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In 1983, Apple released the Apple Lisa at a cost of US$9,995.00 and sold a mere 100,000 units over two years.

However, in 1984, having leaned from its mistakes with the Apple Lisa, Apple release the very popular Macintosh computer. It came with what seemed to be an amazing 128K RAM of memory, but as it turned out, the machine needed much more and was released with 512KB eight months later.

The Macintosh was the first commercially successful computer to come with a graphical user interface (GUI). Before the Mac, computers were text-based, much like a DOS environment with no Windows. By using a mouse, one could find files and open applications much quicker than before.

In an attempt to keep costs down and make the unit profitable, apple sold the unit without the ability to upgrade the mac as it did not have any expansion slots. In fact, opening the case required special tools that most people did not have access to. The mac was essentially an appliance and this made software development simple as there was only a single display driver, a single sound driver and so on.

The Mac was not only a commercial success, it was a commercial hit, selling over one million units in its first year.

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In 1986, Apple released the Macintosh Plus for US$2599. This was the first Mac to come with a SCSI that was used for external devices including hard disks, tape drives, CD-ROM drives and printers. While SCSI devices cost more than IDE devices, they offered better perfornace.

The Plus also featured an 800 KB floppy drive, doubling the capacity of the previous floppy drive. It also had two drive heads allowing it to read both sides of the disk at the same time.

Another major upgrade was the use of SIMM memory. The Plus came with 1MB of RAM, but could be upgraded to 4MB by replacing the SIMMs.

The Mac Plus also came bundled with MacPaint, MacWrite, HyperCard and MultiFinder.

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In 1987, Atari released the 1040 ST at a price of US$999.00. The 1040 came with 1MB of ram, which was double that of the 520ST and also saw the power supply and the floppy drive move to rear in order to reduce the cable clutter.

The 1040ST was featured in Byte magazine as the first home computer with 1MB that sold under US$1.000.

However, the ST did not change much from version to version. The internal technology essentially stayed the same. What did change was the amount of RAM and a few other tweeks.

The Atari 1040 ST sold very well in Europe where it was used by business for CAD and desktop publishing.

Atari 1040ST Specifications

CPU: Motorola MC68000
Speed: 8 mHz
CO-Processor: Shifter and Glue custom chips
RAM: 1 MB
ROM: 192 KB
Text modes: 40 or 80 columns x 25 lines
Graphics modes: 320 x 200 / 640 x 200 / 640 x 400 dots
Colours: 320 x 200 x 16 colours; 640 x 200 x 4 colours; monochrome 640 x 400 x 2 using a monitor.
Sound: Three voices, 8 octaves
I/O ports: RGB: TV modulator; Cardridge, Midi (in/out); Centronics; RS232c; Hard Disk; Floppy Disk; Joystick, Mouse
Built in 3.5 floppy

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In 1989, Atari released the 1040STE. Atari improved the multimedia hardware and operating system. STE machines did not look any different from the previous cases for the 520, 1040, etc...

Key features included:

1) Increased colour palette of 4096 colours from 512.
2) Genlock support
3) A graphics co-processor Blitter that moves large blocks of data around the screen
4) A new 2-channel digital sound chip capable of 8-bit stereo samples up to 50 kHz
5) Two enhanced joystick ports (EJP) were added

The upgrades were clearly aimed to catch up to the Amiga, though it still fell far behind on the graphics and multitasking abilities and was limited to 8Mhz.

Despite these extra upgrades, software developers made little use of them. What made matters worse is that they added incompatibility to existing software. However, this can be expected when upgrading key hardware capabilities.

The only applications designed for the STE-only were CAD and desktop publishing.

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In 1985, Atari introduced the 520ST for US$799.99. that became an instant hit and was very popular between 1985 and 1990.

The 520 ST featured a Motorola 68000 16/32-bit processor. While the processor is 32-bit, the bus and the rest of the computer is 16-bit. Therefore, the Atari 520ST is considered a 16-bit machine. It also comes with a whopping 196K ROM and 512K of RAM.

The Apple Macintosh also used the same processor but the ST had colour graphics and supported higher resolutions. And while the Commodore-Amiga was a more sophisticated machine with more customer processors and multitasking, the Amiga was twice the price. The result was a fast selling machine.

As with the Amiga and Machintosh, the Atari St came with a graphical user interface, which was novel for the time. It also had an innovative single-chip graphics subsystem that shared the full amount of system memory, in alternating clock cycles, with the processor. Besides it's price, it was also well accepted due to its integrated MIDI support.

With the ST being cheaper than its competition and with a high-resolution monochrome display, it was ideal for business and CAD. It was also popular as a music sequencer and controller of musical instruments among amateurs and professionals due to its MIDI support.

Atari 520ST Specifications

CPU: Motorola MC68000
Speed: 8 mHz
CO-Processor: Shifter and Glue custom chips
RAM: 512 KB (520 ST/STM), 1 MB (520 ST+)
ROM: 192 KB
Text modes: 40 or 80 columns x 25 lines
Graphics modes: 320 x 200 / 640 x 200 / 640 x 400 dots
Colours: 320 x 200 x 16 colours; 640 x 200 x 4 colours; monochrome 640 x 400 x 2 using a monitor.
Sound: Three voices, 8 octaves
I/O ports: RGB: TV modulator (520STm); Cardridge, Midi (in/out); Centronics; RS232c; Hard Disk; Floppy Disk; Joystick, Mouse
Built in 3.5 floppy

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In 1986, Atari released the Mega ST sold very well in Europe, especially in Germany where it was primarily used for desktop publishing and CAD.

The Mega ST included a detached high-quality keyboard, stronger case that was capable of supporting a monitor and internal bus expansion connector. Atari soon released a budget laser printer. It did not contain a processor or memory, leaving the ST with all the overhead.

As a result of the extra work required by the ST, was equipped with 2MB or 4MB and it was frequently upgraded by those who purchased it for desktop publishing.

Atari added a custom blitter co-processor for the Mega 2 and Mega 4 STs to improve graphic performance. The blitter was capable of moving large areas of graphics around in memory without taxing the central processor.

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In 1985, Commodore introduced the Commodore-Amiga 1000 at the Lincoln Centre in New York with much fan fare.

The Amiga had a 68000 at 7Mhz, had a 16/32-bit architecture, had 4096 colours, 512KB of memory, 3.5 inch floppy, operated at 7MHz, stereo sound, had a colour GUI and it was the first home computer that had true 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking.

The Amiga was an amazing computer in its time and for several years thereafter. It was based on the Motorola 68000, a 32-bit processor with 16-bit pathways. The Apple Macintosh used the same processor in its 1984 Macintosh computer. However, the Amiga was half the price of the Mac while offering several technology improvements.

Like the Macintosh, the Amiga came with a graphical operating system, however, the Amiga's operating offered a pre-emptive multitasking with colour and stereo sound. The Macintosh never truly had Pre-emptive multitasking until they released OS X and Wintel did not have it until they released Windows 95.

While the Amiga used the same processor at about the same clock speed, it was considerably faster due mostly to the several custom chips that were responsible for video, graphics, IO and sound processing, relieving the burden on the CPU.

It also had a 4096 colour pallet with a resolution of 640 x 400 pixels. This was a dramatic difference compared to the Mac's monochrome display and the WinTel boxes that used CGA graphics. The Amiga came with a four-channel 8-bit stereo sound capable of sampling rates of 44KHz.

The first Amigas came standard with 256KB RAM, but were often sold with at least 512KB and could support as much as 9 MB.

The Amiga's video output ports allowed the Amiga to connect to an analogue RGB monitor such as the Amiga 1080 monitor, which was perfect for video editing as the computer's frequency closely approximated that of the HTSC video signal.

The Amiga 1000 was also the affordable computer to offer video genlocking and video editing.


The Amiga Story
Amiga was actually a start up company founded by former Atari engineer, Jay Miner. He had an idea for an advanced home computer, but Atari was not interested. Jay then left to start up his own company where he developed this new computer in secret. However, in order to make money, the company sold many game devices supporting various game consoles.

As the video game market started to fall apart, Amiga ran into financial troubles and began looking for support. At the same time, Jack Trameil had left Commodore and was now the head of Atari and saw the Amiga as the key to their next generation computer.

Seeing that the 8-bit computer market was collapsing, Tramiel saw Lorraine (codename for the Amiga) as an opportunity to get a new advanced technology without spending any money on research and development. Seeing that Amiga was in a tough financial bind, he made an extremely low offer to buy the outstanding stock of Amiga Inc should they fail to repay Atari on a loan.

However, once Commodore became aware of the technology, they gave Amiga the funds to replay the deal and purchased the startup. At the time, it appeared Commodore had a much better understanding of the technology and saw it as more than just a series of advanced chips.

Jack Tramiel was infuriated at the deal, as it forced Atari to build a competitive computer with off the shelf parts from scratch. While the first Atari ST was half the price of the first Amiga, it did not come close in terms of features.

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In 1987, Commodore-Amiga released the Amiga A2000. The Amiga 2000 was marketed as the high-end version of the Amiga.

The graphics, sound and other custom chips were not upgraded. The performance was not any faster than the Amiga 500. However, it did come with five Zorro II proprietary expansion slots, two 16-bit ISA slots that were enabled by adding a bridgeboard, a CPU upgrade slot, and a battery-backed clock.

The Amiga 2000 was very popular with Video professionals due to it's expandability. And with the introduction of the NewTek Video toaster in 1989, the unit became a top seller with many expansion cards for video, accelerators and memory.

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In 1987, Commodore released the Amiga 500 as a low-end Amiga. It offered the same graphics and sound capabilities as well as offering a new mode called extra-half bright.

It also featured the 32-bit multitasking operating system offered featured in the Amiga 1000 with some refinements and extra features. Commodore announced it at the same time they announced the Amiga 2000.

The Amiga 500 was designed to compete directly against the Atari ST, which had been outselling the Amiga by a significant margin. However, with a price of US$595.95, the Amiga 500 became a top seller and eventually beat out the Atari ST in sales. The Amiga 500 was Commodore's best selling Amiga.

The A500 series was discontinued altogether in mid-1992 while it as still a top selling model. Commodore made a lot of mistakes in it's final years, this is considered to be one of them.

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In 1992, Commodore-Amiga introduced the Amiga 500+. It was an enhanced version of the 500 offering the new operating system and the enhanced chip set. The A500+ was only released in Europe.

The Amiga 500+ was discontinued and replaced by the Amiga 600 in summer 1992.

The main reason for releasing the A500+ was to introduce the new operating system and reduce the cost of production. However, the new operating system was not compatible with a lot of games.

The Amiga 500 Plus was physically identical to the old A500.

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In 1992, Commodore released the Amiga 600, and in order to improve sales, it killed the Amiga 500. Commodore intended to revitalise sales of the A500 line before the introduction of the 32-bit Amiga 1200.

The A600 was 14" long by 9.5" deep by 3" and weighed approximately 6 pounds. It came with AmigaOS 2.0 and was generally considered more user-friendly than its older brethren. It was aimed at the consumer market with the higher end being dominated by the A3000.

The main reason for releasing the A600 was to reduce costs, however, by the time Commodore had finished redesigning the unit, it came in at about US$50 more expensive than the A500. The A600 was also designed as a replacement for the Commodore 64.
David Pleasance, Managing Director of Commodore UK, described the A600 as a "complete and utter screw-up". This is once again another reason why Commodore did not make it past 1994.