Amiga 2000

The A2000 was unveiled alongside the A500 in January 1987, but with a different audience in mind: businesses, studios and anyone who wanted to expand the machine. Much of the design was done by Commodore in Germany, in Braunschweig, and only later revised in the USA, which gave rise to the A2000 and B2000 versions.

It is a desktop case, with a separate keyboard, room for two floppy drives and a hard drive, and an internal power supply with headroom for plenty of cards.

The processor is the same 68000 at 7.09 MHz, but what sets the A2000 apart is its slots: five 16-bit Zorro II slots for Amiga cards, a processor slot for accelerators (68020, 68030 and later 68040), a video slot and four ISA slots, two of which are in line with the Zorro slots.

The ISA slots only work with a Bridgeboard, a card with a PC on it (the A2088 with an 8088, XT-compatible, and the A2286 with an 80286, AT-compatible). The Amiga and the PC share the same case and exchange data, and the PC appears in a Workbench window.

Memory started at 512 KB of Chip RAM plus 512 KB of other memory on the early versions; with the ECS Agnus of the later revisions it went up to 1 MB of Chip RAM.

In 1990, NewTek launched the Video Toaster, a card for the video slot that turned the A2000 into a video mixing desk with effects, a character generator and 3D software. It cost a fraction of professional equipment and spread to local TV stations, production companies and weddings.

The 3D program that came with it, LightWave 3D, took on a life of its own: it was used for effects on series such as Babylon 5 and seaQuest DSV in the 1990s.