My father bought me an Amiga 1000 at a Federated Group store in late 1985.
Coming from a C64, my mind was blown by the Amiga's graphics and the multi-tasking. I could run the amazing RoboCity animation demo and then drag it down half way and see my Workbench.
Marble Madness on the Amiga looked and sounded just like the arcade.
1985 was a magical year in general for me, but a big part of that magic was conjured by the Amiga.
Same story here. Christmas 1985. I remember distinctly how my dad showed me how to type "DPaint" at the "CLI>" line, and the magic that followed.
He made friends with a sales guy at Federated, so we got a bootleg copy of Workbench 1.2 when it came out.
I used that computer daily for over ten years. From 1st grade through my junior year of high school. While the TV played advertisements for Windows 95 in the background, I was still plugging away on my A1000 (with upgrades, of course. I had 2MB of RAM and a second floppy drive. Never had a hard drive or modem, though!)
I still have it in a closet. It booted up about ten years ago, but I'm afraid to power it up now without taking a look at all the capacitors.
The earlier machines had much higher quality capacitors that are mostly still OK afaik. Consensus (if I may be so bold as to try to represent it) in the Amiga community today is: definitely recap the later Amigas (A600, A1200, A4000, CD32) with their cheaper SMT caps that usually leak and slowly destroy the motherboard, but A1000* and A500 usually don’t need it.
*The caps on the motherboard, anyway. I am not sure about the durability of the internal PSUs. I haven’t bothered to replace anything in either of the A1000s I acquired recently.
I recall the sales guy giving us copies of something too!
I used the icon editor until I got Deluxe Paint. My first real job was doing graphics for a couple of game companies, mainly cross-platform conversions by hand.
I still have my A1000 keyboard and the manuals and quite a few floppies, but the main unit kicked the bucket.
There's still a big Amiga scene and an active forum community over at https://eab.abime.net/
Thank you for sharing! A year or two after you got your 1000, my dad bought the family an Amiga 500. It began my love of computing, gave me a scrappy hacker mind set (owning an Amiga in the US a rarity), and ultimately sowed the seeds of my career.
Coming from a C64, my mind was blown by the Amiga's graphics and the multi-tasking. I could run the amazing RoboCity animation demo and then drag it down half way and see my Workbench.
Marble Madness on the Amiga looked and sounded just like the arcade.
1985 was a magical year in general for me, but a big part of that magic was conjured by the Amiga.