Even with all my memories of using an Amiga 1000 gone.....

[Rob68K]

I am trying to think of other 3 box designs like A1000 or PCs of the era and can only think of 2, the Atari MegaST1-4 cases and the Commodore 128D (which I presume the identical looking Commodore PC-1 also has the same plastic case).

Apple2GS ?

[haps]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The keyboard is better than the keyboard on the most expensive PC/Mac millennials blow thousands on

Bullshit. The keyboard of my a1000 is nowhere as good as my beloved cougar mechanical keyboard for my PC was. I loved the fucking thing, to bad I smashed it one night and now have this 'orrible razer crap, definately getting another cougar when I decide this ones had the dick.

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

It's still the nicest, and more importantly best designed and built, Amiga of all time. More importantly it doesn't develop any stupid faults like the A600/1200/4000/CD32 bullshit SMT motherboards with their 1 out 4 sound channels going AWOL etc.

I unpacked two Amiga 1000 systems and after a bit of manic searching for the Kickstart 1.3 disks(!) everything worked perfectly.

The keyboard is better than the keyboard on the most expensive PC/Mac millennials blow thousands on, the fan is so well engineered it is near silent and the build quality is far in excess of any computer on sale in PC world today.

Sadly I don't really remember much about when I owned an Amiga 1000 in the late eighties but that little melody the A1000 plays to test that both left and right phono outputs are connected to your TV/speakers I do remember and is just one of those things that make it charming.

I am beginning to see exactly why the Amiga 1000 was the best computer ever sold to the general public, there is nothing else like it, no other Amiga comes close to this combination of build quality, design excellence, the most powerful computer Joe Public could ever get his hands on let alone spastic machines like Mac 512 or IBM PC AT doorstops of 1986. Commodore dropped the ball big time, by the time the A500/2000 machines went on sale after 9 months of Commodore abandoning the Amiga 1000 the Acorn Archimedes was here, that powerful elegant diminutive machine is the spiritual successor to the A1000 as a concept and it cost less than a 1mb A500 in 1987.

It's a bit like when I say "I watched Star Wars yesterday" obviously I am talking about 'Episode IV:A New Hope' ditto with "I unpacked my Amiga yesterday" means I unpacked my 'Amiga 1000'

I wish they weren't so expensive, every Amiga fan should have the opportunity to own an Amiga 1000.

I agree, the quality of the 1000 was like what you 'almost' got with the old (80's/90's) Sony ES gear.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Rob68K

Apple2GS ?

Not sure I ever saw one of those in the UK but yes that is another one

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by haps

Bullshit. The keyboard of my a1000 is nowhere as good as my beloved cougar mechanical keyboard for my PC was. I loved the fucking thing, to bad I smashed it one night and now have this 'orrible razer crap, definately getting another cougar when I decide this ones had the dick.

I am not a virgin so that keyboard is not for me

[E-Penguin]

I think I just accidentally bought an A1000. Not really sure what I want to do with it (trick it out to the max or keep it original?) but I saw it and it called to me...

Suggestions welcome.

[Tigerskunk]

The Amiga 1000 is THE AMIGA.

Everything else was fan fiction, imo.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Everything else was fan fiction, imo.

I think the Amiga 500 was a lesson learnt from the ST, but I agree that the rest of the line up was either showing off or just... whatever the hell the A500+ and A600 were

[gimbal]

Apparently video editing was a pretty hot topic back then, that is what spurred designs for the A2000/A3000/A4000.

the A600 is not so strange, no? It saves space on the desk. I also use keyboards without a numeric keypad exactly for the same purpose. Heck... I guess it would be a good choice if you were likely to transport your Amiga frequently.

[TCD]

Okay, but why base it on the A500 and not make it 1 MB A1200?

[E-Penguin]

And here it is in all its 1.1 glory. Man, I'd forgotten how much CRTs flickered.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by TCD

Okay, but why base it on the A500 and not make it 1 MB A1200?

According to Wikipedia the original goal for the A600 was to be cheaper than the A500, but as per usual they failed to meet that goal. You can see the why in that goal, they wanted to nab the portion of the market that thought the A500 was too expensive.

So then the question was when they learned that it was going to be more expensive why did they not upgrade it to an A1200 design. Probably because Commodore

[lyzanxia]

And I just love that the A1000 had those signatures of the designers on the inside cover. Talk about detail and dedication.

[r.cade]

I've rescued quite a few over the years, and always the disk drives seem to have trouble for me.

[gimbal]

Makes sense since that is the most manhandled part of a classic computer

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

And here it is in all its 1.1 glory. Man, I'd forgotten how much CRTs flickered.

Haha welcome to the club!

Back then I used to wear polarised sunglasses to reduce the flicker on Workbench screens, or change the palette to shades of grey. They used to sell polarised screen filters to go over the CRT screen. If you have a 100hz CRT TV then problem solved of course.

I keep my A1000s original, if I had something like AddIDE to put inside it to get hard drive workbench usage then I would do that. Amiga + hard drive = heaven for serious/creative work. A Gotek in an external drive casing attached would be the icing on the cake.

Sadly some idiot wrote over my KS and WB 1.1 disks with 1.3....oh well. When I have a Gotek drive sorted out I will be fixing that problem!

[Jope]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

And here it is in all its 1.1 glory. Man, I'd forgotten how much CRTs flickered.

Excellent. Better make copies of the originals and only use the copies though. :-)

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by gimbal

According to Wikipedia the original goal for the A600 was to be cheaper than the A500, but as per usual they failed to meet that goal. You can see the why in that goal, they wanted to nab the portion of the market that thought the A500 was too expensive.

So then the question was when they learned that it was going to be more expensive why did they not upgrade it to an A1200 design. Probably because Commodore

Really no idea why they chased that low end of the market once more after the debacle that was the 264 line (C16, C116, Plus4).

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Apparently video editing was a pretty hot topic back then, that is what spurred designs for the A2000/A3000/A4000.

the A600 is not so strange, no? It saves space on the desk. I also use keyboards without a numeric keypad exactly for the same purpose. Heck... I guess it would be a good choice if you were likely to transport your Amiga frequently.

The only problem with the A600 was it didn't get launched at the intended £199-£249 so as soon as the A1200 came out for £399.99 in Oct 1992 it was redundant. The 256 colour/8 sound channel/blitter equipped Commodore 65 had better specs in sound and graphics than A600 and it would have been sold for that sort of price. God knows what C= were doing, probably financially crushed by the greed of Irving Gould's annual bonuses he kept giving himself too not just the lack of RJ Mical/Dave Needle quality engineering genius working there.

An A600 with hard drive and 2mb Chip RAM is a pretty good machine to have for sample sequencing music production. Putting it into double PAL mode etc also allows 56khz samples which is pretty damned clean for a base model computer. Just the price of £399.99 in 1991 was too much for a 32 colour machine.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

Really no idea why they chased that low end of the market once more after the debacle that was the 264 line (C16, C116, Plus4).

After Jack was forced out Commodore didn't make any good decisions at all.

If the TED line had stuck with a 48/64kb minimum base spec and been sold for about $99/£99 as was the plan with Jack/Shiraz it would have wiped the floor with the EU competition of Sinclair and Amstrad to be honest which did cost as much as the C64 but didn't have a hope in hell of matching the world class C64 sprites or SID sound. The problem was always the base spec was 16kb, unexpanded VIC games are also a bit naff vs cartridge ROMs and expanded games. The TED might not have sprites but it has pixel/sub-pixel scroll registers of VIC-II, same clock speed as Atari 800, same colour palette as CTIA based original Atari 400/800, doesn't output sound through some crappy 2cm useless speaker in the case like the Amstrad and the TED is just as good for punchy game SFX as Atari 400/2600/7800 etc etc. Selling the Commodore 16 for the same price as a 48k Sinclair was asking for trouble, 16kb just isn't enough.

No idea what they were thinking with the C128 , they would have been better off just selling a 64k RAM expansion for the C64 and saving $$$'s on C128 development because the VIC-II can never display an image with a CPU clock above 1mhz and the C128 with all that useless crap like VDC and Z80 was pricing itself out of the war. The C128 + 1570 + 1351 mouse cost MORE than the 8mhz 68000 based 520STM + SF354 bundle of Spring/Summer 1986 and I know which machine I'd rather play The Pawn, Gauntlet, Carrier Command, Virus, etc etc. Sure the ST can't do Uridium but the C64/128 has it's limits too for other game genres.

Cancelation of the Commodore LCD and bastardization into the C128 is another dumb decision, they might as well have flushed all that dev money down the toilet and got to work on making a VIC-II upgrade that could run at 2mhz or something.

Buying Amiga when they had no way to make huge quantities in-house of those esoteric custom chips and other support chips for A1000 another mistake and then refusing to use Jay's ranger chipset for an A3000 class machine and forcing out talent like RJ and Needle was a huge mistake.

They didn't even try to keep all that engineering talent at Hi-Toro so the Amiga 500 in 1987 was no longer cutting edge because Commodore engineers were not clever enough to improve it. ECS non upgrade of a new chipset another waste of time. A1200 CPU borked due to Chip RAM only design another mistake etc etc.

The Commodore 64 was probably the last good idea Commodore had for low end market domination, it was the Megadrive of its time really as far as bang per buck goes in the early-mid eighties home computer wars and it was aggressively marketed and wiped the floor with the competition. Even in the UK by 1984 the C64 and VIC-20 combined was outselling the ZX Spectrum 48/16kb and ZX81 models combined (news item fact reported in a weekly non games focused magazine not some wikipedia myth). Even worse Commodore software actually used to be quite good, the £15 International Soccer cartridge for C64 was indeed a killer app for EU consumers, especially when you look at £30 Realsports Soccer on VCS around that time. Le Mans with paddle controls plays a lot more like arcade Sega Monaco GP (not 3D Super Monaco GP) than the Sega SG-1000 official port of Monaco GP etc etc. What software did Commodore ever make for Amiga to help it sell?

Irving Gould and co. were damned clueless and Jack at Atari without MOS type advantage was doomed to fail. We the consumer ultimately got screwed because of Irving and his childish attitude towards Commodore in 1983. If I had a time machine I would go back and make sure his parents never met and rescue Commodore myself during the disastrous Calculator Wars and Microsoft and Apple would be dead THAT is what Halt and Catch Fire script should have centred on, not birth of x86 rubbish of this reality