A brief history of the Amiga
The Beginning of a New Era
A small development team who worked for a company called Hi-Toro dreamed about a machine that would beat the latest offering from Atari. One of the members of the team, Jay Miner, was a computer hardware designer who had previously worked for Atari, where he helped build the Atari 800 as well as the Atari VCS home computer system.
The team didn't want to have a computerized name for their new computer, so the machine was nicknamed "Amiga", which was also the Spanish term for "girlfriend". They continued this tactic and gave the custom chips female names like Agnus, Portia, and Daphne.
Jay wanted the machine to include the MC-68000 CPU because it was the best CPU available in 1982. As for other design choices, some came from Jay and others will inspired from other sources. His original design was very similar to what would eventually become the Amiga 2000, with lots of expansion slots. He cooperated with Ron Nicholson, who gave him the idea for the "blitter". Hold And Modify mode (HAM) was inspired by a visit to some flight simulators. All of this research and development had cost $7,000,000 at this point.
The custom chips necessary to build the machine were fabricated in 1983, and in January 1984 Jay and his team introduced an Amiga at the Chicago CES with the hopes of finding someone to invest in their project. Later, the first Amiga "demo" was developed, which displayed a sphere with red and white rectangles on it, bouncing around on the screen. This demo was only shown to selected "customers", and all the development was continued secretly.
Due to lack of money, the team was trying to find a company to buy their technology and to employ them. Many companies were interested in the custom chips, including Sony, Apple, Phillips, and HP. Atari's president, Jack Tramiel lent Amiga Inc. $1,000,000 to be paid back one month later. When the month ended, it became apparent that Amiga Inc. would not be able to pay him back, so he offered 98 cents per share for the company. Amiga Inc. thought that this was unacceptable, so they looked for someone else to buy them. Just two days before the deadline, a company called Commodore came in and began to talk to Amiga Inc.
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