AMIGA1000+
[A1000+]
This Commodore AMIGA 1000 was manufactured in November, 1985. For $1295, you could get the AMIGA with a Motorola 68000 CPU (running at 7 Mhz), 256K RAM, a keyboard, a mouse and an internal 3½" 880K disk drive. The monitor was extra, although you could get a somewhat blurred picture by connecting it to a television. Today, the base computer is worth about $40. Currently, mine can only be described as an A1000+, due to the number of add-ons and modifications.
Specifications:

  • Motorola 68010 CPU
  • 512K Chip RAM (graphics & data): 256K internal, 256K front plug-in module
  • 3.5M Fast RAM (data only): 1.5M internal IN1000 board, 2M external Starboard II module
  • Two external Commodore 1010 3½" 880K disk drives
  • One external Commodore 1020 5¼" 440K disk drive
  • SupraDrive 4x4 external SCSI controller module (w/ battey backed-up clock)
  • 240M Quantum & 20M Seagate SCSI hard drives
  • Commodore 1080 RGB / composite / Y/C, Analog/Digital monitor
  • DKB KwikStart II internal Kickstart ROM switcher with Kickstart 2.04 installed
  • NewTek DigiView Gold slow-scan video digitizer
  • Low-pass filter disabled (hi-fi audio!)

    What can an Amiga 1000 do?

    With the original (1985) chipset, an Amiga is capable of stereo sound and four video resolutions: low-res (320x200), low-res interlaced (320x400), high-res (640x200) and high-res interlaced (640x400) with a maximum of 4,096 colors simultaneously from a palette of 4,096 (16x16x16 RGB). 4,096 colors can be a strain on the system, so for most applications, save for still pictures, 32 colors (low-res) and 16 colors (high-res) are used. The newer Amigas (from 1989-90) have the ECS graphics chipset, which gives a few more video modes (such as 640x480, 1280x200 and 1280x400). From 1992, the A1200 and A4000 have the AGA chipset, which can provide 16 million colors on-screen at any video mode. This has been superseded by the several video cards which are manufactured for the Amiga, which give the Amiga SVGA video modes along with the 16M colors. The thing is, the A1000's bus is identical to the A500 bus (backwards) and its pins correspond to the A2000 Zorro-II slot's first 86 pins. The remaining pins are mostly unused on the cards, the few signals needed can be obtained from the motherboard. For a few dollars, the A1000 can be 99% Zorro-II compatible. It really is amazing the mileage that can be obtained from an 11-year-old system! A Picasso II SVGA card can be added to the A1000 in this manner... which would exceed the value of the entire system!
    With three custom chips handling I/O, sound and animation independent of the CPU, the A1000 (and all newer Amigas) can provide full-screen, full-motion video and stereo sound, all multitasked along with any other applications. AmigaDOS itself is somewhat UNIX-like, a true multitasking, multithreading operating system. The Amiga's Workbench GUI (Intuition) provides icon/window point-and-click access to the system (at less than 64K), while alternately or simultaneously the CLI Shell may be used.

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