Now, the answer has always been interesting to me: The people on the phone told us to hold down CNTRL - CBM - AMIGA for a number of seconds and the Amiga 500 should ask for a Kickstart Disk.
Complete bull. The 500 lacks the hardware to load a standard Kickstart - neither WOM nor MMU (the early 3ks are the only other machines kickstarting from disk by using their MMU). There were beta Kickstarts that could be loaded into fast RAM @$200000, but that wouldn't actually
increase compatibility.
