I was a big time Amiga user back in the day, although I got my start with the 64. That command was LOAD "*",8,1
The Amiga was a very different beast. I was developed about the same time as the Mac, by a group of former Atari engineers. It was basically their attempt at putting together their dream computer - and it eclipsed just about everything else out there.
Unfortunately, the company was bought by Commodore, who were desperate to find a successor to the 64/128, which were very limited. As such, it wasn't well marketed and in many cases, it was looked at as a game machine.
Although the Amiga met with success in Europe, it never really took off in the US and elsewhere, although it did find its niche in video editing and rendering.
But in 1985, just a year after the Mac was released, it featured a full, preemptive multitasking OS, a host of dedicated co-processors, full multimedia capabilities (it could display 4096 simultaneous colors in a day when Macs were black and white and PCs could barely display 16 colors) and could even run MS-DOS and its associated applications by way of a daughterboard. All of this in 256MB of RAM and an 8MHz 68000 chip.
Truly, it is a crime that it never really took off - mostly because of the ineptitude of Commodore management, which eventually pushed the company out of business in 1994.
