Today marks a very special occasion for Commodore Amiga fans — the 40th anniversary of Commodore's initial unveiling of the first-ever Amiga computer (otherwise known as the Commodore 1000).
It was on Tuesday, July 23rd 1985 that Commodore first unveiled the eagerly-anticipated computer at the Lincoln Center in New York, in what was described in the press at the time as a lavish "coming out" party, with its plan being to position the $1295 Motorola 68000-based computer as a potential rival to Apple's Macintosh computer, which had released one year earlier.
Originally created by the California-based Amiga Corporation, the origins of the Amiga had been fairly-well documented prior to this unveiling in 1985, with Amiga Corp having shown a prototype of what became the Amiga at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) throughout the year.
It was two months after the first of these showings, in January 1984, that Amiga ended up making a deal with Atari to further fund the development of the new system, before later partnering with Commodore instead, who agreed to buy the company outright in August 1984. This led Atari file a lawsuit against Commodore stating that it owned the rights to the Amiga's technology — a suit which would eventually be settled in 1987.
At the Lincoln Center event, Commodore announced it would begin shipping the Amiga computer in September of 1985, with the goal of capturing the business market, but there was also a lot of excitement elsewhere about its possibilities for home entertainment, with Electronic Arts' founder Trip Hawkins being among those to champion the computer, telling McNaught Syndicate's Dan Gutman (as published in The Gazette) that "Our strategy on the 16-bit machines is to focus on the Amiga. It has everything you want a home computer to have”.
With all this excitement, it seemed as if Commodore was poised to take the market, but a bunch of factors would end up limiting the availability of the machine, causing Commodore to miss the all-important Christmas rush, and resulting in less-than-stellar sales. With Commodore in a tricky position financially, a decision was made to split the Amiga into a low-end and high-end product, resulting in the release of the first two Commodore variants, Commodore Amiga 500 and Commodore Amiga 2000 in 1987.
The Amiga 500 would become the most successful Amiga model ever released to the market, and would eventually end up becoming the platform of choice for many video game fans throughout the late 80s and early 90s.