Kickstart/Workbench 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3
Workbench 1.0 was released for the first time in October 1985. The 1.x series of Workbench defaults to a distinctive blue and orange color scheme, designed to give high contrast on even the worst of television screens (the colors can be changed by the user). Version 1.1 consists mostly of bug fixes and, like version 1.0, was distributed only for the Amiga 1000. The entire Workbench operating system consisted of three floppy disks: Kickstart, Workbench and ABasic by MetaComCo.
The Amiga 1000 needed a Kickstart disk to be inserted into floppy drive to boot up. An image of a simple illustration of a hand on a white screen, holding a blue Kickstart floppy, invited the user to perform this operation. After the kickstart was loaded into a special section of memory called the writable control store (WCS), the image of the hand appeared again, this time inviting the user to insert the Workbench disk.
Workbench version 1.2 was the first to support Kickstart stored in a ROM. A Kickstart disk was still necessary for Amiga 1000 models; it was no longer necessary for Amiga 500 or 2000, but the users of these systems had to change the ROMs (which were socketed) to change the Kickstart version.
Workbench now spanned two floppy disks, and supported installing and booting from hard drive (assuming the Amiga was equipped with one), the name of the main disk was still named "Workbench" (which is also the user interface portion of the operating system). The second disk was the Extras disk. The system now shipped with AmigaBasic by Microsoft, the only software Microsoft ever wrote for the Amiga.
Kickstart version 1.2 corrected various flaws and added AutoConfig support. AutoConfig is a protocol similar to and is the predecessor of Plug and Play, in that it can configure expansion boards without user intervention.
Kickstart version 1.3 improved little on its predecessor, the most notable change being auto booting from hard drives. Workbench 1.3, on the other hand, users can find several significant improvements to Workbench, including FFS a faster file system for hard disks storage which resolved the problem of old Amiga filesystem which wasted too much hard disk space due to the fact it could store only 488 bytes in any block of 512 bytes keeping 24 bytes for checksums. Many improvements were made to the CLI (command line interface) of Amiga which was now a complete text based Shell, named AmigaShell, and various additional tools and programs.
Read more about this topic: Amiga OS Versions