Amiga

And the 68010, 68030, 68060, and PowerPC?. I had a 68060 for a while. It was way faster than the 486s of the time. Also, they came with more RAM than that later on. The A1200 came with 2MB, and the A4000 anything between 2MB and 18MB. --Admiral

That something else would be Lisa. Denise handled the floppy disks as well. Agnus wasn't CPU, rather the general system bus controller. The A3000 was the first fully 32-bit Amiga, although 32-bit CPUs had been shoved into other Amigas before. The A1200 was the "cheap" machine based on the 68020 rather than the marginally more powerful 68030 from the A3000. The A4000 came in two versions - a 68030 and 68040 version. The cpu boards of the A3000 and A4000 were replacable, and compatible, so the only difference between the two versions was a two inch by four inch board. Incidentally the 040 version was seriously crippled by having to access memory on the motherboard, and some third parties produced 68040, 68060, and PowerPC? replacement boards that had memory locally. --Admiral

I'll have you know the CGI for BabylonFive were done using Amigas.  Its graphical processing power was unmatched at the time.  Or rather, I would have you know that had Jumlian not just told you further down this page 2 minutes ago.  --AC

Was dissed by everyone as being a games machine, but interestingly had considerably better operating system support for things like multitasking etc than most other systems.

As was the AtariST? equivalent 'gem'.  Both inherited from Xerox.  --Vitenka

Nonsense.  Lisa was launched in 1983, Mac in January 1984, the ST in January 1985 and the Amiga in June 1985.  The idea is certainly generally credited to Xerox, but the implementations were separate in each case.

Launch dates aren't the best indicator of relative ages of technologies.

Eh - I'm being unfairly mean.  The amiga was (and still is) a plenty powerful computer.  It had a floppy drive that could read and write any other format (which, um, kinda encouraged piracy - but was damn useful too.)  It had plenty of games.  It had forward compatibility.  It had a sense of humour, (eventually) a decent desktop and a nice powerful graphics engine.  Sadly, its sound never really improved much past the CommodoreSixtyFour? and the Atari (and later the mac) bypassed it in 'serious' applications.  As a 'games machine' of course, offices didn't want to touch it.  Amiga is still around in name, and is trying to sell an API for a SetTopBox? and Emulator products.  No one is biting.  --Vitenka

Um, excuse me? I didn't think the C64 had the ability to produce stereo 14-bit sampled sound, and the Amiga's actual sound generation chips were good quality. You could certainly get sound reasonably indistinguishable from modern sound cards out of it. --Admiral

The computer graphics for the first series of BabylonFive were done using modified Amigas called (for some obscure reason) Toasters.  End historical note.  -- Jumlian

Addendum: A toaster was in fact a daughterboard that you could plug into an Amiga. However, it was a very expensive piece of kit, and to all intents and purposes, it was no longer an Amiga that you were running, it was something a lot more powerfull.  --Tsunami

AlexChurchill disagrees :P  Sure it was expensive (and so was the software), but it was still an Amiga :)

Admiral also disagrees. The video toaster was a glorified broadcast-quality video capture/video generation card with a very powerful graphics rendering processor, and maybe some other stuff. Certainly it was the bees' knees for the video editing/generation community.

(PeterTaylor) The version I heard was that it was named girlfriend to allow coded discussions during development. Of course, had its developers been any good at Spanish, they would have named it the Novia, which actually means "girlfriend". "Amiga" is "girl friend".