Prototype : Amiga Walker (A2400)

I have also created a 3d model in Google SketchUp program, which you can view and download here

Specs

It was to be based on the Motorola 68x series CPU the prototype featured a 68030 running at 25Mhz, a FPU 68882 running at 25Mhz, it would include the AGA chip sets, 2mb Chip Ram, 4mb Fast Ram, 240mb IDE Hard Drive, 1.44mb Hd Floppy Drive, and a 4 speed CD-Rom drive. The board also featured PCI, a first for Amiga at the time and would've allowed cheaper PC add on cards to be added to the system if needed.

What might have been?

If the Walker had come out I think it would have been a difficult computer to market, it was going to be a lot pricer than an A1200 yet still cheaper than your average PC at the time, likely cost at least £700. It was still clearly aimed at the home computer market, not a serious business machine you could tell that by the design. However it would have been up against Playstation and N64 in the gaming market and then the more powerful games on the PC and the one thing the Walker spec did lack was 3D grunt, a GFX upgrade would have to been needed for the Amiga platform to really keep up.

However with that being said, the specs on paper would have been enough to run some of the big games of the time like Doom, Myst, TFX, Theme Hospital, Z, Command and Conquer all could of ran on a system like this (as proven by the fact that later most of these games did get ported and ran on an expanded Amiga system with these specs), but let's just say it would have been difficult to keep up with gaming market.

Serious side, well a hard drive as standard would of made the Amiga a much better serious computer to home users, Wordsworth, Photogentics, PPaint, Datatype, Pagesetter etc would of all benefited from a Hard Drive and the extra speed and ram, but again Microsoft had made the world think you need MS Office application to be productive and again it would of been a tough market to break. CD would of have cut down piracy, which was a big problem on the Amiga too, and a big factor as to why Amiga support dried up so quickly after Commodore went under.

I think its a 50/50 of this computer being a success, but one thing that would of helped it a lot if it came as standard would be the Internet, it was just starting to reach homes around the world at this time on dial up and as proven with Escom A1200 surf pack they made, it got a lot of attention for being one of the cheapest ways to connect to the net. The Walker might have been a great internet computer with enough power under it to get on the early days of the Net working.

Price would have been key and then there the expandability options, this was also going to be the first Amiga computer you could just buy the motherboard on its own and build your own Amiga. Companies might of made many different configurations based on the Walker board for each market, which Escom also expressed interest in letting other companies do this, so this might have been more successful than the complete system. If this system had came out the Amiga market would of I think at least stabilized to what it market size was in 1995, it certainly would of been interesting addition. But sadly it was not to be.

Further Reading

Below are some scans from Amiga magazine coverage of the Amiga Walker. There was more published in these mags and across many issues, so if you can get some old amiga mags from summer of 1997 for loads more details.