Amiga 600

The Amiga 600, also known as the A600, is a home computer introduced in March 1992. It is the final Amiga model based on the Motorola 68000 and the 1990 Amiga Enhanced Chip Set. A redesign of the Amiga 500 Plus, it adds the option of an internal hard disk drive and a PCMCIA port. Lacking a numeric keypad, the A600 is only slightly larger than an IBM PC keyboard, weighing approximately 6 pounds. It shipped with AmigaOS 2.0, which was considered more user-friendly than earlier versions of the operating system. Like the A500, the A600 was aimed at the lower end of the market. Commodore intended it to revitalize sales of the A500-related line before the introduction of the 32-bit Amiga 1200. According to Dave Haynie, the A600 "was supposed to be US$50–60 cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive." The A600 was originally to have been numbered the A300, positioning it as a lower-budget version of the Amiga 500 Plus. An A600HD model was sold with an internal 2.5" ATA hard disk drive of either 20 or 40 MB. Amiga 600's compatibility with earlier Amiga models is rather poor. Roughly one third of games and demos made for A1000 or A500 do not work on A600. Commodore Business Machines began the process of drastically changing its management in late 1990, when Irving Gould, its CEO and chairman, laid off six of its high-level executives. In the spring of 1991, Mehdi Ali, a former investment banker at Prudential Investments, was promoted to president of Commodore, and continued a program he started in 1989 involving cuts to the budget and staff, mostly from the sales and manufacturing divisions. After the release of the Amiga 3000T, Commodore's next project was a next-generation Amiga chipset, which became the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). Concurrently, engineers Dave Haynie, Jeff Porter, and Eric Lavitsky began work on Amiga 3000+, which would have been the first computer to use the AGA chipset, and Joe Augenbraun was behind the Amiga 1000+, which also would have used the chipset.