Commodore Amiga 1000 Trash to Treasure Part 1 | Meet The Amiga 

Wow. A new Amiga series! Amiga can never be 'done to death'. I'd happily watch more A500 trash to treasures. Nothing more satisfying than seeing an old Amiga come back to life.

I can't wait to see the rest of this series. Using BYTE as a reference and timeline is brilliant. I brought home my first ever Amiga 1000 this week only to find an active ants nest in it so that is going to be an extreme restoration.

According to Commodore Belgium at the time, I was the first person to buy an A1000 in Belgium. I had waited almost a whole year for the thing to turn up at their HQ. I drooled over the specs for well over a year and couldn't wait to start programming it. As part of the purchase I got copies of all the official Addison-Wesley manuals (Intuition, hardware, etc.). The architecture was a joy to program.. and roughly a year later I got hired by Icon Design (Manchester) to work on porting Kikstart II (C64 original) to the Amiga. The Amiga launched my programming career. Unique times.. Four years later I managed to get a software engineering position within Commodore itself, but that''s a whole different story (Google is your friend).

You know it's serious when Neil breaks out the murder gloves.

That shot of the "piggyback" RAM upgrade brings back memories of soldering my own in 1986 or 87, to increase my A1000 to 1 MiB. It was a low-cost way to avoid being one-upped by the new Atari 1040ST.

I found some pics of the the Amiga 3100 joystick, search for "Amiga Power Stick"

That controller was basis behind the famous guru error

I haven’t had my A1000 open since 1988. Now I’m excited to pop the top and see how things look after all these years...

I had a mate who had an Amiga 1000 and I was blown away by what it could do. I had a Laser 128 Apple 2e clone myself so to see an Amiga in action was awesome.

Denise was the looker, Paula sounded great and Angus held the show together.

This opens up the way-back machine again. I first saw the Amiga in Vancouver during the big reveal. I was blown away, and so were all the computer geeks around. Soon I was sporting an Amiga 1000 with 020 processor, 2MB ram, 80 MB SCSI hard-drive, a 286 bridge-board, and various other thingies with blinky lights. The local computer club had fissioned off (Panorama) and we rode the tech wave until the untimely and inglorious demise of the Amiga.

Excellent start to the series, Neil! I watched the Amiga 1000 for years as a young man, but could never afford it. Even after I bought my Amiga 500 in 1988, I saw the Amiga 1000 as a "better" machine. In many ways it was - the build quality is incredible, the composite output is probably the best I have seen... What a lovely machine and mine always has a place on my desk.

I didn't know that Amiga made joysticks before they sold to Commodore. A quick Google search yielded articles talking about their Power-Stick with pictures. Apparently, they made versions for TI 99/A, Colecovision and Atari (that one is model number 3100). Neat.

My dad threw out my A1000 with original Phoenix board and monitors and floppies and BJ330 printer, it still hurts. :(

Great video, looking forward to the next episodes! I cherish my early A1000 and A1080 monitor, imported from the US in 1985. All 110V, NTSC, rev 6 motherboard with WCS daughterboard. Two years ago I got my hands on a second A1000, the motherboard of which I replaced by a GBA1000. The features are stunning: 68060 CPU at 100MHz, fat Agnus ECS chipset, 2MB chipram, 136MB fastram, onboard bootable 2.5" IDE controller, A2320 flicker fixer, realtime clock, Zorro II expansion port with Picasso II RTG graphics, autoswitching VGA output... All fitting perfectly in the A1000 case, not a single hole drilled!

I never had an A1000 but did have a friend who did. I eventually got an A500 in 1988 to replace my C64. I still miss that thing. It took years before I finally had an Intel-based PC that surpassed my A500.

Argh! It didn't occur to me to get a photo with the lid when I visited but now I wish I had!

Ah, the machine I grew up with. I still have it, and it still works, though it’s sitting in storage right now. It was also a pain to open up, as I recall. Only the X68000 was more complicated, at least from what I personally own. That daughter board also made installing upgrades a pain! I put an Indivision ECS in mine for VGA output. Installation instructions for the A1000 say to put it in the Paula socket, but with the daughter board, that’s impossible. I ended up cutting away part of the power supply shell so I could fit it in the Denise socket. Another thing to keep in mind, US A1000s (at least the early ones) shipped with the R5 Denise, which lacked Extra Half-Brite mode. Fortunately it’s just a drop in replacement for a newer revision, and I have an R8 in mine. Also, the expansion slot is more or less compatible with A500 slot expansions; they just need to be rotated, and propped up to account for the height difference. I’m glad mine doesn’t have such extensive yellowing. Personally I think it’s screaming for a retrobrite job. Love how you can tell that there was definitely some sort of sidecar connected to it!

That dirt really got the VIP treatment ;)

18:50 I believe the internal expansion was omitted to keep cost down. The card edge PCB connection was the compromise, and that lived on in the low cost A500 as well.

Great video. Thank you for highlighting BYTE magazine. It was a truly wonderful publication where I met the Macintosh, Amiga, and IBM PC. It was also where I encountered the legendary Jerry Pournelle. Thanks for the great memories.

The Amiga was basically an Arcade machine architecturally, and it had a better OS than Apples. I so wanted one, but had to wait until the A500 to afford one.

Like other truly great things of the 80s, the Amiga 1000 crops up in Stranger Things 4 :)

I really enjoyed that look back pretending to wait for the Amiga to appear. I used to do that, sometimes it took absolutely ages to get what you thought you needed.

I own all versions of the Amiga joystick in my collection. There are several.

When I first started learning about Amiga's (and computers in general) as a child I really struggled to see the reason why someone would want the A1000 over the A500. From everything I could understand the A500 was capable of everything that the A1000 could do, just in a different box. It is only years later I became aware that the A1000 pre-dated the A500 but even then I was confused that Commodore was still selling A1000's when A500's were already on the market. This is something that could use some explaining, especially with the A1000 costing more than twice the cost of an A500. Then Commodore released the A2000 which further confused me as that still ran a 68000 at 7MHz. Of course today I can see that the internal expansion options are the things that make that model special but it seemed like a huge price hike (£1500 as opposed to £500 for an A500) for a minimal addition of capabilites (which you would then need to pay extra to use). That machine would have made a lot more sense if it came with a 68020 CPU but that's not what Commodore chose to do.

thank you so much for all these videos, i really appreciate and love watching them

It was good to see it open on the table during my cave visit. The photos came out well too!

You may consider a small "pancake" air compressor to blow out components. I do it outside. Tip: Don't spin the fans with the air. I learned that one the hard way.

This is one of the best videos about the Amiga, I ever saw! Brilliant, thank you very much!

oh wow, this a SUCH a COOL way to tell the story!!! and to have you restoring an orignal first model... EXCELLENT!!!! - I LOVE THIS CHANNEL!!!! :D

That's an excellent approach to talk about a greatly talked about machines history. Loved it.

Never had a micro computer and I am still finding this series a joy to watch. Can't wait for the next part.

Great start, Neil. I'm looking forward to the rest of this series. In 1984/5 I was working in a small company that had a connection to Commodore - we were building 64K RAM boards for the C16 and, at one point, Commodore UK had a conversation with us about supplying the boards so they could fit them into C16s from new. That plan never developed into anything concrete but, because of the connection, we did get invited to a special UK trade/ticket-only launch of the Amiga (long before it was called the 1000) in 1985. We had to get to Kensington Olympia where some other computer show was taking place (possibly a PCW show - I can no longer remember) and get on coaches were laid on to take us to a town hall somewhere (possibly Hammersmith - I can no longer recall). The whole thing was rather low-key but, once there, we were given a full run-through of what the Amiga could do at the time. I remember finding the long load time of first Kickstart and then Workbench from disk rather tedious - that was definitely a letdown after the almost instant boot times of most 8-bit computers of the time. At least Kickstart was then effectively write-protected and would survive warm boots, so the demo speeded up after that and became far more impressive. They showed off the early version of Deluxe Paint running and we were treated to the Boing Ball, RoboCity, speech synthesis and the various line and circle drawing demos that seemed so amazing back then. I think they may have also demoed the early A-Basic, which was later superseded by the embarrassingly slow AmigaBasic from Microsoft. At the time I came away wanting one but, at £1295, it was totally out of reach. Two years later I finally got my hands on an A500 after the prices started falling.

22:40 You're not planning on snorting that are you Neil?

Great Computer. I have Amiga 500 in 1992. I have A1200 with 040. I'm from Cracov Poland.

Excellent start to a new trash to treasure series. I love the idea of using Byte magazine for the history lesson.

So glad you are making this series. I've read about the Amiga 1000 in a French magazine when I was in high school (in Quebec) . It was an very early article, just a column with a tiny picture but still I was blown away by the promises of a computer with 4,096 colors! The possibility for gaming was out of this world. The computers I knew then were C64, the originals Macintosh and the monochrome IBMs. I finally got to see a year our two later in a large retail store and it was love at first sight. Thus begun a very long campaign to get my parents to purchases one. It was a tough fight including the usual lies about all the productive things I would with such a computer. Success was in the form of an Amiga 500, store used, who would crash if my tv (no real monitor for me, no sir) was too close to it. I still have a picture of my setup. I stuck whit the Amiga computers till the my last purchase was a Amiga 4000, 68020. I was the guy who would jump into BBS to defend proudly the Amiga against those PC users and their VGA cards with passion until Civilization II can only for Windows. I shamefully surrender and got my first pc computer.

Very creative new take on this. Excellent work.

Neil, those shoes are entirely appropriate for someone who values old-school cool, and naff.

Brilliant approach to the series, going through the history via the BYTE magazine articles was excellent. Look forward to the next chapter.

I love the end user perspective, brings a really new fresh idea to this videos

One of my favorite machines! I'd strongly advocate for retrobrighting and not painting the case. Painting always seems to go sideways, even for folks with years of experience.

MikroBitti binder on the low left! How cool is that! Very neat to see that as a Finn!

OMG another RMC TTT!!!👍😍👍 can't wait till I get home!

Great timing! I just got my very first Amiga (1000). I’ll be following along. :-)

Loving it. Can't wait for the next episode.

I really like the different turn on this TTT, showing the audience the thought processes in each time period, what was out, where people got their information from, it wasn't as easy as today where a 10 minute youtube video would get you up to speed, you had to wait MONTHS and scour around different magazines and articles to learn as much as you could before dropping big money on early advanced computing..i need an Amiga 1000..

I bought a month 2 amiga 1000 in the uk after seeing a preview of it in london at the novatel hotel at a commodore show. Happy days. That 1st year was frustrating for me software wise. Thank god for fred fish public domain. I so loved this machine. Excelsior :-)

In the early 90's I was scheduled to work in a high school library, going through the boxes of old magazines to see if any were salvageable from a water leak. I discovered all the Byte magazine back to mid 80's. I had just been given an A1000 and would just get lost looking through the old mags and the Amiga section. What a great time. Nostalgia hitting me big time right now. This is going to be awesome watching the videos about this. Nicely done!

Can you capture the signatures to paper by doing a sketching like a brass rubbing using a pencil of charcoal and framing that?

When Kickstart was booted write enable was disabled so fully reset proof. You only needed to load once per session. It was effectively a WOM or write once memory. Immune to even the worse crash. (WB 1.0 did that quite alot....lol) Wish I never sold mine. damn..

Nice approach to the story telling Neil.

Nice series idea! Looking forward to more! Thanks.

Excellent Idea for a series..love it.

The Amiga 1000 is a great looking machine. Great video!

Fantastic episode - thank you!

Finally! The missing piece of the puzzle. Enjoyed this episode so much. Can't wait for the rest.

Seeing the actual piece of hardware that created the phrase "guru meditation error" was worth it. Yes perfect standing on that widget was "guru meditation", a fall to a side would be a, you guessed it a "guru meditation error". Amiga kept that as their standard error message.

Brilliant! Cannot wait for the rest.

Absolutely awesome!

I'm guessing the joysticks mentioned in that issue of Byte were "The Power-Stick", which were definitely released, I have several of them. They were little hand-held sticks. Quite awful to use, actually. :-)

Love to watch this after work while I'm eating dinner. :)

You, sir, are an expert storyteller. Thank you for this peaceful review of wonderful pioneering technology.

Yes! I cannot wait for the next episode!

The "Amiga 3100" controller that is advertised is referring to the product code for the "Amiga Power-Stick" controller. It was printed on the back of the box as "#3100".

Excellent video! Thx!

i love your trash to treasure series

Nice video and good way to explore the topic through the pages of Byte magazine. One of my regrets from my visit to the cave was to spend more time at the library, next time 😋

This is quality content! Well done

Murder gloves amused me! Great video as always!

Can't wait to watch this one! I just scored a free Amiga 1000 (and 64C and plus/4 in the box and 1541 in the box and Mac Color Classic) yesterday! ;)

What a beast :) really looking forward the next parts

If I could add just one more system to my collection, it would easily be the 1000. Just so rare to find in the States, and when you do, they're so expensive. Someday.

You're better than many professional journos. What a great watch!

I’m looking forward to seeing the finished machine. Definitely think you should retrobrite it. Will look amazing. Great video as always. 👍🏻

A smoker must have placed it on his desk facing away from a panoramic window.

I definitely vote for retro bright. It always looks better and I believe it can fix some of the brittleness of the plastic.

Man that episode really flew by, I can't wait to see more! Never seen an A1000 in person (only A500, A1200 and A4000) it's a beaut! Hope to be able to fly over to the UK and see it in the cave one day!

First ten minutes was like Jackanory for nerds, loved it :)

And yes I did have one. So much goofy upgrades to play games. But I got mine in the later years and they were common. Other than a few "glitches" that involved jumpers it ran every A500 game.

The murder gloves 😂 very interesting concept acting as a buyer and reading “updates” to make your decision! Looking forward to future videos in this series

Bring it back to the former glory!

Kickstart on Disk was a handy feature. My original A500 was KS1.2 and would have cost quite a bit to upgrade to 1.3 via a ROM swap. With the A1000 it was just another floppy disk.

Very interesting. I would put the case on a electric jewelry roundabout and leave it in the sun for a few days.

To quote Coldplay, it was all yellow. Given how brittle that cover was, I would go for just cleaning rather than Retrobrite.

Epic machine, I restored one a few months ago

Your boots are awesome!

I still own and occasionally run my amiga 1000 which I bought new when it was introduced. It came with kickstart and workbench 1.1

Another great viddy thanks I have the 2000 with the maths co processor & when it came out would watch Red Sector demo daily before schooling

Loved the box Amigas at uni lots of early adopters had A2000 often with a pc bridge board. About a year later lots and lots of a500s descended on the population

I really like the way the story is told, tbh otherwise I might have switched off as I'm not a huge Amiga fan, but this really brought the moment in time back to life

I wouldn't usually say retrobrite but it definitely needs it!

you could use some white board marker on the signatures inside the case to highlight them in black then take a photo of them. then you can make a poster or something to put on the wall i think that would be a nice display piece

Glad to see another trash to treasure. In school my friend's older brother had an Amiga 1000 while we played on hid C64c

I was an Atari 8-bit guy back then. I remember hearing the rumors about the Amiga and talking about them online in the pre-internet Compuserve Atari forums. The rumor had it that the machine could do Saturday morning cartoon level animation.... and I wanted one. 🙂 BTW, the keyboard cable looks like a modular phone cable, but it's actually a handset cable.

The joyboard looks a lot like being an inspiration to the LJN Roll n' Rock controller for the NES, nice to see a wierd controller

I love the narrative as a user reading BYTE and deciding on an Amiga. I think you should retrobright it, and make it as pristine as you can. Then at the end of the series it is as though your new Amiga finally shipped, and you've set it up for the first time. Maybe a follow up series detailing what upgrades that user might do over time based on the ads section of computer magazines of the era if you can find those.

11:40 ish - I'd go with scrub keys, retrobright keyboard and paint shell.

First. Also, the A1000 was NEVER trash!