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The Amiga 500.
The Commodore Amiga 500. One of the most well documented computers ever made, the distilled, cost reduced version of the original Amiga 1000, which itself was a marvel of technology at time of launch.
Released in 1987, the 500 was positioned as the successor to the Commodore 64 and a direct competitor to the Atari ST. It featured Motorola's 68000 CPU, which was used in loads of famous machines of that era including the original Mac, the ST and the MegaDrive, among others, as well as the Amiga OCS chipset, allowing up to 32 colours from 4096 with four channels of 8-bit audio.
It was an absolute weapon for digital art, music production, it could run a mean spreadsheet... oh yeah... and it could play games real good.
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Motorola 68000 @
7MHz 512K Chip RAM,
512K Slow RAM, 2MB Fast RAM 200MB SCSI hard
disk (Amiga A590) NEC V30 @ 11MHz
(KCS Power PC) Commodore 1084S
monitor Kickstart 1.3,
Workbench 1.3Looking like a gigantic version of the best selling computer of all time, the Amiga 500 followed the trend of the era of a console-style computer with all the peripherals integrated into the keyboard. And what a keyboard - my example features the NMB HiTek mechanical keyboard and is an absolute pleasure to type on.
My machine is currently using a Revision 5 motherboard that's been cleaned up, with a KCS Power PC memory expansion / PC emulation card in the trapdoor and an A590 sidecar hard disk expansion with 2MB RAM. Running Workbench 1.3 from a hard disk is a very... eye opening experience.
The Amiga 500 was the first computer our family owned, bought new in 1989 while I was the tender age of 5. This example is not our original - it was destroyed by a surge event, victim of living in the countryside at the time. This example was purchased from an ewaste facility for the whopping sum of... $1.50. Seriously, those deals simply don't exist now!
I've opted to keep this one OEM+ rather than filling it with modern upgrades.