Paul's Amiga 500 Tribute page

My Amiga 500 with a 1084s monitor and the 1011 disk drive

This page is a tribute to one of the greatest home computers of all time: The Commodore Amiga 500. Click on the pictures in this tribute to see a larger resolution of each picture, if you wish, but be sure to have Javascript enabled in your browser first.

My Amiga's serial number!

The Amiga 500 was my first "Real" computer. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20, followed by a Commodore 64. However, the Vic and the C64 were, to me, mostly "Toy" computers from my youth. Oh, sure, I had productivity applications and GEOS, and these would get the job done. However, the Commodore 64 was still limited in so many respects. The Amiga 500, on the other hand, didn't seem to have any limits. Indeed, it was the stuff that dreams were made of; it was the future!

The back of my A500's box, showing all the things it can do!

To compare the Amiga 500 to the Commodore 64, or any other computer of its era, would be totally unfair. It was a machine that was many years ahead of its time when it was introduced as the Amiga 1000 in 1985. So much so that when Commodore introduced the Amiga 500 two years later (alongside the A2000), the hardware was left unchanged, yet it still outclassed everything in and even many computers above its price range! The Amiga 500 had no equal. As such, I was very excited to get my very own Amiga 500. So it was in 1988, at the age of 17, I sold off all of my 8 bit Commodore 64 stuff, and bravely put that money towards a brand new Amiga 500 with a matching 1084s monitor. It was time for me to grow up, and I was determined to do that with the best computer ever made.

The Amiga 500's built in 880k 3.5" floppy disk drive

The Amiga 500 was an exceptional machine, in every respect. Consider video games. Up until the Amiga 500, home computer users were thrilled if a video game "Approached" or "Neared" arcade quality. We had accepted it as a given that a reasonably priced home computer couldn't really compete with a dedicated arcade machine. That all changed with the Amiga 500, which not only brought true arcade quality into the hands of home computer owners, it was actually used in real arcade video games! To this day, A500 games are a sheer pleasure to play. Realistic colours, high resolution screens, smooth animation, stereo sound...it really did have it all. The downside to this was that it caused the A500 to become pigeon-holed as a video game machine.

Stock A500 with A501 running DigiPaint

The Amiga 500 was much more than a game machine. The CPU was supplimented with custom co-processors, so that, for example, even while displaying a high resolution picture or animation in hundreds or even thousands of colours, the main processor was hardly strained. This was unheard of in 1988! In addition, it came with a very sophisticated multitasking graphical operating system with a very powerful command line. Certain elements of the OS were resident on a ROM Kickstart chip, while the rest loaded in from an 880k floppy. It was compact enough that one could also include a sophisticated application along with the OS on the same floppy diskette.  Early A500's came with Kickstart and Workbench 1.2, while later ones shipped with version 1.3. All could easily be upgraded to the latest kickstart and OS by replacing the ROM.

Workbench 1.3, default colour scheme

It was, for its day, an operating system that was unlike anything ever seen on a home computer; it was more like those found on powerful and expensive workstations. The graphical elements were in the ROM, but it was not a purely graphical OS. Upon booting, one sees text in a big Command Line Interface (CLI) window that fills the screen; it could prompt for the date and time or some other parameters, if necessary. The graphical part with icons was called Intuition. It wasn't necessary to load Intuition to use the Amiga; it just made things a little nicer for those new to the system. Like Linux today, the real power is in the command line.

The bottom side ofthe A500

What really set the Amiga 500 apart from everything else was its ability to multitask; something taken for granted today. To illustrate how this was a great advantage, consider this scenario: I would start things off by playing some MOD music in my music player, and leave it running in the background. Next, I'd launch my favourite terminal program to download some new files from my favourite BBS. Leaving that to download in the background, I'd then load up my word processor to work on a project. I might need to cite some material I recently received in an e-mail, so I'd open up my offline mail reader, check my e-mail, and copy and paste the selected portion. What made this remarkable were two things: One, each program was written by different people and/or different companies, completely independent of each other; yet they all ran together flawlessly. The other was the fact that each program appears to run as well as though it had the whole machine to itself! Even though the CPU ran at a rather pedestrian 7.12 Mhz, the co-processors took a lot of load off of the CPU, making the only limitation the amount of RAM installed. As you can see, multitasking isn't just about me doing more than one thing at once, but rather giving the computer a bunch of tasks to perform in the same frame of time. This is what made the A500 a wonderful time-saver!

The famous "Trap Door" expansion slot

The Amiga 500 initially shipped with 512k of RAM. There wasn't much multitasking a person could do with 512k especially with graphics-intensive programs. It was fine for word processing, games, drawing pictures, playing music, and playing around with BASIC programs, but it wasn't long before many A500 owners ran into the limits of 512k. Thus, a common and inexpensive upgrade for many Amiga 500 owners was the A501, which plugged into the "Trap door" expansion slot on the bottom of the A500, giving it a full 1MB of RAM and a battery backed-up clock. For all intents and purposes, this turned an Amiga 500 into a stock Amiga 2000, but without all the slots.

The famous A501 "Trap door" expander

My Amiga 500 served as my main and only computer from 1988 until 1994; a span of six years! During that time, I had added peripherals; each one dramatically expanding the usefulness of this machine. Besides the A501, I also added the external A1011 disk drive, which allowed me to have my OS on one disk, and apps and files on another. This really cut down on disk swapping, an annoyance common with single disk drive A500 owners. With the addition of an Epson LX-810 dot matrix printer connected to the standard parallel port, I could print out all of my assignments, letters, and resumes. I even got into some desktop publishing! The standard serial port worked with standard serial modems, and I spent a lot of time on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS's) with my mail order Hayes-compatible 2400 baud modem. It seemed as though there wasn't anything I couldn't connect to my Amiga.

The Amiga 500 offered very generous peripheral connectivity, all across the back

One of the Amiga 500's best kept secrets is its edge connector. It is, for all intents and purposes, a Zorro II slot just like that found in an Amiga 2000, but without the slot. This made it possible for hardware developers to develop things such as hard drives and memory expansion for both the A500 and A2000 computers in tandem, without needing to make a whole lot of changes. For example, many memory expansion and hard disk controller cards were essentially copied over to the Amiga 500.

The A500's edge connector exposed

One interesting piece of hardware I came across for my A500 was a slingshot expansion slot. It effectively gave the A500 a single Zorro II slot. I successfully used an old A2090 hard drive controller with an old 20MB hard drive. The drawback was that it took up an awful lot of desk space. However, it did prove that the A500 was basically an A2000, and its potential really was unlimited!

The "Slingshot" expansion card gives the A500 one A2000 slot

Alas, such is life that all good things must come to an end. By the early 1990's, the Amiga 500's capabilities were starting to become matched or surpassed with PC's and Macs. By 1994, when Commodore went out of business, my Amiga 500 was clearly outdated. Keeping it up to date was becoming expensive, and the parts were growing increasingly difficult to find. The internet was just starting to become available to the public, so on-line resources such as eBay did not exist. I was pursuing a career in the computer industry, and realized that there was no money to be made with Amiga; it was all PC.

The power switch is located on the rather weak power supply

My trusty Amiga 500 had served me well, providing me with entertainment, acting as a global communication tool, and providing me with everything I needed to get my essays and assignments done on time. I had used it well into my College years, most of the time without a hard drive and with a 2400 baud modem. My career path demanded knowledge and skill with PC's; nobody seemed to care for Amiga skills. I did run a PC emulator on it for a while; as well, I had a CrossDOS utility letting me read and write PC disks. My experience with AmigaDOS prepared me well for the world of MS-DOS (which was a lot simpler and less powerful); as well, the Amiga pepared me for programming. I do confess that I could have accomplished a lot of this with a Commodore 64, or any computer for that matter; but the Amiga always left me in awe. Alas, in 1994, it simply could not keep up to my demands without a considerable investment of money; so it came to be, in 1994, I officially "Retired" my six year old Amiga 500 and built a PC.

The box in which I store my trusty A500

While I have long since replaced my first, second, and subsequent PC clones, I've always kept my Amiga 500 with me. The box has become ratty, the case and keys have yellowed a bit, but gosh darn, it still works! What a great computer, with some great memories. I'm so glad I got to spend time with the wonderful Amiga 500.

Want more? I've created an online photo album of A500-related pictures complete with picture descriptions; Click Here to see.

Amiga 500 specifications: