM model. it seems whatever the Amiga was doing, Atari was always so very slightly ahead. still, the amiga 500 was planned for launch in July 1987 but arrived a few months late in October for the budget price of $699 in north America and ₤499 in the UK, and was ready to go ahead to head with the Atari ST and wangle its way into homes and living rooms throughout the world. not long after this, the 2000 model, having shipped 60.000 units was updated to include some of the 500s design improvements and a few updates with US based dave haynie and terry fisher taking the task to hand.

a new buster chip was integrated to manage the expansion bus, also allowing plug and play functionality, another ahead of its time feature. a co-processor interface was added for CPU upgrades and of course, fat agnus was integrated, giving the 2000 a much-needed 1mB memory boost.

that's all for today's story, part 10 can be found here