How the Commodore Amiga Powered Your Cable System in the ’90s
In terms of planning our lives around what our TVs spit out, we’ve come a long way from the overly condensed pages of TV Guide .
In fact, the magazine was already looking awful obsolete in the 1980s and 1990s, when cable systems around the country began dedicating entire channels to listing TV schedules.
The set-top box, the power-sucking block that serves as the liaison between you and your cable company, is a common sight in homes around the country these days.
But before all that was the Commodore Amiga , a device that played a quiet but important role in the cable television revolution.
The Amiga was a much-loved machine, huge among a cult of users who embraced its impressive video and audio capabilities, which blew away every other platform at the time of its release.
As a multimedia powerhouse, it was ahead of both the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC by nearly a decade at the time of its 1985 release, and its launch price was a relatively inexpensive $1,295, making the computer a bit of a bargain at launch. And seeing as “Amiga” is the Spanish word for friend with a feminine ending, it was also friendlier than its office-drone competitors.
