In the good old days when the C64 was the most sold home computer and the new computers Atari-ST and Amiga came to life it was a revolution for coders to work with the new enhanced chipsets and features and a pleasure for the community to share all the results. But the complexity of these new computers and operating systems forced the programmers to have very extensive knowledge. While the C64 allowed about anyone to program the builtin BASIC, the new generations of computers cutted the community in two parts: Coders and Users.
This was the time when Francois Lionet, together with Constantin Sotiropoulos created the first game programming language ever written, STOS Basic, allowing about anyone to write games for the Atari-ST with a simple instruction set. STOS was published in 1988 by Europress.
STOS went a big success, and so it got entirely rewritten for the amiga in 1990, that was the year when the AMOS Basic was born. AMOS went a big success too, although the initial version AMOS The Creator was quite buggy. To increase the speed of AMOS programs AMOS Compiler came out, as well as a 3D extension called AMOS 3D.
Especially designed for beginners was Easy AMOS, a more user friendly subset of AMOS which should prevent new users from being confused by the amount of commands ('just' about 300), but which lacked some features for the enhanced programmers though.
So the professional edition AMOS Professional came out with about 700 commands and a good extension support, which still is an excellent development tool today. Just have a look at the directory dev/AMOS on Aminet to see how much extensions were written by the public or to download the AMOS Mailing List archives of the past years.
Since 1994 Francois Lionet works together with Yves Lamoureux and some more creative heads, they created the company Clickteam, which is in the business of writing excellent game+multimedia authoring tools and other tools for Windows. You should really have a look at the Clickteam homepage, it features an extensive FTP section with a lot of freeware, shareware and demo versions, as well as the AMOS and STOS assembler source code! | 
STOS
AMOS The Creator
Easy AMOS
AMOS Compiler
AMOS 3D
AMOS Professional |