Summary
Recently [Drygol] had an Amiga 1000 system over for some repairs as well as maintenance and general TLC. This is a Motorola 68000-based home computer from 1985 that also has the distinction of being the first Amiga system to be released by Commodore. At a time when the IBM PC was still strutting its monochrome and EGA graphics alongside PC speaker beeps, the Amiga 1000 featured relatively high-res graphics and advanced stereo audio courtesy of special accelerator chips. Overall the system was in a pretty good condition, even coming with the very nifty modern Parceiro expansion that adds 8 MB of fast RAM, an SD card slot and RTC. This thus meant that they mostly just had to perform the typical maintenance task, such as recapping the PSU and mainboard, as well as recapping and lubing up the floppy drive. The original 230 VAC fan in the PSU also got swapped with a 12V unit that was much quieter. After disassembling the keyboard for some deep cleaning and retr0brighting, a little glitch in the form of the use of a too long screw by a previous owner was addressed, as well as a broken plastic clip. With how little attention the Amiga 1000 received after its release it’s good to see some of these units still kicking. Maybe I’m turning into a grumpy old man but I’m not convinced recapping qualifies as “casual”… To fans of vintage computers it’s a required skill, I guess. Also, to my understanding, the soldering iron wasn’t unknown to home computer users of the 80s and early 90s. Back then, building an EPROM programmer wasn’t too uncommon, I think. Computer magazines were full of do-it-yourself projects and circuits. So there must been, um, enough “advanced” users being part of the audience to justify that. Especially in the Commodore crowd with all their various accessories. It wasn’t until mid-late 90s when that fell out of fashion, I assume.