Today, July 23rd 2014, the Amiga turns 29: it was presented in 1985. That year my parents bought a Commodore 128, while my first Amiga, model 500, arrived in 1988. As always I won’t discuss the technical details of this revolutionary computer, but I will pay my tribute with a set of photographs.
I bought this Amiga in 2005; it was an NTSC version, maybe one of the first units imported to Italy before Commodore officialy began selling it in this country. Oddly enough, I never opened it, I never saw how it was made “inside”… until today!
The Commodore logo doesn’t appear anywhere; later revisions of the computer and the monitor had the brand printed on the cases with the institutional blue and red colours.
Some views of the computer:
These are the ports on the back, with pictures of the matching icons:
The keyboard can be hidden under the Amiga:
The mouse has a peculiar connector compared to the subsequent models:
I don’t have the manuals; I only have the Kickstart, Workbench and Extras floppy disks, version 1.1.
Here’s the keyboard, US layout:
The next picture is in black and white to enhance the signatures on the interior of the top case.
To create the transparency effect in the next image, I took two pictures with the camera on a tripod:
The exploded view is a kind of habit, and a computer like this one deserved all the time devoted to the shooting of the pictures and the post-processing in PhotoShop…
Here are the motherboard and daughterboard; most of the PAL units had all the ICs on a single board.
All the integrated circuits have a datecode of mid 1985. Only a couple of them have later dates: the Denise chip, probably upgraded because early units didn’t support a special graphic mode (Extra Half Brite), and the Paula chip, maybe replaced after a failure.
The motherboard is the very first official revision, marked as REV 6:
A couple of pictures of the internal of the 1080 monitor:
Not even the label on the back has the Commodore logo…
The TV modulator and switch box:
One last picture of the complete system, with the R•Type game on screen:
Wow, you do some beautiful work! Very nice.
Thanks :-)
Very nice pictures!
Looks really like new and made for a product flyer.
Also the transparent case and the isometric view of the right top side looks very interesting.
Almost like a CAD view :)
Does exist a hi-res version of the picture with the transparent case ?
Agree with Frank, any Hi-Resolution from this pics?
Sorry but I can’t give away high resolution pictures. If you need them for some particular use (e.g. for an article in a magazine) please write to me through the “Contact me” page.
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Perfect images!
What was the connector on the front used for?
The exploded view of the A1000 is amazing, still one of my favourite Amiga Models, while I never owned this one (hopefully oneday) came be to search for good image references to build a 3D model.
This is an extremely lovely and well done post. As an A1000 user, I commend you for doing the system both historical and pictorial justice. Bravo!
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Incredible! I love it!