The A500 is really only useful foir nostalgia purposes these days..... Saying that, I've two at home (1x OCS wb 1.2, 1x ECS wb 1.3)...... I can never bring myself to throwing them out!
Get hold of an A1200 as it is a great starter system. You can fit a huge range of upgrades to it, from hard drives to PPC accelerator cards, even PCI busboards and Voodoo graphics cards!