Commodore came out with the Amiga 4000 in 1993. It was the natural progression from the Amiga 3000 and had plenty of color to offer. The model 4000 had the highest overall power rating of nearly all the Amiga computers. The Amiga 4000 was a mixture of the A2000, A3000 and the A1200. It was not intended to be released to the public. It was intended to be the forerunner of a different model, the A3000 Plus.
Thanks to the awesome graphics abilities of the Amiga 4000 it became popular for those who were in the realm of designing graphics. There were even some 3D graphics abilities if this computer was modified. The externals of the computer bore the beige color of all the popular computers of the day. The physical setup of the keyboard, case and monitor were like the personal computers of today. The monitor could display 16.8 million colors with two to 256,000 colors that were definable by the user. It was designated as a “home computer”, less than one for business. The keyboard of the Amiga 4000 as well as a joystick could be used with other externals. A lightpen and tablet were supported for easier graphics designing abilities.
The case of the Amiga 4000 contained enough hardware and power to get the job done. The central processing unit ( CPU ) was from Motorola. It was the 68040 series 32 bit processor. It ran at 25 megahertz clock speed and had a removable processor module. The random access memory ( RAM ) was rated at two to six megabytes and could be expandable. Expansion slots with SIMM units could take the Amiga 4000 up to 16 megabytes. More RAM was supported by the special Amiga AUTOCONFIG capability. Amiga included something called Zorro slots in the motherboard. This was something that enabled the ability to make the Amiga 4000 compatible with MS DOS software. The Zorro slots functioned with the use of a bridgeboard. The disc drive was a three and a half inch high density model. It came formatted and loaded with the system software and utilities. The factory also included four drive bays for three and a half inch drives. A 5.25 inch floppy drive was installed on the front of the case. The sound was not too shabby in the 4000. It was given four channel stereo sound and could handle complex waveforms. The audio card processed 8 bit conversion from digital to analog sound. An internal power supply used up 150 watts of power to allow the Amiga 4000 to do its work. The complete assembly weighed roughly 20 pounds and was just nearly 15 inches square in depth and width.
The operating system for the Amiga 4000 was the AMIGA WorKBench based on AmigaDOS 3.0. The AmigaDOS 3.0 platform had its roots in another platform called TRIPOS. It was written in the BCPL which stood for “Basic Combined Programming Language”. The switch to the “C” programming language was accomplished later. This platform was similar to UNIX and was released in 1992. The cost for the Amiga 4000 amounted to $2399 dollars.
The Amiga 4000 is still very popular today. Some still use them as their daily computer. There is also quite a fan following for all the Aiga computers. This high demand keeps the prices of Amiga computers fairly high. The 4000 is probably the most popular so it is not cheap. A fully functioning machine with accessories can reach upwards of $1000.00.
