One of the main people involved in designing the smaller Amigas was George Robbins, who was quite a B-52's fan. As a result, the machines that he designed have B-52's song titles printed on the main circuit board:
I asked Dave Haynie (who was more involved with the "big box" Amigas) about this phenomena, and he had this to say on the subject:
Yeah, George Robbins named every card he worked on after a different B52's song. That's basically it.I guess the A500 was a special case. That was internally called the "B-52" (which is why the A2000 board I did was called "B2000"; it was based on the "B-52" chip set). The A500 was the first system project we had approved after the C128. That was significant; the C128 shipped in August of 1985, the A500 work started up in the summer of 1986. C= was having a rough time in '85, management didn't want to do anything. So we got this A1000+C128 = ? project. Our head of engineering at the time, Gerard Bucas (eventually of GVP) said "If this doesn't succeed, they might as well bring in the bombers and level this place [C= West Chester]". Ironically, that's effectively what happened a year or so after the still-selling A500 was cancelled in favor of the A600.
Dave Haynie
The general laid back happy-go-lucky attitude of The B-52's and their roots in "Surf Rock" fits in very nicely with the ethos of the orginal Amiga enthusiasts of 1987 (and indeed, many of today's users, too).