Posted 12/04/2007 at 05:11:44pm

Americans do this all too often. The rest of the wold purchased them in their millions, but Americans seemed too interested in name brand computers. Amigas were probably the most revolutionary single computer of all time. For a fraction of the cost of an IBM PC or a Mac, you could buy a computer that had more RAM that the PC, and could be expanded to more than the Mac. It had the same CPU as the Mac. That is only the start of the revolution. It was the first multimedia computer. In 1985 there was a multimedia computer. 4 channels of sound (Mac and PC could not do anything close to that). Image/animation/video resolutions up to 640x512. Images in 4096 colours. Animation and video in 32 colours, that may sound small, but unlike Macs and PCs, the Amiga could swap the palette every frame, so in a ten second video file, the Amiga could display all 4096 colours (try that on a VGA card nine years later and your 256 colours that could not change looked pretty bad as the video cut to a different tone range). Speech synthesis (at least as good as the Macs). Two button mouse (up to five buttons). Optional pen on screen mousing inputs. To top this off, the Amiga had full multitasking as well... in 1985! At the same time, IBM PCs could give you beep sounds through the internal speaker, and 16 basic colours on a black screen in a low resolution, but no mouse. Macs could give you 96dpi on the smallest physical screen money could buy, and black and white (NOTE black and white does not include ANY greyscales... you have a black pixel or a white pixel), limited sound handling (you could add a MIDI port, but you could add a MIDI port for a fraction of the cost to the Amiga), and a one button mouse. Of course Apple and IBM charged more, so they had more for advertising in USA. The Amiga outsold the Mac in most international markets, and outsold the IBM PC (and clones) in at least one country.