When was your 1st Amiga

[artman]

Hmmmmmm, musta been about 1986 or so.  Heard about this fantastic new computer that could do things no other could, the Amiga 1000.  Bought it with the 256k ram expansion, external disk drive, Okimate 20 color printer, and the 1084 color monitor.  All for the bargain price of about $2200.00 USD.  Would you believe I still have it and it still works?  Wouldn't part with any of it.

[frankb]

Forgot to mention that along with my first A1000 I got MindWalker (originally called WindWalker, but there were trademark issues IIRC) created by Synapse Software. It was one of the most amazing games. Does anyone else remember it? I believe it was the first game to use HAM for certain parts of the game, and it was THE first game for the Amiga, but never got fully released until mid-1996 under Commodore's lable. Thank God I had some connections ;-).

[Munchkin]

I remember a good friend getting the original Amiga, later renamed to A1000, sometime in -86. It had more or less just come out on the market here.

I was so amazed by this and the drooling started at once. I myself had had the original C=64 since autumn -83 and seing the work you could do with the Amiga, he was a musician just like me and played around a lot with samples and stuff, completely stunned me.

When a classmate later on brought his A1000 to school to show his programming work in computer-class, I just knew I HAD to get one ASAP. Programming Pascal on a Nord-100 with 12 terminals wasn't just good enough and my 64 didn't feel adequate anymore.

But it took until after my military service in september 1988 that I could get what I wanted. After being in my first job for 2 weeks I ran off to the bank and took a loan so I could get it. A 500 with the A1010 extra drive, the 1084 monitor and my first game, F/A-18 Interceptor.

I was in heaven and my girlfriend didn't see me at all in about a week..

About a year later I got the memory expansion A501 with battery for the clock. It took me a few more years but in 1992 I got my first harddrive. A GVP Series II controller with 4 megs of ram and a 120 MB harddrive. Upgraded to kick 2.04 at the same time. Two more years went by and I got hold of a used VX-030 with 2 megs of ram.

Then in -98 I got my used A4kD and that one's still working like a charm, besides the fact that the PSU fan is giving up, and runs as a webserver at the moment. Could I get a NIC for the 500 I'd use that as a webserver instead.
 

[Crumb]

My first was an Amiga 500 bought in 1991 with a 1084sd2 monitor and a tv converter for 720€ :_)

It had problems of stability so after some months of problems and going back to the shop the changed it for a new A500...

It worked flawlessly for years... I bought a 512kb ram expansion (I noticed it in the music of titus the fox and because I could load The One's Darkseed demo). I used it for DeluxePaint, DeluxeVideo (yeah, I know it was crap but it was fun anyway) and games (After the War, AMC, Budokan, Prehistorik, Quadrel, ShermanM4, Titus the Fox, etc...)

I moved to another city. My A500 died 5 years later with the disk drive. I sent it to repair and they gave me an A500+ motherboard with the old chips but the Fattest Agnus. I saw lots of mags and started to buy The One, CU Amiga, Amiga World, Amiga Format, Amiga Computing... I didn't know any Amiga user yet (Spanish mags had died and the only ones alive weren't available neither known in my city). I bought AUI and saw that the disks required KS2.0... I kept the disks some months and upgraded to ks2.05 (3.1 was very expensive). WOW! ks2.0 was great! disks loaded faster, I felt a lot of control, I started to use the workbench more and more...

After 6 years with an Amiga 500 I found an Amiga user in the city (oh, it was amazing! an amiga user!). He had an A500 with 1.3... I saw clearly that he wouldn't upgrade (money problems). I think that having been able to use ks2.0 was an important factor that caused me to continue using miggys.

Then I moved to Zaragoza, found AmigaInfo (an spanish mag), subscribed to it and I sent a letter where I asked if there was any local user group/club, and in the second number I bought my letter was published. In the third number Zurt (now one of my best friends) replied my letter... I was lucky because CUAZ have been founded just 2 months before or so. I meet the CUAZ crew and it save my "Amiga" life :-)

It's a pity that we don't meet so often... I miss the old times.

[AmiGR]

My family bought an Amstrad CPC6128 in 1990 (used by me and my sister, I was 4 years old at that time, so I
have been in computing for most of my life, I remember breaking already making BASIC programs by not knowing what
I was doing when tinkering them... The GFX corruption was fun! ;-)). In Christmas 1992, we bought a second hand A600HD
with a 1084S monitor, 512k expansion and some original and lot's of (sigh) pirated games and programs.
Originals were REALLY rare in Greece at that time...
I still have that A600 but a CIA and the Keyboard MPU are dead.

I bought an A1200 in 96 and a 2GB HD a year later.
in 98 I bought a CD-Rom, the HD died and I had to make some
custom boot floppies to boot from the AmigaFormat CD which
had a 3.1 installation. Luckilly that didn't last long:-)
I got a BlizzPPC040/603@240 and 64MBs of RAM in 99 and got
online later that year with a "nice" 33.6K Modem...
The rest is a custom tower, then a G-Rex and then a PowerTower.
I bought a PegasosI-G3 last summer.
I had no PC till 2002, when my sister upgraded to an Athlon.
I had lot's of experience with PCs but never had one at home. Winblows sucked then and they still suck now... :-)

(Excuse me for the EXTREMELY bad formatting, I really suck
at formating text in such forms and have no time to "fix" it right now...)

[Belzelcior]

Hmm.. Got my first Amiga in 1993 (and no, it wasn't the A1200 (one of my friends got one of those) it was an A600 . The nice thing about that was the 40 Gb harddrive.
"Yeah - sure, you can play Elite II with your machine - well, try installing Monkey Island on your non-existant harddrive wiseass!"

The first program... Hmm. Must've been one of those term programs (if I remember correctly it was a program named NComm or something).

The first game? Well, the A600 was previously owned by a notorious disk-swapper/trader, so I got about 600 disks full of pirated games :)Think it was Monkey Island 1 that I played first - and I totally fell for it.

The first program I bought was a BBS-program named NtPro - later on I was one of the betatesters for the 040 version (or was it the PPC-version? Can't really remember

[mpiva]

  Awww, I thought I was going to be the earliest but frankb beat me (just).  I got my A1000 Christmas of 1985.  Took a LOT of begging from my older brother and me but my parents finally gave in.  Cost was $2800 (Canadian) for the A1000 with 512k, Amiga 1080 monitor, and a Panasonic 9pin printer.  I remember that because my parents got it for us on the condition that we "pay them back" by cleaning the house every week (for several years).

   At the time I was quite young (I was in elementary) and didn't really appreciate what it could do.  Mostly used it for games (I loved playing Defender of the Crown) and for school work.  I would type up all my reports in Textcraft1.0 (GREAT PROGRAM for its time).  It wasn't until grade 6/7 that I discovered the CLI and then I was hooked.

   When we got the computer, we were also given about 20 disks with it, labeled something like "PhaseIV-Demo3".  For the longest time I was confused because I'd stick the disk in and it would read %80 full, but there would appear to be nothing on it.  Then I discoved I could boot off most of them... and then... I discovered "Dir" and whole new world opened up to me  I remember one disk (remember these were given to us by the store) that APPEARED to be blank was actully full of PORN. (I never did tell my parents).

   Eventually my brother lost interest in computers, so I bought my half of the A1000 from him.  Actually, I still have that original A1000 sitting in my office next to my A4000T/060 (along with a couple A500s & A2000s).


-- Michael A. Piva --

"In engineering, there is no single truth, no one right answer; there's a canvas, and you paint it your way, only with chips or gates or subroutines rather than actual paint. That's the Amiga..."
-Dave Haynie

[Revener]

After filling up buckets of drool since 88' :-) I finally got an Amiga of my own at X-mas 93', a new A1200.
Got a HD and modem year later.
The modem got killed by lightning a year after that (damn that was 2700 SEK down the drain). My parents were probably happy though, no more expensive phone bills :-)

Mostly used it for games.

Current Amigas
3 x A1200 1x Blizzard IV 030 2x HD
2x A600 1xHD
1x A500 30Mb HD 3Mb RAM ROM 1.2-2.04
1x A3000 2xDD 1xHD 286 card (no software)
2x A4000 one dead one in tower PPC Cybervision 3D
1x CD 32

Hardly used any of them for 2 years :-(  blame the Games on my PC :-/ and laziness

[DegeRandolf]

I bought my first Amiga in 1986.  It was an Amiga 1000.  Shortly after buying it I did a hardware hack that that involved soldering memory chips together and then piggybacking them on the onboard 256k memory.  It added 512k of memory for a total of 1meg with the upfront 256 memory expansion.  It caused me a devil of a time for about 3 months until I tracked down ONE badly soldered leg.  After that is was rock solid.  Later I added 1.3 kickstart ROM to it to get rid of the bootdisk.  Then added an accelerator that kicked it up all the way to 14mhz. OOH!

Later I added a Microbotics 2 meg expansion on the expansion port.  I still have it and it's up and running downstairs in the basement.

I don't understand how Commodore could have gone broke with all the money I spent with them!!  Here is the complete list of computers I bought:

Commodore Vic 20
with tape drive
Commodore C64
with 2x 1541 floppy drives, Commodore's 6 pin dot matrix printer, Commodore Monitor (forget the model, something like 1702 or something)
Commodore SX64
Commodore C128
with 2x 1571 disk drives, Commodore monitor
Amiga 1000
with 256k memory expansion, 1010 external floppy, 1080 monitor and C1300 genlock
Amiga 2000
with 1084 monitor
CDTV
with external floppy, scsi harddrive, kickstart switcher (1.3 and 2.04), internal genlock and 020 accelerator
Amiga 3000
Amiga 4000 x 2

That's not to mention workbench 2, 3.0 and 3.1 (with roms of course) plus a TON of boards, 8up memory expansion, Megachip 2 meg Agnus, GVP 030 accelerator, 2 GVP TBCPlus, Video Toaster, Picasso II, Picasso IV, GVP Spectrum, Cyberstorm MkII 060, Warp 040, Xsurf, Highway USB and on and on and on.......

NOW how COULD they have gone broke!

The A1000, CDTV, A3000 and both A4000's are still running beside each other in the basement. (All stuffed with all sorts of various boards).  No reason I guess but it's hard to let go

Upstairs next to my AMD Windoze machine is an AmigaOne, you'd think somewhere along the line I would learn wouldn't ya?

[samo79]

I bought in order:

Commodore 16
Commodore 64
Commodore Amiga 500
Commodore Amiga 1200

Now i'm waiting MicroA1/OS4 :-)

[Jope]

1989/1990 and the machine was the A500, rev5. Later expanded to KS2.05, 1MB RAM, extra drive, AR3..

Then I swapped the motherboard for an A500+ one, now it's got an ICD AdIDE + novia mounting kit with 1GB 2.5" HD, SupraRAM, AmigaNET A500.. :-)

It's still missing the VXL*30 accelerator, I haven't had time to figure out how to get everything working together stably. I might need a more powerful power supply for it..

Also a couple of beefy A4000s, the other one 060 and the other 040 and an A2000/060.. I guess it's time to sell some of them away - I don't need so many Amigas. :-D

[commodorelover]

mine was about 1995 when my mum bought a 1200 for £100 but she binned it :-( now ive got an amiga with 170 meg hd(i need 2 upgrade)

[Mucker]

My first amiga, was when i was 14, it was a screen Gems bundle. I had it for X-mas. I can remember having to front half of the cost!

It was expensive then £500. With inflation, would prob cost the same as my NewA1/G4 today

[Animagic]

I bought my first amiga in September 1990.
An A2000 with 1mb ram no hd and a 1084mono monitor.
After this one I bought another A2000 with 3MBram and a 1084S monitor.
In 1994 I bought my first A1200 with Blizzard 1230IV 16MB RAM and 1GB HD.

Today I have 5x A2000 with 1084 monitors and 3x A1200 with Blizzard 1230IV/ and Blizzard 1240 16 MB each.

Animagic

[dslcc]

I bought my first Amiga - was an A500 with 1084, extra ram and an
extra floppy drive in 1987 from Amazing Computers in Dallas. Those
were the days!

[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