Amiga 1200 - History

History

Like its predecessor, the Amiga 500, the A1200 is an all-in-one design incorporating the CPU, keyboard, and disk drives (including the option of an internal 2.5" hard disk drive) in one physical unit. The A1200 has a similar hardware architecture to Commodore's Amiga CD32 game console, and is technically close to the Atari Falcon, which was intended as the A1200's competitor.

Initially, only 30,000 A1200s were available at the UK launch. During the first year of its life the system reportedly sold well, but Commodore ran into cash flow problems and filed for bankruptcy. World wide sales figures for the A1200 are unknown but 95,000 systems were sold in Germany before Commodore's bankruptcy.

After Commodore’s demise in 1994 the A1200 almost disappeared from the market but was later re-launched by Escom in 1995. The new Escom A1200 was priced at £399 and it came bundled with two games, seven applications and Amiga OS 3.1. It was initially criticized for being priced 150 pounds higher than the Commodore variant had sold for two years prior. It also came with a modified PC floppy disk drive that was incompatible with some Amiga software titles. The A1200 was finally discontinued in 1996 as the parent company folded.