Zogging Hell!!!

Specs

68000 Central Processor running at 7.5mhz
Graphics Chip capable of three basic resolutions, Low Resolution 320 pixels by 200 in 32 colours, Medium (Rarely used for games) 640 pixels by 200 in 16 colours and High, 640 pixels by 400 in 16 colours
Pallette of 4096 colours
Up to eight Megabytes of RAM.
Up to two disk drives.
Dedicated Sound Chip (Paula) capable of producing eight channel stereo sound

History

Ironically originally developed by a firm working for Atari who had been responsible for the Atari 800, the Amiga's true value was not seen by the games corporation. Amiga (the firm) was let go by Atari and was consequently brought by Commodore, who seeing it's capability believed they could get one up on their old rivals (Atari later had to develop the ST to compensate for this). The Amiga at first played second fiddle to Atari's ST, mainly due it's obscene price tag of 1500 squid at the outset. Games were ported from the ST meaning they, er, weren't all that good on the Amiga. Some extra sampled sound was all you got in return for this. Eventually it's superior graphics and sound abilities eventually won through and ST games began to be ported from the Amiga (meaning the ST got the naff versions). The machine has always been popular with graphics artists including Dick Van Dyke (yes that one), who is a confirmed Amiga nut. It had a string of graphic program successes including the legendary Deluxe Paint. NASA also famously used the Amiga in its control centres.
The influence of the Amiga operating system is also highly visible in Windows as well (er hum! allegedly of course).
The rivalry with the ST continued well into the early 90's and only declined with the death of Commodore and the Atari merger. Quite which was the better system is unclear, both have unique merits and as an owner of both I appreciate each for their values. The Amiga is better for games and graphics, while the ST is a better all-rounder, though it does have better DTP, word processing and MIDI abilities.