Encyclopedia of General Culture

Amiga 1000[EXTRACT]

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Amiga 1000 (1985)

The A1000, or Commodore Amiga 1000, was Commodore's initial Amiga multimedia home/personal computer, released in the summer of 1985 at an original retail price of US$1,295 without a monitor. A 13-inch analog RGB monitor was available for around US$300. Before the follow-up A500 and A2000 models were released in 1987, the A1000 was usually just called the Amiga.

The A1000 had a number of characteristics that distinguished it from later Amigas: It was the only model to feature the short-lived Amiga "checkmark" logo on its case; the case was elevated slightly to give a storage area for the keyboard when not in use (a "keyboard garage"); and the inside of the case was engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers, including Jay Miner and the paw print of his dog Mitchy.

Many A1000 owners remained attached to their machines long after newer models rendered the units technically obsolete, and it attracted numerous aftermarket upgrades. Many CPU upgrades that plugged into the Motorola 68000 socket functioned in the A1000. Additionally, a line of products called the Rejuvinator series allowed the use of newer chipsets in the A1000, and an Australian-designed replacement A1000 motherboard called The Phoenix utilized the same chipset as the A3000 and added an A2000-compatible video slot and onboard SCSI.

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1 Writable Control Store
2 Technical specifications
3 The two versions of the A1000
4 External links

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Writable Control Store

Because AmigaOS was rather buggy at the time of the A1000's release, the OS was not placed in ROM. Instead, the A1000 included a daughterboard with 256 KB of RAM, dubbed the "Writable Control Store" (WCS), into which the operating system was booted from floppy disk (the disk containing the 256 KB image was called "Kickstart"). The WCS was write-protected after loading, and system resets did not require a reload of the WCS.

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Technical specifications

Jay Miner's signature from the top cover of a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer. The paw print is that of Mitch, Miner's dog.

Motorola 68000 (32-bit CISC microprocessor with 16 registers lacking MMU for memory protection and virtual memory).
Default operating system AmigaOS 1.0/1.1/1.2 loaded from the Kickstart floppy disk at power-on (having 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking microkernel)
256 KB of Chip RAM by default, with an additional 256 KB provided by a dedicated cartridge (sound buffers, graphics buffers and software existed in same memory space)
- Practical upper limit of about 9 MB of memory due to MC68000 limitations (24-bit external address bus)
OCS chipset
50 Hz PAL and 60 Hz NTSC TV output by default versions available (PAL versions sold in Europe and Australia)
One expansion port for add-ons (memory, SCSI adaptor, etc), electrically identical to the Amiga 500 expansion port.
- Resources handled by AutoConfig

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The two versions of the A1000

There were two versions of the Amiga 1000. The first one was sold only in Canada and the United States, had a NTSC display and lacked the EHB video mode which all other models of the Amiga had. Later versions of this version would have this video mode built in. The second one had a PAL display, the enhanced video modes (EHB) and was built in Germany.

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