The second article in Ars Technica’s History of the Amiga is now online; if you missed it, I mentioned Part 1 earlier.
This installment lays out the important groundwork for what became the Amiga computer and – notably – its custom chipset, which used coprocessors to handle graphics and sound in ways that were several years ahead of its time. In fact, the Amiga included some features that have yet to be duplicated. We see the addition of R. J. Mical to the Amiga team (though not yet, by name, other engineeers like Dale Luck and Carl Sassenrath) and we see how a timely slump in game console sales revealed the engineers’ hidden agenda: to create something that could be a game machine, but which was also the foundation of an advanced personal computer with groundbreaking multimedia capabilities. For once, their agenda and that of their backers converged.
This is probably not as fascinating as the last installment – or, I expect, the next – but if you’re not familiar with the background of the machine you’ll learn a good deal here that will be important in the next chapter. What we see is how the team transmogrified their project, kept it under wraps, and did the fundamental work that they still needed to implement in hardware.
