Just finished reading a bunch of scans old amiga magazines, and it got me thinking about one of the few amiga models I have never seen in person: the Amiga 1000.
So tell us about your 1000 experiences.
Did you own one "back in the day"?
Did you buy one later in life (past the heyday of amiga's)?
What attracted you to it back then? What parts didn't you like?
If you bought one years later, what attracted you?
Did you expand them? Use it "raw" ? What did you do on it back then? Today?
HI,
My first Amiga was an Amiga 1000, purchased it two weeks after it hit the market, the reason why was because my old cpm computer an Otrana (something like a Kaypro) which was modified with an 8088 board so that I had a dual boot system to CPM or MSDOS 1.0 decided to die. I needed a new system, since I was doing programming both for the USN and for the banks and Credit Unions. My original idea was to get a Radio Shack Sensation, or a generic. Well I usually purchased Computer Shopper and noticed that they were talking about a fantastic new computer called an Amiga, read the story and it caught my interest, so I waddled down to the old computer store that I usually bothered, and asked them if they heard of it, the dealer said yes and he was expecting one in by 2pm that day, so it was a weekend so I waited there till he got it and we both anxiously set it up. Well disappointment, it didn't run MSDOS and ran some stupid system called Amiga DOS. I frowned and said hey how about that new 286 generic your supposed to get in, he said in about two weeks. So off I left, came back in two weeks to look at the new 286, then looked at the Amiga again, but now it had something else on it, a trial version of the transformer, this really caught my interest, a computer with a software emulator, it was slow, but it would let me run "C" Lotus 123, and Dbase II. My dealer said that yeah the emulator "Transformer" was slow, but he had heard of a rumor of something called a sidecar being built at Commodore in Germany. He said it would probably be faster than the 286. So I took a chance and bought it, the dealer knowing me quite well took my order for Transformer so that when it finally came out I would have it, and being the nice guy that he was he gave me a copy of the demo which worked quite well for not being finished. TADA end of story of why I purchased an Amiga.
My first thoughts of the Amiga after I set it up, and tried using it was, "WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP" it didn't know what C: was, or copy *.*, and didn't even know copy*.bat or anything like that. What the hello was this DF0: crap, and man you had to write a book in order to copy a file. I was completely befuddled and lost the first day I used it, being the weekend I was up all night trying to figure out this totally stupid computer. Why didn't I take it back, well when you booted up the transformer I was back in familiar terror a tory.
It worked well and allowed me to get my work done for Monday morning, thats right people when you are a programmer you have deadlines, and eight hour days forget it. Weekends just another work day.
Well what won me over with the Amiga, the say command, I wrote a little batch file that used the clock and said "Wake UP A$$ whole" and repeated it until I hit the left Amiga key to shut it off. Wow I had got two things for the price of one, a stupid mis aligned computer that didn't follow MSDOS guide lines, and an expensive alarm clock all in one. My only thought on Monday was to return it, and get that 286, so on Monday I went back in to my favorite computer store, carrying my overpriced alarm clock, and said "hey Al take this computer and shove it were the sun don't shine, can't use it for anything" then he showed me two new programs for it, "VIP" and "DBman" and a fish "C" program, he had Commodore C but it was rather expensive at the time, but I purchased it two months later.
So back home I went with the Amiga, I had my new Transformer 1.2, VIP, and DBman. Everything was sweet, I was finishing my programming projects on time, and they all worked in the MSDOS world. Life was good, and I was slowly learning Amiga DOS. Then I purchased a game called "Arctic Fox" good grief excellent music, cannon sounds, and graphics. This piece of crap could finally do something good, but then Amiga Dos 1.1 came out and Arctic Fox didn't work anymore, I had to use 1.0 to use it. I contacted "Electronic Farts" dozens of times, always got put on hold and always got some dizzy broad that said just use 1.0 to make it run, that was what the Amiga was about, you could change kickstarts at the drop of a hat. This worked until I put in more memory, and a hard drive.
I bought the Supra hard drive, and a 5 meg hard drive, and 2 meg of memory for the memory board (a seperate board purchase) I still have it out in the garage, it was one that had long pins on it and plugged into the mother board on the A1000, I also purchased the allegra memory expansion so I had a whopping 4 megs of memory, and also had purchased a 10 meg scsi, so now I had a 5 meg and 10 meg hard drive. Later on after I had moved my A1000 inards into a Xerox printing case, I had 6 scsi drives, 4 megs of memory, a 68020 accelerator, 4 floppies, 5 pc power supplies to power the scsi's and a modem all together in one case. Then I had 6 switches on the front panel, so that I could control which hard drives to turn on or off and to control the modem on or off. This unit had the most flexibility, of any computer I have ever owned.
Sad Day,
When we moved from Florida, up to damn yankee land in Pennsyltucky, my wife called and asked me what to do with my old computers in the garage, I thought she was talking about my 2 Packard Bells, HP's and 3 old generics, so I told her put them out in the trash, forgetting about my C64, C128 and Amiga 1000. Well she stacked them up for the trash truck, but someone came by and grabbed all those computers. My beloved original piece of crap Amiga 1000 was gone. I still have the kickstart disks, and all the version's of Amiga Dos that was ever made for the A1000. This computer was moded all the way, I could copy just about any copy protected disk by dumping memory by pressing a push button switch on the front panel. I could also make duplicate copies with the 4 floppies, and also transfer programs from memory to hard drive. I learned little tricks like dumping the copy protected disk from mem to hard drive then copying the other disks to that directory giving me an unprotected game. It was probably the best and versitle Amiga I have ever owned. It weighed over 55 lbs, in that Xerox case with everything I had put into it. The only thing I really missed about the original case, was the keyboard garage, I loved that feature, but I put it on the side of the Xerox case, in a home made garage port.
Well I hope I bored you all to death, have fun and figure out how to mod your Amiga.
Still the best playing computer in the world, not for programs anymore but for mods and trying to upgrade, it is the hot rod of the computer world, and is probably as well known as the Model T.
smerf
