Historical notes

From MorphOS Library

Ultracondensed classic Amiga history:

Probably you know that Amiga was considered an extraordinary game machine that gained a large user base in the late 80s and early 90s. But if you think it was only a game console masked as a computer, you are completely in error. It had 4096 colours when PC screens were black and green, it had sound and voice when PCs were dumb, it had pre-emptive multitasking when PCs run one program at a time. So Amiga also collected a community of advanced users, who adopted it for professional uses. After the demise of Commodore in 1994, the Amiga people slowly dispersed. Gamers migrated towards PCs and superconsoles; and most software houses and professional programmers converted their programs and migrated towards PC and Mac platforms. However many hardcore people did not migrate. Some software houses and hardware producers, a few professional programmers, together with many non-professional programmers, hobbyists, amateurs, and advanced users unified themselves into an extremely argumentative (thus vital!) community strongly glued together via the Internet.


Ultracondensed Pegasos/MorphOS history:

For a number of years the Amiga trademark passed from hand to hand without any real evolution, mostly used just as a brand for advertising. In the meanwhile, some extraordinary members of the Amiga community slowly emerged and were able to create something that no other nostalgic community of retro PC amateurs has ever been able to do. They created from scratch a new PowerPC-based hardware platform and a new operating system that were able to collect the Amiga legacy and revive the residual community of hardcore users. The hardware wizards are the guys of bPlan/Genesi, while the software wizards that started everything (Ralph Schmidt, creator of Quark, and Frank Mariak, creator of CyberGraphX) are the leaders of the MorphOS Development Team.


Ultracondensed AmigaOne/AmigaOS 4 history:

Another PowerPC-based community emerged in the new century. The penultimate owners of the Amiga trademark, mostly interested to use the brand in another market, first declared AmigaOS dead and later, once MorphOS emerged, outsourced the production of computers and the AmigaOS. This originated AmigaOS 4 as well as the AmigaOne (discontinued) and nowadays Sam440ep PowerPC platform. Furthermore, also the Pegasos II is supported meanwhile.