Mike
Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 and took continuous Amiga development down with it. This is the question that started everything: what would still be true if it hadn't.
I want to be upfront about something before I write another word of this: I am not rebuilding an Amiga 500. I am not rebuilding an Amiga 1200. Nobody is getting a cycle-accurate Motorola 68000 out of me, and if that's what you came here for, this whole series is going to disappoint you early and often.
What I'm actually chasing is a different, weirder question, and it's the one that started this whole thing: Commodore went bankrupt in 1994. Amiga development, as a continuous line, stopped. Not the ideas — people kept the ideas alive in emulators and hobbyist projects and a couple of increasingly sad corporate ownership changes — but the actual forward motion of "what does this architecture become next" stopped cold.
So: what if it hadn't? What would be sitting on somebody's desk in 2026 if that story had never been interrupted?
We're not rebuilding the Amiga of 1987. I'm trying to figure out what might have been sitting on somebody's desk in 2026 if the story had never stopped.
That's an alternate-history engineering question, not a preservation project, and the distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A preservation project asks "how do we keep the old thing running." I'm asking "what would the old thing have grown into." Those point in almost opposite directions once you actually start working.
Principles versus hardware constraints
The Amiga in 1985 got a handful of things right that most of the industry took another decade or more to catch up on. Real preemptive-ish multitasking on consumer hardware. Custom chips doing real work off the main CPU instead of the CPU doing everything itself. Multimedia — audio, video, graphics — treated as first-class citizens of the machine's identity instead of an afterthought bolted on by a sound card manufacturer. A sense that the hardware and the OS were one coherent idea, not a CPU with a pile of drivers stapled to it.
None of that is 1985-specific. Responsiveness, asynchronous operation, modularity, specialized hardware doing specialized work, multimedia as identity, efficient use of what you've got, a coherent machine/OS relationship — those are principles. They'd be just as correct in 2026 as they were then.
What IS 1985-specific: the exact chipset, the exact address space, the exact CPU family, the assumption that whoever's sitting at the keyboard is the only person who will ever touch this machine and can be trusted completely. Those aren't principles. Those are just what 1985 hardware and 1985 threat models looked like.
Modern hardware and modern security requirements are going to change the implementation of every single one of those good principles. That's not a compromise on the vision — that's the actual work. Anybody who tells you they're bringing back the Amiga unchanged is either rebuilding a museum piece or lying to you about the scope.
Where this is going
I've already gone and looked at NewTek's Video Toaster, because if you're asking "what was the Amiga good at that nobody else was doing," desktop video is most of the answer. That's next.
Y'all are going to see this thing change shape more than once over the course of this journal. I'm not going to clean that up after the fact and pretend I knew where I was going the whole time. I didn't. I still don't, entirely. That's kind of the point of writing it down as it happens instead of after.
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