Commodore Introduces New Amiga

Peripherals

Commodore Introduces New Amiga

By Peter H. Lewis
The New York Times

July 30, 1985

COMMODORE'S new Amiga A1000 computer was unveiled at Lincoln Center last week amid flashing lasers, rip-snorting jazz, rented tuxedos and rented celebrities, including Andy Warhol, who was there to bestow the first 15 minutes of fame on the machine. Yet even surrounded by all the glitter, the Amiga stood out clearly as the evening's star performer. When it reaches the stores here in mid-September it will be one of the most technologically advanced computers available for the home and business markets.

Whether it will sell is another matter. In the currently turbulent computer industry, even a dazzling machine like the Amiga - it has been described as a color Macintosh that works faster than an I.B.M. PC AT -has to fight for display space in the stores and is not guaranteed success.

Two major hurdles must be cleared if the Amiga is to survive its infancy.

The first is identity. At $1,295, plus $500 for a color monitor, it is too expensive for the casual home user, who may not know what to do with Amiga's impressive horsepower. And as a new, untested machine from a company that has previously sold its products in toy stores, Amiga faces a tough challenge in cracking the conservative business market. Commodore officials vow that Amiga is the flagship of an armada of business products that will transform the company into a major international force in technology.

The second is software and peripherals. About 15 programs will be available at Amiga's debut, but only three are considered to be useful business tools.

It took more than a year for software developers to catch up with the Apple Macintosh and there is no reason to believe Amiga will reach its software potential any sooner.

The hardware horizon looks brighter. Commodore, avoiding the closed-box philosophy that retarded the Mac's development, opened its machine to third-party peripheral makers and has several add-on products already in the pipeline.

The most interesting is an optional ''I.B.M. emulator'' that will allow the Amiga to run most off-the-shelf I.B.M. software, including Lotus 1-2-3, dBase III and Wordstar.

Those are the formidable hurdles. Amiga, though, is a formidable machine. Following is a rundown of some of its major features.

Power, Speed and Flash

The basic Amiga comes with 256K (256,000 bytes or ''words'') of random access memory, expandable internally to 512K and externally to 8 million bytes.

The brains are a Motorola 68000 microprocessor (the same one used in the Macintosh) and a unique set of three co-processor chips, one each for color graphics, sound and animation. These three chips are designed to relieve the 68000 chip of such specialized duties, and as a result Amiga simply blows away all competition in its price range for speed (7.16 megahertz, as against the PC AT's 6); graphics (4,096 possible colors and five-layer animation, rivaling dedicated design computers costing 15 times more) and sound (four-channel stereo). For music and video applications the Amiga is unsurpassed. Walt Disney would have loved it.

Its operating system (Amiga-DOS) is incompatible with other computers, which means that it will not run software written for other machines without optional hardware and software modifications. This heaps more confusion on the already fractionated marketplace. Like the Mac, however, Amiga's system was designed to be easy to learn and use, with icon symbolism, drop-down menus and full support for a mouse input device, which is included. It offers true multitasking, meaning that many separate tasks can be worked onscreen at the same time.

Standard is one built-in double-sided 3 1/2-inch disk drive, yielding 880K of formatted storage (twice that of the Mac). External 3 1/2-inch and 5 1/4-inch disk drives are optional.

The keyboard has 10 function keys (Mac has none) and separate cursor controls and numeric keypad (combined awkwardly on the I.B.M.).

It all adds up to the most interesting new product in the microcomputer field since the Mac.

Junior on Sale

The Amiga is the first major entrant into the treacherous top-end home market since the I.B.M. PCjr. I.B.M. recently cut the price of the junior in an effort to cull what is rumored to be a formidable inventory.

One of the criticisms leveled against Junior was its stiff pricetag, originally more than $1,500 for what was essentially a lightweight computer. Now the price has been cut sharply. The Exel Computer Centers of Stamford (203-348-5894) and Greenwich (203-637-1600) sell the 128K PCjr with one disk drive, a color monitor and a real keyboard for $699. At that price, Junior is worth considering.

Recently a version of Lotus 1-2-3, a high-powered software package that combines several functions, was marketed for the PCjr, making it better suited for business uses than any other computer in its price range but still feeble in contrast to the big boys. And several new hardware products that boost the Junior's power have been introduced lately.

In light of the falling cost of the I.B.M. PC, which is nearing $1,500 in some stores, the introduction of Commodore's Amiga at $1,295, and the certain pressure Amiga will put on Apple to lower the Macintosh's price, it seems to make more sense to buy a bigger machine and grow into it than to buy the smaller PCjr and remodel it to meet expanding needs.

On the other hand, the Exel price makes the Junior extremely attractive for buyers who look at it as primarily a game and educational computer that can handle modest business chores as well. In a couple of years the support for Junior may dwindle, but in the meantime its value is growing.