Your first A500

[PMC]

.......And changing the colour of my workbench to turquoise/white/blue, adding a nice shadow to the mouse pointer, reading my first scrolltext......

No wonder I flunked so many exams that year  :-P  :-D

Ahhhh, my first A500!

My parents bought it somewhere in 1989, thinking it it would be good for our education :-) We went to a local computer shop and with the amiga came a complementary game: Thunderboy! That game was really crap....but so good at the time! My two elder brothers used the amiga just for games, but I tried everything I could to learn the machine. Took some time too: 1.3 ADOS isn't exactly a friendly learning enviroment    :-D

After some time I bought the extra 1/2 meg ram (and played pinball fantasies...owwwww) and a 2.1 ROM with a kickstartswitch. All those utilities! Octamed v5!  It became my life...and still is to some extend. It wasn't untill 1998 I got myself an A1200 (with '030 and all), but it never replaced  the A500.... (talking about replacing: killed three diskdrives in 10 years   :-P

[unclewilli-amigalover]

after burner and robocop and dpaint 3 animation art
oh man my a500 wonderful, later i upgraded it put it in a case pc power supply viper 520cd, 3.1 rom mini mega chip (2 meg chip ram) rev.6 mb put more memory on mother board, cdrom,os3.9. i ask a old amiga  man    what i could do with an amiga, he said the question is not what you can do, but what can't you do. amiga can do anything!

[darksun9210]

I remember walking into Dixons (UK hardware store)
sometime in 1987 being all of 9yrs old, looking at the KS1.2 A500 they had running the polygon robot animation (about 50 frames of looped anim) and thought wow! then nagging parents for a year untill i got one. thing was, by then it was release 1.3 and didn't come with the animation. i was well disappointed. then i got one with DPaint 1, the basic demos, etc etc, gaming sleepovers, linkups (parnet, sernet), external floppy drives, 1/2mb ram upgrades (i saved pocket money for 6months to by 1/2 a meg! hard disks, A570 drives, 2mb chip ram upgrades, 020 M-Tec 28Mhz accelerators, the wonders of real fast ram. since then i've owed almost every machine at some time bar the A3000, and A1000. and even when i had my massive A4000T with GFX cards, drives, PPCs etc, i think i was most creative with a dodgy copy of Dpaint3, a coverdisk version of Protracker, an old technosound turbo sampler, and my old 1mb A500. why didn't someone say to me back then "son, these are going to be some of the happiest days of your life." would i have listened? no. i'd have booted shadow of the beast 2 one more time.

[SilvrDrgn]

My first A500 (and my very first Amiga computer ever) was purchased quite a while after I saw one at a Software Etc. store in a mall in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  Had to save up money for a long time.  Gee, that was a long time ago!  It was running the "El Gato" demo.  Bought with 1 MB of RAM and an additional floppy drive.  It has changed a lot since then.  You can see what I've done to that very machine (yep, I still have it to this day) at this LINK.

[Staticman]

I got my A500 in March 2000 but it died within a few months.. i still have 2 A500s lying around though but at the moment the 1200 is resident on my desk next to the PC. Guess which one i use more  :-D

[Gavilan]

Well...my first Amiga 500...wow...such a long time ago..I was an exchange student in San Diego...went to a shopping mall..saw one running some demo...called my mother asking for her permission..she told me "ok, buy it, but when you return home, you get rid of the C=64 you have..i dotn want more garbagge in your room" )
I bought it the very next day, with the a501 clock expansion. Paid a LOT of money (cant remember how much), got rid of all boxes, put it in the middle of the my luggage, and pray. At local customs here, i had to pay one guy 50 dollars extra to be able to bring it home. It came with Carmen Sandiego & Tetris. The very first day home, i sold all my c=64 equipment, bought a 1084 and bought about 10 games....Thats the beginning of my story with Amiga, and was the "end" with C=64 (I returned 10 years later, when i re-bought all the stuff i have sold)
)

Regards

[TheMagicM]

I bought mine in 1990..I was working at a supermarket for $3.85/hr..saved up around $550 to buy my Amiga 500..I first saw one at my friends house..he had a C64 so I bought one..he bought a Amiga..I was blown away by the sound and graphics..well..3 months later I saved enough money to buy one..

[Cyberus]

Has anyone got it out of the loft recently to find out that the loft ain't a good place to keep the old girl?

(I suppose you can guess what happened to me recently....)

[mikeymike]

"Whats that stupid shell-window for ? And why can't I close it"

LOL, I remember thinking that :-)

A500 since 1987.  KS1.2.  It's resting up in the loft at the moment :-)

[Druideck]

Got the half-meg expansion, played Monkey Island
etc. on floppies.

Now have 5 meg ram-, scsi harddrives, Boots 3.1,
020 accelerator, this thing is still amazing!

[sdesros]

I actually bought a A1000 in 1990, came with some software.  (In fact, I traded it for a TurboGrafx-16).  In 1991 I landed a good job, and purchased a used A500.  Added the ram expansion, "fatter agnus" and eventually graduated to KS1.3.   I'm trying to remember the fist thing I did with it, but considering that I had the A1000 before.... I think it was mostly to play some of the titles I had in PAL.

After a little bit an oppertunity presented itself and I traded the A500 for a LtKernal 40Meg HD for my C=64 for use with my C=64 based BBS.

I bought another A500 a few months aftwards.  I also upgraded the processor to a 68010, added a ZorroII side car that had a GVP harddrive +HD and 8 megs of fast ram.  I also had a Vidi Amiga 12.  By then I was playing around with Image FX, CineMorph and the Vidi Amiga 12 making little animations.

That A500 got traded in towards an A1200 eventually.  (But I still have an A1000 in my closet. )  [Oh, that A1200 was traded away for a GVP Impact Vision 24...]

[todi]

I never had any A500 ... started with a A2000 and a 20MB HD  :-o in the early 90's  :-D

[Kees]

The first thing i did on my a500 .. was a game called crazy cars :-)

[Gavilan]

Well...i was a C= fan (having a huge 64c and 128 and all that stuff) and had the chance of seeing one Amiga 500 at my local shop (and by "local" i mean, a store which was 2000 km away from me. Yes, i lived in the south of Argentina, where no places to buy stuff for computers..) Anyway, it was SO expensive (but SO beatiful). In 1989 i was an exchange student in San Diego (California), and i went to one of those chain computer shop called Electronics Boutique. Saw one 500, asked how much it was. Called back my parents, asked for permission, returned the very next day...I took it all way to Argentina with me, played a lot with Tetris and Carmen San Diego until "Insert Lazarus volume" appeared..then my love with Amigas begun...Of course it was NTSC so i had to "fix" that (it cost me 100 dollars to convert it to PAL) Then, i bought a rom switcher, an Action Replay, a 1084d monitor (actually i trade it for ALL my c64/128 stuff), a sampler, a second drive...bla bla bla...
 :-D

[Tenacious]

The A500 was my first real (flexable) computer in 1989, had a Timex/Sinclair and an Atari 1200 before that.  I first saw it in a shop next to an IBM XT, both were playing Battle Chess.  The game play and sound were fluid on the Amiga, the XT was jerky with no sound.  I couldn't wait to get more software!