So recently me any my parents went out to pick up a shop smith. Its this giant ungodly contraption that is a bandsaw a lathe and a table saw all at once. Its great! So we saw the people’s property and they showed us around (it was fucking beautiful like holy shit its smack dab in the center of 3 lakes in the middle of the woods and the bats are always out because the forest is so dark so theres no bugs UGH IT WAS SO GREAT) and we walk into their barn to see this holy shit machine and I turn and see this.
And I’m like “Oh cool an amiga” and turn back to the machine. WAIT WHAT? AN AMIGA?
For those who don’t know I fucking love amiga’s but the NTSC models for America are pretty rare in all honesty. They were here, its just that MSDOS machines, IBM DOS machines, and CP\M machines were way more popular here (for the most part). So to see that thing… It was amazing. Turns out the guy is like 87 or 88 and fighting cancer for the second time. He can’t feel anything in his hands or feet anymore and he’s trying to get rid of stuff but in the appropriate way. He really didn’t want to have it all get scattered all over the place and he has had this computer for over 25 years. When he saw that I knew what it was and that I knew about them he was trying to sell it to me. 30 bucks total, and you wouldn’t believe what he had with it.
Every piece of documentation. When he had it serviced and refreshed in 2002 (has a new battery in it, no worries there :3 ), all the docs for the printer he had, all the original disks, all the amiga basic stuff, all the from-factory documentation about the upgrades that had to be made because the 3000 was a pain in the ass to get in the mid-west so it was easier to just throw a 68020 inside instead of keep the stock 68000 in there, everything. Literally every paper that could be packaged with this thing is. Its great. But I feel kinda bad. This was basically his center thing for years. He used to be a minister, and until 2005 he was using this amiga as his main machine. He had an HP printer plugged up to it that was rather modern in all honesty, but worked, and all his sermons on floppies. I kinda wanted the floppies because I don’t have many DD disks, so we made a deal that I could keep them IF I could get the sermens to him in a text format on a USB or something (its like 30 some years of his lifes work so I can see that). I use AROS so that should be easy enough.
I honestly wanted him to donate it to a computer museum somewhere with the amount of stuff he had with it. There aren’t any add-in cards or anything, but thu original KB and Mouse, Commodore 1010 monitor, and the (1015?) external 3 1/2 floppy drive. It has another 3.5 floppy drive internally, maxed out 9mb of ram, and a Fat Agnus chip paired with that 68020. Been working on cleaning it since last night getting it home and I think I got it all done pretty well. KB was the hardest part actually but I’ll do that in a post below.
Its beautiful. Its not the most collectible amiga available, but fuck it its mine and I love it.
I know the amiga story front to back. Even some of the stories about the first sales and how people couldn’t just use the keyboard for everything and some sent theirs back. I find it pretty funny.
