© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
All Rights reserved
|
|
Or, things that can't be placed anywhere else.
The A1000
The A1000 casing featured the signatures of all the designers and
the paw print of Jay Miner's dog moulded into the inside of the
casing. When it was demonstrated at the CES show in 1984 it was
just 4 breadboards cabled together. They were so fragile each board
had its own seat on the plane to Chicago. According to rumour it
was going to include a phone answering machine built in, but
Commodore decided it would be too expensive to fund.
Hold And Modify
The HAM mode which gave the original Amiga it's 4,096 colour
display was an experiment by Jay Miner after seeing flight
simulators in action. He wanted it to be similar to virtual reality
machines.
Amiga Alphabet
Somebody noticed on the Internet that the owners of Amiga seem to
be following a pattern.
- Amiga Inc
- Commodore
- Escom
- Gateway
If only Amiga Corp. would change their name to iAMIGA!
Controversy
Even in its dying years the Amiga has caused controversy. At the
end of 1996 a PD game called "Schoolyard Slaughter" attracted
attention, because it was disrespectful of the Dunblane tragedy
earlier in the year.
Name Game
The Amiga is Spanish for "female friend."
Microsofties
Microsoft did not own MS-DOS originally. It was a CP/M clone called
QDOS (Quick and dirty Disk operating System). It was then brought
off the author for a very small sum and the rest is history.
Oy! Dave NO!!!
David Pleasance still owes me 1 pence for a Amiga CD³²
umbrella I bought at the World of Amiga '96 show, because he
"didn't have any change". Tut tut.
LZX
Microsoft now own the LZX file compression format after buying it
from its author, who is reputed to be working for them. It is being
adopted for Microsoft's new CAB file compression format. The second
generation LZX algorithm can be found in Microsoft's Carbarc.EXE
program.
Sales Figures
Think that Commodore completely messed up the sale of the Amiga?
OK, it could have done better but it was hardly a complete failure.
Amiga sales had reached the 2,000,000 mark by November 1990 and
3,000,000 exactly a year later in November 1991. Yes, that's right
1 million Amigas sold in just one year! Hard to believe isn't
it.
Technology
Worried that your A1200 can no longer cut it. Well the HAM8 mode is
so advanced that NO MONITOR in the entire world can display the
maximum amount of pixels that are available, and that include all
those PC and Mac monitors.
Commodore Liquidation Facts
The creditor that caused the liquidation was Banque Nationale de
Paris, on April 25th, 1994 when they made a formal demand upon CIL
(Commodore International Ltd) for payment of its debts. Among the
products for sale, There was a 2 page listing of what was not
available. This included:
- Commodore UK's trademark on "Maggot Mania"
- Commodore France patent on a device for opening and closing
fluidtight doors
- Commodore's former patent on their digital thermometer and
thermostat
- Commodore's intellectual property and their CDTV/CD³²
software licences are valued at $12,000. Commodore has the CDTV
trademarked five times in Japan.
- The only listed inventory of completed machines made by
Commodore is about 3,300 CD32's valued at $22.50 each.
Amiga Inc.
The original Amiga Inc team (not to be confused with the Gateway
subsidiary) partly financed themselves selling joysticks. One of
these was the Joyboard, which was controlled by your body weight,
similar to the arcade skiing games you found nowadays. One
designer, who was in charge of designing the systems error handling
routines, made it a habit of "meditating" on the board, and thus
creating the Guru Meditation error whenever the system crashed.
This was a popular hobby when the team were bug fixing, so the
software failure screen suggested that the OS "Guru" and go
"meditate" on it.
KOSH
According to Cassell`s dictionary of English Slang (German
Edition), a Kosh is a metal pipe used as an impromptu weapon, as in
street fighting.
It`s true. It may also explain why Kommunity begins with a K for
reasons other than Fleecy and Jason can`t spell very well.
BACK
|
|
|
|
Latest updates to the Amiga History Guide. (more)
|
Other interesting items in the archive!
|
|
