When was your 1st Amiga

[Tekoneiric]

My first Amiga was a 500 I got in '89. My gf got one a year later. Over the years between the two of us have aquired quite a bit of Amiga equipment. 3 A500s, 2 A3000s, 2 A4000s, CD32 and various cards, hard drives, monitors, etc. I'll get a 1200 when a friend sends it to me.

We're going to be moving into a house soon, so I'm going to dig them of their boxes, fix them up and maybe ebay some of them.

Andrea

[SHADES]

That's a great question.

What made me get one. I saw a 1000 in Myer with the ball man juggleing.
There was another demo later that I also saw in Myer a year or so later, I am still looking for everyone!! if you know what it is, and can help me find it!! I'll describe it breifly.
It had music and red balls at the top of the screen I think they moved to the diff channel music then they turned into little winged devils and back again to the red balls. I WANT THIS DEMO. I saw it on a compilation disk for Sonix or Audiomaster.

Anyway I was sheerly amazed. I  used to play on my dad's XT turbo with herculese graphics card, green screen and 10 MB hdd which I thought was so cool. I used to draw on it. Halo Paint was the program, but my mates dad's apple Mack, wow, it was sooo cool even though it was also mono, it had a black & white screen!
When I finaly saw the AMIGA, I was simply floored. When  I heard the AMIGA, I nearly fainted. When I saw the multitasking OS, I died went to heaven then asked GOD to send me back so I could play some more.

I remember it was over a grand, nearly 2 from memory. I thought, there's no way I'm ever going to afford this puta, my friends were getting them, my mates mum bought her son one, I was like woah, you mum spent $1700 on you? But I worked and saved and finaly, I went, with my dad, and bought my first AMIGA 500 with the extra disk drive. Oh how I was in HEAVEN. This PC rocked big time, it was just the best thing I have ever had, I sooo loved it. Normaly when I buy things I think, geez should I have spent so much for just this...
Not with my AMIGA. It took me no time at all to learn the GUI and befor I knew it I was writing basic programs in WB 1.2.
Then My mates mum got him the 500 for nothing and it had 1.3 roms. I was so jealouse. I wanted to swap motherboards, he'd never use the HDD booting ability and I wanted it, not to mention, it had more on board ram chip slots. You could populate that puppy with 1MB ram, the new Fat Agnus chip and not even use the trap door.
 Out came the 2000b wooo what a beast! a big desktop. My mate had one with a graphics card cost him nearly 5 grand. I was going to have to wait a little then low and behold the 3000. Now, the 3k did something to me, it got hold of me and shook me. I remember going into the Melb city store, just to play on one. I used arc at the time to do some file archiving, this computer store let you come in with disks and get free PD utils. Man, I went there every weekend!. The 3k was INSANE in the speed department, it was 10x faster than my mates 3k and I saw some amazing demos.

My mate gets a 500+ Lucky {bleep}!! with os 2.1 I'm jealouse it does some hi rez modes! I want a new miggy real bad

Saving like frantic suddenly out of nowhere the AMIGA 1200 is released. OH MY GOD. The graphics!!!! OH. and a 020 and hdd to boot. OK, that's a must have. I almost had enough money from trying to save for the 500+ and so I borrowed money from mum and caught a train to Croyden in Victoria Australia to a place called MVB computers where I ran the whole way from the train station to get there before the shope closed. I was greeted with broad smyles as I had called up 3 or 4 times that week to make sure they would hold the store open for just a little for me to get there after school. The guys there were all teasing me saying they had to sell the last one because they had to finish the order but they would have some more next week. I was so dissapointed I turned to leave and thanked them pleading with them to please hold the next one for me when the other guy came out of the back holding the 1200 box with a big grin on his face I lept for joy and hugged the lady near me lol They were all laughing
I held that puppy so tight all the way home on 3 trains. took 2 1/2 hrs for the trip but I HAD ONE!! oh, it was insane. It almost made me fail school that year lol.

I had now just finished High School and was studying Electronics.

Then the 4k came out. OK, I'm not going to bore any of you any more, you all probably think I'm a nut by now, but I saved, and saved and saved and finaly I got one for $4800 and I loved it. It was a {bleep}load of money for me at the time, and it was the first time I thought, geez have I done the right thing, but I look at how long I got the use out of that PC and I judge it that it most certainly was. I'm not sure if I would spend that kind of money again, but the 4k was the stuff dreams are made of and Oh yeah OS 3.1 MAAAADDD wow.

Anyway, never in my life has a peice of machine ever had that kind of an effect on me. And never again since. MVB now sell PC's and most of the people are gone. Big HI to Michael if he still reads AMIGA posts! You're the best man, I have such fond memories of you and that store.

[SHADES]

Oh, yeah, about the question, I'm not sure of the dates.

[adz]

My parents bought me my first computer back in '86, a C64C with a 1571 (the drive was fast but it made running a few games a real a$$ pain). Anyway, the C64 was sold of to fund the purchase of an A600 in '93 which was sadly traded in for a 486DX4/100 based system in '95. Then during my first year of Uni ('98) I got myself a job as a tech at one of Australias biggest Amiga computer shops, Maxwells. To my surprise they still sold Amigas as well as Amiga software and accessories. My first weeks pay went towards buying an A2000HD they had sitting there. I took it home and proudly set it up in my room. It began taking up too much space and was relocated to the bulkhead of my wardrobe where it sat until the middle of last year when I discovered WinUAE. Anyway, while at Maxwells I also aquired an A500 and a 128D, both of which found themselves stuffed in the bulkhead with the 2000.

Anyway, upon discovering WinUAE a lot of fond memories started coming back and it prompted me to dig through the now overcrowded bulkhead of my old room. I pulled out all the Commodore stuff I had collected and relocated it to my new house where I have dedicated an entire room to my computers. I fired up the A500 first (for the first time funnily ennough) and didn't really get much out of it, so it went on to the "to fix" pile. I then fired up the C128D, no problems...woohoo.

Anyway, I then moved to the A2000HD, it fired up no probs but for some reason it would freeze everytime I pressed the joystick button on port two. Funnily enough, thats how I discoved A.org. Some very kind people pointed me in the direction of the CIA's, it was at this stage that I discovered that the battery had began to leak, doh!!! Anyway, to cut a long story short, I cleaned up the battery mess, replaced the CIA's, removed the battery and upgraded the HDD. Now the A2000HD runs super and I intend to upgrade it even further.

Since my rebirth into the Amiga community, I have aquired an A1200, 2 A1000's, a GVP HD8+ for the A500 (stripped that down, cleaned it out and reseated the chips, all ok), an Opalvision video card for the A2000 (can't seem to get that working) and a C64C along with a 1541-II drive. Anyway, sorry for the long and no doubt boring post, but I thought my Amiga story should be told :-D :-D :-D .

[scafe]

Mine was an Commodore A1200 brought by my dad in 1994, it was my first and only amiga and yes i still have it, although in a slightly modified form :-D
Wouldnt mind an A4000 though, but i was only 7 years old at the time!

[Prmetime]

My first Amiga was an A500 with a 1084 monitor that I bought used in 1991.  I had always lusted after a A3000 but I couldn't afford that at the time.  The A500 served me well until I was able to buy an A3000 in 1994.  Since then I have updated that 3000, sold the 500, acquired another 3000 and an A600.  I probably need to sell a couple of them as I don't use all of them but they are fun. I have both 3000s apart to replace the batteries so I haven't used them in a few months.  I need to get at least one back together.  :-)  Ah, YAM and IBrowse, where are you when I need you?   :-D

[68kGuy]

Hello all!

Long time lurker, first time poster, long time Amiga lover!

I bought my first A500 back in 1989.  I remember that my best friend had gotten his A500 not 6 months prior to me.  his model came with KS /WB 1.2 and mine came with 1.3.

I'll never forget the look on his face when he found out.  The jealousy was apparent.

Since then I have aquired an A4000 040/25 Desktop, an A1200 stock in a Power Computing Power Tower, another Amiga 500 (KS 1.2).  
My original 1.3 A500 has been updated with an M-Tec 68020 Accelerator Card and 4 MB FAST RAM.  

I have yet to get one on the Internet. I just have too many projects going on at once.  Between my family, school, job, Macs, Atari's and Amiga's there is no time

My poor wife is going crazy with me and my "Orphanage for Wayward Computers".

Ok. Enough rambling.  

Happy computing!

[BigBenAussie]

I bought a used Amiga 1000 with 4 mghz Sidecar back in 88 when I was 14. The A500 was already out for a while, but for some reason I loved the A1000 set up much better. At the time there were no discernable difference between the A500 although people kept going on about some sort of halfbrite mode thing. Oh and the chip ram was not expandable and stuck at 512k.

I quickly upgraded the RAM to 2 meg which was decent for the time, and shoved a 20 meg partitioned HD in the Sidecar that could be used in the Amiga(After a lengthy floppy boot disk process. sigh). I also had an accellerator card for the PC that brought it up to a whopping 8mghz. Still CGA of course though. At least I was able to program Pascal for school. Then of course I got an external 3.5 floppy and later even a 5 and 1/4 floppy drive. Hmmmm...So many mods abandoned on those. I wonder if the disks are still readable. I had huge speakers surrounding the A1000 too...The system was soooo kick ass at the time and my PC and ST friends were soooo envious.

[jonnyboy]

I was a hardcore Atari ST fan, when my folks bought me a 520STe in 1990. I defended the machine to the hilt until I realized that I was fighting a losing battle.

When just about everyone I knew had bought an A500+, I suddenly decided to jump ship at the release of the A1200. I've still got it, but with the upgrades it has I daren't boot it without getting hold of another upgraded power supply!