3 ms·

I'm looking at an advert in Amiga Format 54 (the Christmas 1993 edition from 29 years ago)... probably the pinnacle of the Amiga's popularity. Here are some sam

I'm looking at an advert in Amiga Format 54 (the Christmas 1993 edition from 29 years ago)... probably the pinnacle of the Amiga's popularity. Here are some sample prices: Amiga 600 standalone: £194.99 Amiga 1200 standalone: £289.99 20MB HDD £89.99 60MB HDD £179.99 80MB HDD £195.99 120MB HDD £219.99 210MB HDD £359.99 Amiga 600 with 20MB HDD £289.99 Amiga 1200 with 85MB HDD £499.99 Amiga 4000/030 with 120MB HDD £969.99 Amiga 4000/040 with 4MB Fast RAM and 120MB HDD £1699.99 RTC fix: £14.99 Commodore 10884ST monitor (requires interlace for 640x512) £199.99 Commodore 1940 monitor (640x512 without interlacing) £284.99 You can see how the prices add up very quickly and make things unaffordable for the typical family. A business could afford to pay £1300 per computer, but a family likely could not. Most people plugged their machine into their existing TVs, as it seems did you. If anything, this gives a good example of how technology has beaten inflation. The 20MB HDD is £4.50 per megabyte, or £4.7 million per terabyte. Today you can get a 16TB drive for £215, or £13.44 per terabyte, which is 351,000 times cheaper

squarefoot 4y ago
I agree pretty much on everything, adding a hard disk would have placed the smaller machines in a whole different segment. I however recall also the A2000 was sold without a hard disk, just to advertise it ad a lower price, which I find absurd since that way it was essentially an A500 plus expansion slots.
- amiga386 4y ago
  To be fair, the expansion slots were a pretty useful thing and allowed a lot of extra hardware (including the Video Toaster) that the A500 sidecar was incapable of. But yes, the original A2000 was a souped-up A1000, later upgraded to a souped-up A500. I looked this up and it appears the A2000 launch price was $1495 USD in March 1987, I don't know the UK price but it would've been around £950 at the time. That's ridiculously cheap (until you understand it's an A500 with Zorro and ISA slots). The A3000, probably the best machine Commodore ever made, launched for $3379 USD in 1990. I don't have any magazines from 1987, but Amiga Format issue 1 (August 1989) has an advertiser selling: A2000 standalone £799 A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard £1099 A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard and A2090a (HDD controller card for the A2000 because IDE hasn't been invented yet) with 20MB HDD £1369 A2090a with 20MB HDD £479 A2090a with 40MB HDD £750 A2058 (up to 8MB RAM expansion) with 2MB RAM populated £449 I can see why you'd offer a working system, 1MB RAM, floppies only, if it more than halved the visible price.

squarefoot 4y ago

I agree pretty much on everything, adding a hard disk would have placed the smaller machines in a whole different segment. I however recall also the A2000 was sold without a hard disk, just to advertise it ad a lower price, which I find absurd since that way it was essentially an A500 plus expansion slots.

amiga386 4y ago
To be fair, the expansion slots were a pretty useful thing and allowed a lot of extra hardware (including the Video Toaster) that the A500 sidecar was incapable of. But yes, the original A2000 was a souped-up A1000, later upgraded to a souped-up A500. I looked this up and it appears the A2000 launch price was $1495 USD in March 1987, I don't know the UK price but it would've been around £950 at the time. That's ridiculously cheap (until you understand it's an A500 with Zorro and ISA slots). The A3000, probably the best machine Commodore ever made, launched for $3379 USD in 1990. I don't have any magazines from 1987, but Amiga Format issue 1 (August 1989) has an advertiser selling: A2000 standalone £799 A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard £1099 A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard and A2090a (HDD controller card for the A2000 because IDE hasn't been invented yet) with 20MB HDD £1369 A2090a with 20MB HDD £479 A2090a with 40MB HDD £750 A2058 (up to 8MB RAM expansion) with 2MB RAM populated £449 I can see why you'd offer a working system, 1MB RAM, floppies only, if it more than halved the visible price.