Amiga

What is it?

I first saw the Amiga in the summer of 1985 (maybe '86) - it was an Amiga 1000 in the basement of the public school board main office building, while I was taking a summer computer course from Bruce and his dad. I remember being blown away by the demo for it (and it was just 4 windows open at once, each one doing a different line or circle drawing routine, with some music playing in the background).

My first Amiga was an Amiga 500 I bought in 1987. I was the first person I knew who had one. I paid $1000 CDN for it at Computer Mind, then had to spend an extra $40 for the A520 composite adapter to hook it up to my old 1702 monitor (I couldn't afford the 1084) and then later $250 for the extra 512K Ram expansion. I also recall bringing it back shortly after I got it - I think they had purposely sold me a machine with the 1.2 kernal when 1.3 was already out. I *think* they acted surprised (probably just surprised I noticed?) and upgraded it - I think - for free. Later on, I bought 2.04 for it, and also bought the Adram 540 (populated mine to 2.5MB, for a grand total of 3MB), had it modified to provide 1MB of chip RAM, and put an AdIDE in as well, and sat a full size 52MB Quantum LPS hard drive on top of the computer case - I believe it was my suggestion to do that (I'm cheap) rather than pay more for those weeny 2.5" drives that could fit inside the A500 case. Don Sutton of Electronics 2000 set me up with all that nice gear, and even had a local fellow make nice little plastic cases to mount the hard drives in. That computer got me pretty much through all of university, with some help from the 386sx/20 laptop I bought in 1992.

What do you have in your collection?

In addition to my first Amiga (the 500), I've since picked up 4 more Amiga 500s, and also an Amiga 1000 that Shroom found when he was away at Bible school. It lives at my house now. I've also got a few 1084s, a 1010 drive, a A1000 genlock, and some other stuff. And finally I own an Amiga 1200 that I picked up at the 2003 Chicago Expo!

What are you doing with it?

Not much anymore - in the past, however, we did a whole lot of stuff with it.

We coded many game demos in AMOS, which was a fantastic language. A Thrust clone was well under way, an "Unfriendly Giant" game based on the parody radio show we loved so much (it had fantastic art, by Shroom), and an Amiga port of the great C64 game "Sensitive" was pretty much finished.

Shroom also made a lot of great music on the Amiga. I hope one day to get around to transferring it over and getting some of our code and music up on the Internet.

Links

None right now.

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Last Update: 2003.12.14
Robin Harbron - macbeth@tbaytel.net