Williamo’s Blog.

If any of you are familiar with the unfortunate history of the incredibly ahead-of-its-time Amiga computer, I think you’ll get a big kick out of this:

The Amiga computer, launched by Commodore in 1985, combined superior multimedia technology with ease of use, inspiring millions of the most creative and enthusiastic computer users ever.

Amiga Forever is the award-winning Amiga preservation, emulation and support package brought to you by Cloanto, Amiga developers since 1986.

Different editions of Amiga Forever blend high-quality software and original content with the ultimate set of videos to chronicle and let you experience firsthand the history, culture, challenges and passion behind the Amiga.

(http://www.amigaforever.com/)

If you’re not, you should really check it out. This computer did things in 1985 that mainstream computers wouldn’t end up doing for years - unfortunately, Commodore screwed the whole thing up, and it never got the chance to really break into the marketplace:

Amiga
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer. Commodore International bought Amiga Corporation and introduced the machine to the market in 1985. The name Amiga was chosen by the developers specifically from the Spanish and Portuguese word for a female friend,^[1] and because it occurred before Apple and Atari alphabetically.^[2]

Based on the Motorola 68k series of microprocessors, the machine sports a custom chipset with advanced graphics and sound capabilities, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (now known as AmigaOS). While the M68k is a 32-bit processor, the version originally used in the Amiga, the 68000, has a 16-bit external data bus (that transfers 32 bit of data in two consecutive steps, a technique called multiplexing — all this transparent to the software, which is 32-bit from the beginning), and the original machine (along with its contemporary, the Atari ST) was generally referred to in the press as a 16-bit computer;^[3] later models sported fully 32-bit designs. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64, and the Amiga quickly grew in popularity among computer enthusiasts, especially in Europe, and sold approximately 6 million units.^[4]

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga)

Yep. It had a pre-emptive multitasking operating system in 1985. For some context on how impressive this is:

The earliest pre-emptive multitasking OS available to home users was the AmigaOS released in 1985. Pre-emptive multitasking was later adopted on Apple Macintoshes by MacOS 9.x ^[1] as an additional API, i.e. the application could be programmed to use the pre-emptive or co-operative model, and all legacy applications were multitasked cooperatively within a single process. Mac OS X, being an Unix-like system, uses pre-emptive multitasking for all native applications, although Classic applications may be multitasked cooperatively as they run in fact under Mac OS 9 running as OS X process.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking#Preemptive_multitasking.2Ftime-sharing)

It took Apple until MacOS 9.x to implement this as an additional API.

MacOS 9 was introduced in 1999. (Granted, Windows NT/9x and Unix/Linux had this sooner than MacOS.)

Check it out. Definitely worth a look.