At New York's Lincoln Center, Commodore introduced the Amiga 1000, a machine with custom graphics and sound chips that let it multitask, display thousands of colors, and play digitized sound, capabilities that would not appear in mainstream PCs for years. Andy Warhol appeared at the launch, live-painting an image of Debbie Harry using the machine's graphics software.
The launch event was pure 1980s spectacle: held at Lincoln Center rather than a convention hall, it featured a New York Philharmonic-style presentation and Andy Warhol on stage, using the Amiga's ProPaint software to digitize and manipulate a photo of Blondie singer Debbie Harry in real time, marveling at the machine's speed compared to his usual silkscreens.
Under the hood, the Amiga 1000 packed custom chips nicknamed Agnus, Denise, and Paula that handled graphics and sound independently of the main processor, letting it display 4,096 colors and play four channels of digital audio while still running multiple programs at once through a preemptive multitasking operating system, AmigaOS. Rival machines like the IBM PC and even Apple's new Macintosh looked primitive by comparison.
Despite its technical brilliance, the Amiga struggled commercially against Commodore's own marketing missteps and IBM's business dominance, though it found devoted followings among video artists, musicians, and, notably, the video game and desktop video production industries. Its legacy lives on in hobbyist communities and in techniques it pioneered for affordable digital video editing.
Key people: Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry