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Desktops and mini PCs · Commodore Amiga

Commodore Amiga 1000

8owners with an opinion
62%of verdicts positive
5/3positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and design; criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Likes it
In hindsight, I think it was. The built in MIDI is extremely useful. The high resoution B&W monitor with high refresh rate as well. My main complaint is that it should have came with the YM2203 sound chip, or at least had an optional card slot for it. It turns out that the Amiga chipset design did not age well, once CPU's became faster than RAM. The Amiga had a design flaw where it could not be used reliably for MIDI, because every so often an interrupt would get masked, resulting in dropped bytes from the serial port.
Doesn’t like it
When the first mentions and prototypes of the Amiga started surfacing in 1984, I began saving my paper-route money to buy one. I finally got it on the first day I could. It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined. What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability. It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.
Likes itStill going
Indeed, I got my first Amiga in October 1985 - I believe it was the first Amiga sold in Virginia (U.S.) and one of the first ever sold - period. https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a... I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid. 1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92. I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.
Doesn’t like it
Having come from an 8-bit micro with ROM BASIC to the Amiga 1000 in 1985, I too was excited when I read about AmigaBASIC. It really seemed next gen. Unfortunately, once I started actually trying to do interesting things with it, I found it was surprisingly slow compared my 8-bit micro's ROM BASIC. Of course even though the 8-bit was only running at ~1Mhz compared to the Amiga's ~7Mhz, the 8-bit's ROM BASIC was written in hand-coded assembler (and by some really good programmers, including BillG himself (in the case of the Radio Shack Color Computer I used)). I think AmigaBASIC must have been written in C and designed with portability in mind.
Likes it
Nice restoration and article, thanks! I bought my Amiga 1000 in 1986. I loved it. I was learning animation using Hash Inc's Animation:Master. People get impatient with web page loads today, but boy, waiting for a low-res animation to render could teach you patience! I had started in 1977 with a Commodore PET 2001, and was a Commodore person until I bought an Apple PowerPC and loaded MkLinux with the Mach microkernel on it. Later Minix was my choice. I always rooted for Minix over Linux years later, and I still think a microkernel is better than a monolithic one. Sadly, my Amiga 1000 was stolen from my NYC apartment in 1988, while I was at work.They left the HP laser printer which was more valuable at the time. I learned animation, kept up with programming from my PET days, and got into music trackers. I never bought an A2000 or A3000 or had a VideoToaster, although I really wanted one. Apple one the print/graphics market and Commodore lost its multimedia market with it. The Amiga will always be my favorite Commodore. I had a Vic-20 and a C-128 at one point too.
Neutral
Seeing beginner ray-tracing experiments evokes not-so-fond memories of my own first experiences with ray-tracing (and 3D rendering of any kind). Around 1987 I tried a brand new ray tracing program called Sculpt 3D on my Commodore Amiga 1000 (7Mhz 68000 / 512K RAM). I'd been lured into buying the software (for $99 IIRC) when I saw a looping ray-traced animation called The Juggler at a local user group meeting ( http://www.etwright.org/cghist/juggler.html ). This despite the salesman at the computer shop warning me, "Yeah, so... 3D is really hard and slow." With no knowledge, experience or clue I enthusiastically raced home to boot up the diskette and dive into what I naively imagined would be a journey toward making my own Tron-like images. I cracked open the manual and pretty quickly figured out how to create a new scene, add a sphere to it and apply what promised to be a shiny chrome texture to the sphere. Of course without rendering it all I could see on the screen was a wireframe. So I anxiously clicked the magic Render button and the screen went black. I knew the results wouldn't be instant so I went and made a sandwich for lunch. Upon returning to check in on my masterpiece, the screen was still completely black. I went and watched a TV show. Still nothing on the screen yet. I went out and did some errands. Still nothing but black. After dinner, I checked back and finally saw the "Render Complete!" message. But the screen was still completely black. I went to bed demora…
Doesn’t like it
As someone who followed the development of the Amiga and then bought the Amiga 1000 (plus everything else I could afford with my paper route earnings) the first day it was available -- I do NOT yearn to relive those days. I loved it then and as documented everywhere, it was a head of its time. However, the instability of software and how much Commodore didn't iterate on the technology -- that's what killed the Amiga. I still have PTSD from all the insane amount of crashing and rebooting my setup did.
Doesn’t like it
The most interesting thing is how hard the true believers find it to let go of the past. I bought one of the first Amigas - I own 2 Amiga 1000's and several others. But for me they are nothing but items in a curiosity cabinet. Other people seem to deeply engage emotionally with some sort of alternate fictional future in which technology X or technology Y was recognised for its true destiny and never defeated by IBM/Microsoft whoever. Computing moved on an other systems became much better. Don't waste your life living in the past. Just drop that dead technology and move on and stop investing yourself in a fantasy world.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
In the home computer universe, such computers were the first ones having a programmable graphics unit that did more than paste the framebuffer into the screen. While the PCs were still displaying text, or if you were lucky to own an Hercules card, gray text, or maybe a CGA one, with 4 colours. While the Amigas, which I am more confortable with, were doing this in the mid-80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Px-ZkObTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A The original Amiga 1000, had on its motherboard, later reduced to fit into an Amiga 500, Motorola 68000 CPU, a programmable sounds chip with DMA channels (Paula), and a programable blitter chip (Agnus aka early GPUs). You would build in RAM the audio, or graphics instructions for the respetive chipset, set the DMA parameters, and let them lose.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
I have to say, I love the industrial design of these 80s machines from Atari, and also from contemporary Commodore offerings. As an example, the original Amiga 1000 is beautiful , and I'd be incredibly happy to have a machine with that form factor, but equipped with modern internals, today. Honestly, I don't think even Apple could touch the best of Atari and Commodore industrial design in the back half of the 1980s. To be blunt, the early Macintoshs simply weren't practical in their design: for starters, a tiny monitor - that was originally black and white (which in 1984 was already kind of a joke) - and very limited upgradeability, relatively poor multimedia capabilities (speech synthesis was no more than a gimmick that was also available on other platforms), and then the whole aesthetic just wasn't that pleasant. And I say this as someone who, personally, has only owned Apple machines for the past 15ish years, so I'm not exactly coming at this from a "not a fanboi" perspective. I'd still take 1980s Atari or Commodore aesthetic over modern Apple, or modern anything else for that matter[0]. Also, as an aside, I really enjoyed seeing "Atari Means Business with the Mega ST" as the top headline on Hacker News in 2025. Even on a Sunday when content typically tends to be more varied and interesting this was still an entertaining surprise. [0] I suspect the reality may be that I'm an "anything but Wintel" kind of person, although not at any cost, because I did run PCs exclusi…