Tell us about your Amiga 1000 experiences

[runequester]

Do you remember what you paid for that 40 meg HD?

I remember reading articles of a 20 meg drive being advertised as "basically unlimited storage"

[shaf]

If I remember correctly 40MB HDDs (Seagate MFM 5.25" HH) were selling for approx. $800.00 CDN in 1988/89. At least that's what we sold them for installed in the store I worked for.

[duga]

HI,

My first Amiga was an Amiga 1000, ..........
...................................
......................................

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

Thank you for a interesting story.

[JimS]

Do you remember what you paid for that 40 meg HD?

I remember reading articles of a 20 meg drive being advertised as "basically unlimited storage"

If I recall, it was a customer trade in. I was working at an Amiga store at the time. I guess it would have been considered obsolete by the time I got it... around 91 or so. It was kinda marginal, suffering from "stiction". You had to poke the spindle to get it started.... but I was happy to get it. ;-)

You want to talk about insane disk prices... I remember paying $500 for an 88K floppy drive on my Atari 800. And was glad to get it. ;-)

[pwermonger]

I did not own a 1000 'back in the day' but it was the first Amiga I saw. My friend who had a 2600 when I did, and a C64 when I did had gotten it. I still had a Commodore 128 at the time. He showed me the Amiga with free PD software that blew away the commercial software for my 128/64 and I wanted one. Started to save up but by the time I had enough to buy one, the 1000 was no more and the 500/2000 were out, and considered better than the 1000. I still wanted a 1000 more than the 500 due to the look of the machine. I loved the detachable keybaord, rounded sides, and the keyboard garage was brilliant. The 500 by comparison looked too much like a larger 128.
 
Later, when Amiga 1000s were inexpensive I finally got one. Of all the Amigas, I most enjoyed expanding the 1000. My 1000 has a Starboard 2 for RAM and SCSI and a tablet. I also picked up some of the 1000 specific parts like the original Perfect sound that goes on the 1000 Parallel port and sticks up behind it, the genlock that fits behing the keyboard garage, and the Mimetics audio digitizer (Soundscape?) that fits on the 1000s joystick port. Also have an AmiTote for the 1000 to be able to carry it around when I need to.
 
Though my 1200 and 4000 are the most capable Amigas I have, the 1000 is still my favorite.

[NorthWay]

I slobbered over the Amiga since I first read about it in a CU that had a show report (published in summer 84 or 85). The local dealer had an A1000 set up - they must have gotten bored of me and all the other computer nuts coming by to suck it all up.
Nicest looking Amiga ever. The fan was so silent I didn't know it had one.
Bought an A2000 in September 88, so I kinda skipped the first generation. Now _that_ one had a fan like a jet engine taking off...

[arttu80]

My beloved original piece of crap Amiga 1000 was gone.
smerf

Felt really bad about your loss, but enjoyed very much reading the story, thank you for sharing!

Because I started as Amiga user as late as '92 I couldn't get A1k fresh, but very much later I own several of these. Partly because the historical value but also for their looks and little unique features I love, such as shorter keyboard, which is very nice in feeling, but quite bit difficult to get used to. Little challenge to expand these days (I put C= A590 backwards in it with 4Gb SCSI and 2Mb...btw internal PSU is adequate to run this.). And these look veery good!

[klx300r]

funny this thread should pop up just when I finally bought my first A1000:drink: I've always drooled for one ever since the first time I laid eyes on her when I was 15 at a local computer shop.  My mouth just dropped watching the boing ball & juggler demo's at a time when PC & Apple products needed upgraded graphic and sound cards to not even come close to the bog standard Amiga and the casing was just ultra cool.  Alas at 15 the A1000 was out of my reach on a paper route income:roflmao: A Vic20, C64, A500, A1200 took me thorugh to university when work and AutoCad forced me to the PC world.
Came back to the Amiga with my Samflex@800 in 2009 & this past year upgraded to an AmigaONE-X1000 which will soon be sitting next to its famous forefather Amiga 1000 :knuddel::cool:

@ smerf

great story and man if my wife did that to me miggies I think I would have had a heart attack!

[motrucker]

Back in 1985/1986 we had several local dealers come to our use group meetings to show of the A1000. Obviously they made many converts from the C-64 and C-128. Not to mention a software company that was local at that time, who came with demos of their newest software.
I was offered a deal in 1986 I could not turn down. That was my first Amiga. I trades up to an A500, then A2000 in short order though. The A1000 was amazing, but just to expensive to upgrade back then, even using some A500 expansions such as the GVP a500+ hard drives.
I was offered another A1000 about three years ago - so I took it. It's still here with only mild upgrade to RAM (2Mb Starboard II sidecar setup). It's all original, with a 1080 monitor. I use it for old games and programs that will not run on newer OS. This is why I have left it with the disk based Kickstart.
I really like the keyboard garage idea. This may well have been the best looking Amiga they made. It sure is a very reliable machine.

[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.

[desiv]

If you think about it, it's the only "actual" amiga, meaning it is the manifestation of what the designers were aiming for. .

I really like that idea.
The Amiga 1000 is "an Amiga" computer.
The A500/2000 thru the A1200/4000 are "Commodore Amiga" computers.

:-)

desiv

[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.

[Drummerboy]

I really like that idea.
The Amiga 1000 is "an Amiga" computer.
The A500/2000 thru the A1200/4000 are "Commodore Amiga" computers.

:-)

desiv

Thats true..

But

"If you think about it, it's the only "actual" amiga, meaning it is the manifestation of what the designers were aiming for. ."


not necessarily was what the designers were aiming for. Becouse when was released the A2000, Jay Miner, said something like, the Amiga 2000  is more like what he wanted to design.

[LargoLaGrande]

For me the timing of this post is also perfect, as I just picked up my
first ever A1K last weekend. If anyone wants to sneak a peek,
here are some pictures :

http://www.mijnalbum.nl/Album-7INT7VO8

Before I got the Miggy, seller told me it didn't have a memory upgrade
to 512K (I posted also on the forum here to find out about the price of
such an upgrade and was bidding on a Dutch variant of Ebay for a box
containing 4(!) such upgrades but the price went too high imho so I pulled
out.  Imagine my surprise when on opening it up I found the upgrade
installed and working

This particular A1K has a German layout keyboard so I imagine that's where
the original owner once purchased it (historically for Dutch people consumer
electronics were a lot cheaper there).

Unfortunately a lot of yellowing, so hints and tips on how to best tackle that are welcome (Retr0Bright?) or perhaps I should just spray paint it white.....
I am considering some of the Indie upgrades out there like the kickrom conversion or the 4mb/Ide upgrade by TomThule if I can find one (just registered on AmiBay).  If I can find a cheap A590 or GVP somewhere that
may also work but I like the current sleek slim look
Eventually I would like to have some SD cards in there.

Back to the real thread - never owned an A1000. My brother and myself went through an Atari 800 XL (I think) a C64 and then my brother got an A500.
He new a guy in the same town with an A1K tricked out with a sidecar though.

We used the Amiga a lot for gaming, for schoolwork I eventually got into inferior PC's and went through the whole x86 range. Eventually played with a NeXT machine and got into Mac's.  Approx 9 yrs ago I had a A2000 that I bought for kicks and expanded out. When it died I sold the bits and pieces
and just played around with WinUAE etc. I have been following the Amiga scene through the whole QNX/Gateway story, the Bill McEwen story and probably visit Amiga.org once every week at minimum.

And now I have an actual hardware project once more

[Drummerboy]

For me the timing of this post is also perfect, as I just picked up my
first ever A1K last weekend. If anyone wants to sneak a peek,
here are some pictures :

http://www.mijnalbum.nl/Album-7INT7VO8



And now I have an actual hardware project once more

Watching your A1000 pics, came to me any interesting diferent between the American Amiga 1000 and Europe Amiga 1000, and this is the Europe A1000 not have daugtherboard, the American A1000 has dautherboard.