Tell us about your Amiga 1000 experiences

[amiga-penn-wchester]

Had an A1000 in the day (1987), and shortly after an A500.  Took a break from Amiga and then had an A2000 (early 90s), then finally A1200(T)/Blizz/060/PPC in the 90s.

What I can say about the A1000 is that the case design was awesome, even the nonstandard keyboard I got used to, and well - at the time the fact that you could run one program while running another - the whole package was a mind blower actually.  I had a 512k A1000 and the idea of being able to drag screens while watching different apps running was amazing.  Mind you this was when something like Dpaint was - basically a 256k application.  

I eventually purchased a sidecar RAM expansion and that was an additional 2 megs. In 1989 this was - for me - as good as it could get.  

I actually like the open design of the A1000 - softkicking and all.  I never got into any hard disk expansions or phoenix boards, but still I still keep one for nostalgia.  

If you think about it, it's the only "actual" amiga, meaning it is the manifestation of what the designers were aiming for.  After C= started guiding the designs, the rest of the amigas were only a shadow of what they could be....

[amiga-penn-wchester]

Another thing I should say is that the early A500s, at least where i was living, wasn't that much of a big progression if you had an A1000.  It was "impressive" that the form factor changed and the drive/keyboard was all-in-one, but early A500s were essentially the same thing as a slightly upgraded A1000.  Most ran 1.2 kick/wb and 1.3 shortly thereafter.  

As with the original Macintosh, the A1000 was a very new thing. It wasn't noticed by many people given what it could do for them. If you were heavily into the Vic20/c64 as I was at the time, this was another progression for sure, but it was such a large step forward that it could not be ignored.  

We all know that throughout the 80s, arcade hardware was head and shoulders above standard consumer computer hardware - The A1000 basically caught right up with it immediately.

[amiga-penn-wchester]

I can't stress enough that the thing that kept amiga alive in the US (and also UK, I'm sure) was the amount of demo programmers who created so much graphics & sound. Many programmers who were doing low level stuff on the c64 came right over and learned 68000 on the amigas.   This happened fairly quickly for the A1000 and A500.  

The demo scene ultimately found its home far away from commodore's home, but I'm not sure we would be talking about amigas today if it weren't for the demo scene :-)

My A1000 experiences amounted to watching many demos, painting in deluxe paint, playing marble madness, and writing term papers on Textcraft Plus.