Today we celebrate the birthday of the Commodore Amiga 1000, The first ever Amiga which was released on 23rd July 1985, making it 38 years old as of 2023
It has a Motorola 68000 CPU at 7.14MHz, 256K Stock or 8MB Max Memory, a 16 Colour display at 640 X 400 or 4096 Color Display at 320 X 200, it stores Data on 3 1/2 inch Hard-style Floppy Disks which only store 880KB, it has 1x Parallel Port, 1x Serial Port, 2x Joystick/Mouse Ports, Stereo Audio, RF and Composite Video Output, it also came with OCS (Original Chip Set)
It shipped with AmigaOS 1, which used the Kickstart 1.x disk to boot to the “Insert Disk Kickstart Screen”, which then allowed you to load Workbench 1.x or even a Game disk
This was the first in the line of Commodore Amiga machines, it had no Kickstart inside, so on “Boot Up” it would request a Kickstart Disk (left picture)
When you inserted the Kickstart Disk, it would load the Kickstart into memory and then show you the infamous Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 Insert Disk logo (right, lower picture), at which point you could then Insert your Game Disk or Workbench Disk and boot from there
There are various modifications to boot directly into Kickstart which can now be added to the Amiga 1000 via the Expansion Slot
I personally never owned an Amiga 1000, since they were far too expensive, later on I got the Amiga 500, which was released in January 1987
The Amiga 1000 has limited expansion capabilities, But it does have a side-slot on the right, where expansion cards could be fitted on, and nowadays, you can get all sorts of expansions for it, from memory upgrades to even a Kickstart add-on which will automatically load into its memory, so it will be ready for you to just insert your Workbench or a Game Disk instantly
The most amazing thing about this machine is that it has the signatures of the designers cast into the case itself, along with the paw print from The Late Great Jay Miner’s (31st May 1932 – 20th June 1994) Dog who was called Mitchy
Find out more about this machine at Wikipedia and Old Computers
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