1982 was the year that saw the conception of the Amiga. The Amiga codename, which is now familiar to us, was chosen by a small development team, then called Hi-Toro as the secret title for its Atari-beating games console. This team comprised four young men who had all been well immersed in the high expectation, high achievement, high-profile world of Silicon Valley. They were Jay Miner, R.J.Mical, Dave Morse and Karl Sassenrath.
The Hi-Toro title didn't stick for too long because the Amiga name that the boys adopted was that bit catchier.There are a number of stories as to just why the name Amiga was chosen. One of the theories has it that when the guys were discussing their new baby in the local Californian bars, they had to use a codename that was not too obviously computery - calling their nascent console the X5532/3Y would have been a bit of a giveaway to people sitting around them (all of whom would also be creating computers, it being Silicon Valley) and it would also be a bit of a mouthful after a few tequilas.
So they decided on a name that would make them sound like the kind of lads who had Spanish girlfriends - Amiga being the Spanish for girlfriend. They also carried this theory over to the codenames for the special Custom Chips that became the heart of the machine, coming up with the names Agnus, Portia and Denise, and decided to base their computer around the latest chip technology, which happened to be the 16-bit Motorola 68000.
Back in the early '80s, Silicon Valley was a remarkably lively, but very peculiar place to work, because there was so much industrial espionage going on. The products being developed there were worth hundreds of millions of pounds, so spying was a lucrative business and secrecy was essential to the early development of the Amiga.
Apart from the codenames, the team decided that they'd disguise their operation further so that no-one would know that the Amiga was being developed by creating weird joystick designs such as half-size surfboards to act as a distraction to potential spies (and as meditation aids!).
Eventually a console design started to appear and a table full of circuit boards connected to a keyboard, disk drive and various ports and connectors was christened Zorro.
This then, was the very first physical Amiga. Unfortunately it looked like Zorro could also be the very last Amiga because the team had run out of money before they finished developing the machine.
The initial $7 million venture capital had been enough to rent premises, pay wages and, of course, buy all the extremely expensive electronics equipment required to launch a world-beating console. In retrospect it seems that the team had not really got the business brains to make the best use of the money - how else do you explain a $7 million loss?
Luckily for the boys, the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1984 was the ideal stage to preview their machine, and to look for some additional capital. And boy, did the show do the business for Hi-Toro/Amiga. All the big-name companies were there, and among those companies was Atari. The once-massive corporation had stumbled upon hard times with the console crash of the early 1980s, and was now looking for a way to claw-back some sense of empire. This desire was augmented by the fact that the founder of Commodore Business Machines, Jack Tramiel had a rather large axe to grind having recently been ousted from his seat at CBM, and having gone on to buy controlling interests in the rival Atari operation.
But money did not come immediately to the team. They showed their prototype machine to executives from companies including Hewlett Packard, Philips and even the once maverick Apple Computer before Atari finally stumped up an undisclosed (but not massive) amount of money.
But Jack Tramiel and Atari were not to benefit from this investment in the long term. There was no way in which Commodore Business Machines was going to allow Tramiel the opportunity to have a potentially big stick with which to beat his old firm. So, the whole machine was bought up by CBM who then created a brand new division, Commodore-Amiga, to finish development and to market the computer.
With the new funding, and the backing of an enthusiastic company behind it, the first Amiga, the A1000, went from clunky but interesting development machine to full-blown home computer. So one year later, at the same (CES) computer show, the Amiga 1000 was launched. It was extremely primitive compared to today's models boasting only 256K of memory and a price tag of £1,000, but it created a huge stir in terms of publicity and market image. This was helped by Debbie Harry demonstrating the computer's music capabilities, and by Andy Warhol showing off it's graphics abilities.
Another year on, in 1986, the A500 was launched with a price tag of £599. But all famous names, and the media hype was not reflected in huge sales. So, Commodore was forced to rethink the image of its machine. And what a rethink it was.
The most obvious choice made by the company was to avoid making the A500 an IBM PC or Apple Macintosh clone, but instead going for it's own look. That decision paid huge dividends and by 1990 the A500 was the best-selling computer in the UK.
Since then there have been many different Amigas. They've come with widely differing specifications and price tags, but what they all have in common is that they've all sold in their thousands and they've all retained the basics of a Motorola processor, Commodore's own custom chips and the Workbench operating system. In that respect even today's A1200 reflects its ancestry.