A1000 General Discussion

Today in my boredom I spent a bit of time on Chris Pirillo's chat room (anyone who has looked up anything computer related on youtube will be familiar with who Chris is)

I quickly struck up a chat with a fellow amiga user and it struck me as quite odd that he (as well as a few others involed in the chat) was extremely fascinated that I owned an A1000.

I'm the first to admit that I'm quite new to amiga having only bought my first A500 only 2-3 years ago but I did catch the bug that all you guy have (I usually refer to myself as being part of the "new generation of amiga users" ... we do exist so please excuse our n00bness).

The guys on this forum seemed to hold the A1000 as an extremely rare god-like entity (ironic since the fellow I was chatting with owned an A1XE and until joining this forum I thought the A1 was like the yowie... everyone's heard of it, but no one has ever seen it!)

I was just interested in what you guys think of the A1000
Personally, I love mine. It has permanent residency on my desk and gets used numerous times each week. In its 512kb configuration it plays most games that I have in my collection and yeah, the keyboard garage is a certain awesomness that you never understand until you see it in action.

What do you think?

@mz3540

style... poise... grace ... it's, it's Miss Amiga. (parody of William Shatner dialogue from movie Miss Congeniality)

Well, I loved mine, and kept it going from it's debut sale for many, many years. See details in my sig below.

I reluctantly sold it about two years ago to raise money for other things, and in the hope that a new owner might have the time and zeal to get the SCSI interface working again.

Paul

oops, forgot I had to shorten my sig for Amigans.net. The A1000 (Frankenthousand) had an '030 @50 MHz plus 68882, custom PAL timing chips ont he Rejuvenator board, 2 megs of Chip ram, 136 MB of fast Ram, dual boot ROM's, Flicker Fixer, over a GB of hard drive space, a CD-ROM burner, IDE and SCSI interfaces, two power supplies, and a customimzed oversized case. I tried to get away from the second power supply with a timing signal circuit, but it never worked right.

@mz3540

Well, 2 to 3 years from my point of view being into the Amiga is like a senior already. I just started January 2010. hehehehe.

So, I hear about this new Amiga X1000 from OSnews web site one night. I play around and start reading about Amiga. Decide there that the X1000 when it comes out will be my flagship computer and my Macs will take second seat. I decide also to go back to my days of youth when computing was actually really fun.

In other words, in a short few weeks I went from never owning an Amiga (I was an Atarian in 70s/80s/early 90s and then Mac in 90s to now) to now owning a very clean A1000 (the first Amiga made and now the 1st Amiga I purchased), a CD32, and have a A4000T on order. hehehehe

Plan is when the X1000 sees the light of day, it will become my main Office system to get all my business done. I still need my Macs of course as I have my own company (self employed) called MacSociety and I provide tech services on Mac so I need Mac to earn my bread. Unless I can get into the Amiga business down the road when Amiga is in every home again.

So, my A1000 sits next to my Mac system and is wonderful little system. I am sure I will use it to keep it alive. Oh yeh... I have an Amiga 500 on the way to.

Can anyone say I am a sick sick man.

tj

Here is my A1000.
http://gallery.me.com/macsociety/100154/DSCF3550/web.jpg

@mz3540

I also have an Amiga 1000; purchased used from a local computer store in 1985/6 or so. Definitely a rare machine to see in the wild nowadays.

I too am extremely stoked over the new X1000, and have about made the same decision you have. I am pretty much (80%) decided on purchasing one once it becomes available, for the same reasons. Going back to when computing was fun.

My Amiga 1000 has the second disk drive, the genlock attachment that slides into the port in the back (and underneath where the keyboard is stored) and the 1 Meg memory upgrade.

That 1 Meg memory upgrade was sweet. I had the A1000 for years before I got it, and after I installed it games "just knew" that it was present and there were more features to them - new sounds, etc. that were present in the games that weren't before with 512k.

Such an exciting machine still after being released over 30 years ago!

@Arcane5150

I had fun watching the Amiga Tutor tour to show me about Amiga. Felt like I was a kid and learning computers for the first time again.

tj

@mz3540

Although I own 3 A1000s I've never turned them on... I preferred the B2000 or up until I got SAMs the PPC A4000 or similair...

I brought my first Amiga in 1986... I won't tell you how many systems I still own lol

My first Amiga was also an A1000. I loved that machine! I don't think of it as a rare machine at all, though. I knew several people who had them, through the local BBSing scene. One of them had purchased his in 1985 (September?) and had pre-1.0 Kickstart/Workbench disks! Mine came with 1.1. I never actually saw the pre-1.0 disks, they maybe weren't official disks with stickers &c.

Yeah, Amiga Tutor was a cool program! The graphics seemed awesome to me at the time. I loved the dancing mouse. Kaleidoscope was great, too. I used to leave my A1K running Kaleidoscope for hours while I did homework. That was a while before the demo scene.

All of the disks that came with my A1K now have icky-looking labels, which is too bad.

Back then, I actually liked AmigaBASIC and I wrote quite a few programs using it. I remember that it took me a few days to get used to using a GUI and a mouse, though. I didn't know when a program had been quit or when it was just hidden sometimes. I remember loading several copies of AmigaBASIC without knowing it... everything just got slower and slower because AmigaBASIC is a CPU hog, and I was thinking that I had brought home a buggy piece of #%#%! Haha!

Anyway, the A1000 is still my favourite Amiga. Probably just for nostalgic reasons, but it was beautiful, too! And quiet! Until I got that golram Seagate HD! BVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV..... AAAAAAAAARGH!

There's been some great stories told in this thread!

@Slayer

I've been browsing this forum for a few months now and I am very much aware that you own several hundred (?!) amigas. (or was that figure closer to eleventy squillion?)

@Arcane5150

I know the genlock you're talking about... they are one of the most awesome looking attachments I've ever seen for an Amiga... What was the Ram expansion you had? did it plug into the front reu port or was it an attachment to the side port?

@AmigaSociety

I think every amigan would be very impressed with the incredible enthusiasm with which you have taken to the amiga in these last few weeks.
That A1000 you got there is in great condition! looks like a very early build too...
I wish you the best of luck with your plan to incorporate some amiga stuff into your business.

and finally,
@Paul

WOW!!! I would have cried like a little girl if a sold something like that!
I would like to know more about that machine you had. What software did you mostly use with it? And also, what version of kickstart did you use? I'm led to believe that with that much ram you didn't need to worry about the 256kb WOM limit... was it possible to use kickstart 3.1 with it? Also, why 2 power supplies?


During the last few months there have been a few A1000's pop up on ebay here in australia but the people selling them are mostly jerks who sell them in seperate parts... Who wants to buy a bare-box A1000 that has had the REU removed from the front port? I find that very annoying!

I got mine about 6 months ago from a guy who saved it from a rubbish skip! He knew nothing about Amigas, but as someone who work in IT he was familiar with the brand and thankfully realised the historical importance that someone had simply tossed away.

It's a fairly late build. It's got the Commodore logo on the front and is labled on the bottom with text that reads "A1000"

@mz3540

Today in my boredom...
Really, it's such a huge world?
I was just interested in what you guys think of the A1000?
I have one too, but haven't used it since the Bulletin Board Systems closed and Fido Net wasn't the place to be anymore around Y2K. Right?
You need to read Amiga Future Magazine, man! I'm treading through #81 and it's really nice. In fact it has an article called "GB 1000 - Be Part of the Saga". It's about Georg Braun's dream of the A1000. Awesome! Eat you heart-out 'Frakenthousand'!

My A1/1000/1200.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11367727@N07/2716912145/

I have an A1000 and it is my most treasured posession. It was at the time the greatest general purpose computer on the market and now it stands as a testament that the developers got it right and the world owes a debt to the work done on the Amiga 1000.

@clusteruk

I've never owned an a1k. My first amiga was the 500,in 89 i think. After that i got an used a4k,in 96 i believe. Sexy box that was, Upgraded alot. Then when it broke down,i didn't use computers for some years,until a friend of mine came with his A1XE G4. Then the amigadrug came back. Got a used SE,XE. Then the XE died,and i got a Sam. Sold the classics and the A1's. And now i'm waiting for the new AmigaOne X1000

@AmigaSociety
I have 4 brothers. two of us are Amigans through and through the other two not (Mum dropped them on their heads when they were small). My other Amigan brother (somewhat inactive) is minding an A1000 for another brother who doesn't know, appreciate or care about it's pedigree.

Now here is my problem, how do I get hold of it!! -:)

Welcome to our small community, it is fun to see newbies, especially Atarians who must be laughing at the antics of this community over the past decade.
Given the fact no-one has given you crap about that just shows how mature we have become.-:)

Well I guees we are just lucky and happy to still be here let alone attract wonderful new users like yourself.

Glad to have you aboard.

ace


PS i run 4 Macs at home.

@mz3540

Quote:

Pagestream (3, maybe 4 even before I got my A4000) ADPro, ImageFX, Final Writer, MIamiDX, Voyager (browser), Thor (email) Brilliance, DPaint and I'm sure some others as well.

I had a ROM swither installed in the Rejuvenator's ROM socket. So I could switch between actual ROM's for 3.1 and 1.3. The Rejuvenator (replacemen daughter board) is what made the 2 MB Agnus possible, too.

re: RAM, oops, my goof. That was what I had on my 4000 with 128 MB mounted on the '060 accelerator. The 1000 only had 32 MB of Fast Ram mounted on the CSA Derringer accelerator. They say the Derringer could actually handle a 64 MB simm, but I never got around to trying it.

re: 2 power supplies. The A1000 power supply provides a timing signal to the motherboard. Without it, it wouldn't boot. A friend built a circuit for me which we put in the second (PC) power supply for Frankenthousand, which was supposed to provide that timing "tick" signal, but it never worked. So I used the original power supply to power the motherboard, and the PC power supply to power the drives, fans, etc, Eventually, I gutted an IBM 386 tower case and turned it on its side. For a while I had two stacked A1000 cases to hold everything, but it was a really awkward arrangement.

Paul

@mz3540

Quote:

It plugged into the front reu port. The middle of the case had a removable front case there that exposes the metal slot cover.