Inside the Amiga 1000

Twenty-five years ago, Commodore released a revolutionary multimedia machine. We take a peek inside this classic computer to see what made the Amiga so amazing.

When it came time to ship the Amiga in 1985, Commodore engineers found the OS too buggy to include on built-in ROM chips in the computer. (And that's too bad, because it would have allowed the Amiga to boot instantly just as other early PCs did.) Instead, the engineers devised a workaround called the "Writable Control Store" (WCS) that fit on a daughterboard attached to the motherboard via long multipin headers where chips would normally reside. The WCS included 256KB of memory used specifically to hold a basic OS that had to be loaded from a floppy disk at boot time.

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