The Amiga 2000 was introduced
in January of 1987 along with the Amiga
500. The Amiga
2000 was designed to appeal to anyone who likes the Amiga
for its fast processing and superlative graphics, but who
also wants the ability to run IBM
PC software. The A2000 was actually two machines in
one, it was first a Commodore computer capable of the
fantastic graphics and sound with a large library of
games, and second an IBM clone completely compatible with
the entire DOS based software library. The engineers at
Commodore built a PC
ISA bus into the motherboard and
integrated it into the Amiga architecture. Through the
installation of what was called a Bridgeboard, (an entire
PC on a plug-in board), the Amiga's Zorro II bus and the ISA bus are
joined allowing the Intel processor to share the internal
resources such as RAM
and hard drives.
The basic Amiga came with one
3.5 inch floppy drive, seven expansion slots, three drive
bays, and a 200 watt power supply, all for under $1500.
The keyboard and mouse/joystick ports are located on the
bottom right-hand side of the front of the computer. The
rear of the machine has standard PC type connectors for
the RS232 serial ports and parallel printer ports. Also
are connectors for connecting a Commodore RGB monitor and
outputs for stereo audio.
The A2000 uses a
Motorola
68000
processor running at 7.14 MHz, this is a 16/32 bit
processor, the same processor used in the Macintosh.
Unlike the A500, the A2000 came with the built in ability
to be easily upgraded to a faster processor by dropping
an upgrade card into a special 86 pin processor slot
inside the machine. The A2000 comes with 1MB of RAM expandable to 9 MB with an expansion card.
A hard drive is added by
dropping in an A2090A/ A2091 Hard Card ( a hard disk
mounted on an ST 506 compatible expansion card ) or an
IDE hard drive can be added using a IDE controller card.
As with the A500 the Kickstart disk has been replaced by
burning it into a ROM
chip to speed up the boot process.
The seven expansion slots extend
the Amiga system's bus and provide slots for IBM ISA
cards. Five of these are 100 pin Amiga Zorro II slots and two are
ISA specific. However two of the 100 pin slots can be
used as ISA slots bringing the total ISA slots to four.
The two ISA
slots were originally designed for use with
the 8088/8086 processor making them 8-bit slots, but
Commodore predrilled the 16-bit extenders on these slots
to make it possible to add in 16-bit AT type cards.
The Amiga that you see above is
a basic machine with 2 extra MB of RAM added and an extra
880k 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. I purchased it at a local
thrift shop as a backup for my A2000HD that is set up in
my workshop.
