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A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000

This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a significant piece of home computing history. Arguably one of the most important machines of the 16-bit revolution period, considered by many to be the first multimedia computer, it marked the beginning of Commodore’s last cycle, after the huge success of the C64, in the history of personal computing.

Back in the day, computers would typically connect to TV sets or dedicated monitors using either modulated RF, composite (sometimes with separate chroma/luma, also known as S-Video), or RGB video and encode the signals using either NTSC in the US and some Americas, PAL or PAL/SECAM in the rest of the world. This Amiga was fitted with a third-party board that appeared to be a brand-less, “Made in Germany” clone of the Spirit Inboard fast RAM expansion that plugs on top of the MC68000 CPU socket. Chemically speaking, retrobright consists of soaking the yellowed plastic in a mix of hydrogen peroxide, a small amount of the “active oxygen” laundry booster TAED as a catalyst, and a source of UV, but there are variants.

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