Launched:
1991
This is widely known as the
shortest-lived Amiga ever, lasting only 6 months until it was phased out by the
A600. This was yet another of Commodores secrets with many people opening their
Amigas at Christmas expecting to find a A500 only to find something much better.
It looked physically similar to the A500,
but updated it with 1mb of ram, Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and Workbench 2.0 which
turned the horrible blue interface of workbench 1.3 into a much more lovely grey
and blue.
It also allowed the user to see
files that did not have icons without resorting to the CLI and put among other
things the FastFileSystem into ROM (Kickstart) allowing you to boot from FFS
disks containing 880k of data.
----Technical Specs ----
* Differences
to A500 are highlighted in bold italics *
- Motorola MC68000 Processor
- Enhanced Chipset (ECS)
- 7.16 MHz CPU
- 512k Chip RAM or 1 megabyte
Chip RAM on motherboard
- Maximum 1 megabyte Chip
RAM
- 512k Fast RAM in trapdoor
expansion bus (optional)
- Maximum 8 megabytes Fast RAM
- 1 megabyte RAM on
motherboard
- 256k ROM or 512k ROM on
motherboard
- 3.5 drive bay 2.5 drive
mountable
- 3.5 880K internal floppy
drive
- Integrated keyboard
- 2 button mouse
- A1000 sidecar expansion bus
- A500 trapdoor expansion bus
- Compact case
- External power supply port
- External floppy drive port
- RS-232 serial port
- Centronics parallel port
- 2 mouse/joystick ports
- Monochrome composite video
port
- 15kHz colour RGB analogue
video port
- 2 stereo audio output ports
