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Powering up the past: Ars goes hands-on with the Amiga 500

Commodore's "Rock Lobster" brought low-cost 32-bit (sort of) computing to the masses.

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of Amiga, the PC line from Commodore that tried to fight the growing IBM PC hegemony in the spirit of the Commodore 64. And despite being unaware of the Amiga's birthday, I somehow managed to recently publish two brief tours of landmark computers from the 1980s: the Apple II Plus, which I had rescued from my parents' attic, and the TRS-80 Model 100, which I won on eBay with a bid of $35. This sparked an e-mail from Ars reader Dave Hough, and the subject line said it all: "would you like another old computer - amiga 500."

Dave was clearing things out and wanted to find a good home for his Amiga 500—the computer upon which his kids first learned to program. Who was I to say no?

This past Saturday, I met up with Dave and picked up a box filled with not just the 500, but a host of attachments and accessories—everything but the monitor. Fortunately, there was an RGB to composite video adapter in the box as well, so I didn't have to go on a great search for RGB-to-VGA converters. The box even included something more valuable: a SupraDrive hard drive.

The Amiga 500 was built on the same processor that powered Apple's first Macintosh, a Motorola 68000. Like the Mac, it has a graphical user interface (Workbench), but the 500's designers took a slightly different tack than Steve Jobs' Mac team did when trying to create a simple and easy-to-use computer. The 500 had elements in common with the Commodore 64, the Apple II, and early game consoles. Presumably, one of the driving forces behind the design decisions was the price tag: $595 in 1987.

The 500's body included a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive on its right side. And in a limited nod to expandability, there's a peripheral bus slot on the left side. The bus allowed expansion of the system without having to make the computer itself that accessible—suddenly, users could add a hard drive without cracking the case.

Dave's Amiga 500 now joins our other two recent acquisitions in the Ars Tech Lab, but it has the unique advantage of being somewhat intact. Dave provided us all the core documentation, original software disks, optical mouse, and joystick. With that kind of firepower, we're looking forward to figuring out how far we can push the 500 into the 21st century. Anybody know a good Web browser for Workbench?

Channel Ars Technica