What is an Amiga and who cares?

It's funny, because the main reason I connected to the Internet in the first place was to get in contact with other users of Amiga computers.  It's funny also that so many people, like me, could get downright passionate about one particular computer versus another.  To most people, it's like somebody being passionate about one particular brand of blender or coffee maker.  Who cares?

The Amiga was a line of personal computer.  The first commercial release of the Amiga was the Amiga 1000 in 1985.  This was followed shortly after by the Amiga 500, which was probably the highest-selling Amiga, and the Amiga 2000.

At a time when most people were using MS DOS on black and white screens, the Amiga had a fully graphic GUI, 4-channel digital sound, a 4096 color screen mode, a fully multitasking 32-bit operating system, all part of a custom chip set that allowed graphic and sound tricks which were light-years beyond anything the competition had to offer.  The Amiga was a true multimedia computer, and in fact the word 'multimedia' was first coined in reference to the Amiga.

Furthermore, the Amiga was designed at both the hardware and software level to be fully expandable, fully upgradeable;  in fact the upgradeabillity of an Amiga at the time was superior to that of the IBM PC, because the Amiga had auto-config ('plug-and-play') a long time before the same concept was haltingly introduced to Windows.

The Amiga was a 'dream machine';  the designers put into it everything which they had always wished for in a computer.  It was, really, the ideal personal computer.

Naturally, it failed miserably.
(This page is incomplete, more to follow)