The
Amiga 500 was introduced in
January of 1987 along with the Amiga 2000. It was
designed to bring the powerful 32 bit 68000 processor;
the same processor used in the Macintosh, into the home
computer market previously dominated by the highly
successful C-64.
The two
computers were designed to replace the somewhat
successful Amiga 1000 introduced in mid 1985. Commodore
realized that to crack the highly competitive home
market, it would need to lower the price of the A500 to be
competitive, the original A1000 sold for a list price of
$1295 when it was introduced. Commodore introduced the
A500 at a list price of $595.95.
In order to get down to this the
A500 when through some major design changes. The most
obvious change was to the computers appearance. The first
to go was the detachable keyboard and IBM style CPU box
to sit the monitor on. The A500 was made to look more
like the C128 with the keyboard placed in a plastic
housing and placed on top of the motherboard all in one
unit.
To further cut costs, new custom
chips and gate arrays were designed to take over
functions previously performed by off the shelf chips.
For example, the Agnus chip was redesigned to become the
Fat Agnus chip and incorporated all the surrounding
support circuitry of the chip. More powerful chips mean
less complex, easier to build motherboards.
Another major change was to put
the 'Kickstart' into ROM. The Kickstart is the Amiga's
operating system which had previously been disk based for
the A1000, and had to be loaded into a specially
protected 256k part of RAM
called WCS (Writeable Control
Store). This was a welcome improvement because the floppy
load was time consuming.
The A500 also came with 512k of
user RAM easily expandable to 1 MB with the insertion of
a memory cartridge that plugged into a compartment on the
underside of the unit. It could also be expanded to
maximum of 9 MB through the expansion port on the left
side of the unit. There are two game controller ports
located on the back of the computer.
The computer's great graphics
capability requires an RGB monitor, in fact there is no
hookup for a television or composite color monitor,
although it does have a mono output for a hi-res
monochrome monitor to do word processing applications. It
uses standard RS232 and Centronics parallel printer
interfacing and has a built in 3.5 inch - 880k floppy
drive on the right side.
