The Atari ST was the first popular 16-bit home computer to use the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse Pointer) interface. It wasn't the first 16 bit computer for the home audience. That belonged to the Texas TI99-4A, in the days of the VIC20, but it never took off.
The ST had borrowed and adapted the WIMP interface from the Apple Macintosh, which had got the idea from somewhere else in the first place. Commodore saw the writing on the wall, and bought out a group who were working on what became the Commodore Amiga.
I bought the Amiga 500, which was the first popular Amiga model for the home market. The Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000 series was aimed more at buisiness/high end useage.
The 500 came with 512KB of RAM, expandable to 1MB with a plug in pack. These cost £119 for 0.5 MB of RAM, oh how times have changed! It had an 880KB floppy disk drive, a mximum of 4096 colours in something called "HAM" mode and a Motorola 6800 CPU chugging away at 7.14 MHz, This seems feeble by todays standards, but the PC's of the time were struggling to get above 3 MHz. The Amiga's strength lay in it's graphics chipset, which was advanced for its time. Oh yes, you needed a fairly large RF modulator to connect to a TV, but after a few months you bought a monitor, or new glasses.
The Operating system was called "Workbench" and loaded via floppy disk after almost a minutes wait, but it was worth it. A WIMP environment like the Mac and ST and a screen resolutuion high enough to cope with proper wordprocessing software (80 column) meant this was finally a Commodore computer which could be used in home and office. By this time, office was moving towards the PC thanks to "Visicalc" the spreadsheet software.
AmigaBASIC was fairly dreadful. You could do simple stuff fine, but using BOBS and sprites was a nightmare, it wasn't really up to the job.
I bought a GVP hard disk drive, which bolted onto one of the A500 side expansion ports. This came with a wopping 52MB of storage space and some RAM expansion slots. Only 52MB? Remember, we are talking late 80's to mid 90's so software wasn't as large/complex/bloatware as it is now. You could get a fully functional wordprocessor onto a couple of 880K floppies.
I also bought a KCS PC emulator, which plugged into the RAM expansion slot on the underside of the PC. This was basically a 11MHZ 286 card which used the Amiga hardware to emulate a PC. I didn't get windows working on it, but it ran the DOS programs I had for a PC with no problems, since DOS never had the graphic overheads that Windows has. DOS = Speed.
I then bought an Amiga 1200, which came with a 64MB hard drive, a 14 MHz 68020 processor and 1MB RAM, although you needed to expand this memory to get the thing to run at the intended speed, something to do with the graphics chips fighting the rest of the computer for meory, or memory speeds, or something. It was at this time CD-ROM was making an appearence, I bought a PCMCIA SCSII interface and plugged a 2x CD-ROM into the Amiga.
However, by now the Amiga was showing the effects of several years of non-development. What used to be cutting edge graphics were now simply average as the PC enjoyed the Graphics card explosion. The 486 and then the Pentium series of 80X86 chips were rushing ahead. Commodore went under and the Amiga started a long decline into near oblivion. Which was a shame, because had the original advantage been maintained between Amiga and PC, we would be running some frighteningly powerful machines today. In 1987, a PC could just manage 16 colours, forget 3D. An Amiga 500 would render a low resolution (320x240) 3D raytraced frame in about 10 hours. Today my PC cranks out 1024x768, 65k colours at 30+ frames per second while connected to the internet playing Counterstrike. and blasting out music and explosions (and the gasps of my vanquished enemies, heh heh)
The Amiga now lives athttp://www.amiga.com and at many enthusiast sites, just use a search engine with "Amiga."