Monday, July 25, 2005

The Commodore Amiga (the initial name of the Amiga 1000) was unveiled at the Lincoln Centre in New York on July 23rd in a media frenzy. For the launch Commodore had hired Andy Warhol & Debbie Harry (lead singer of Blondie) to demonstrate the Amiga's graphics capabilities using Island Graphics Graphicraft. This was accompanied by a full score synthesized by Roger Powell and Mike Boom, author of Musicraft.

It is difficult to indicate just how advanced the Amiga was compared to other systems. Apple had a graphical interface ... whilst PCs were still horrible text based systems. The Amiga also had an ace up its sleeve by the fact that it was TV compatible and could be used for editing footage. A task that even now the Mac and PC cannot do as standard. The Juggler demo, consisting of a character juggling reflective balls in a 3D environment, attracted customers to the graphical capabilities. This spurred Electronic Arts to rewrite their IBM PC package, Prism (which was an enhanced port of Doodle for Xerox machines) and release it for the Amiga during September. The rewrite was christened Deluxe Paint and the rest is history.