On 2/11/10, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: Interesting to note. It was expensive then, and by extension, absurdly expensive now. I routinely install enterprise-grade web servers that are well under $10K (dual-socket, quad core, 48GB of memory, 1TB internal RAID, quad gigabit NICs, etc). Fortunately for me, I'm making more than twice as many absolute dollars as I was in 1985 (when I happened to be in college but also had a part-time, but "real", job as an electronics tech, software developer, and VMS System Manager), so economically, at least, I've made some progress over the past 25 years. ;-) I also bought an A1000 in 1986. Mine didn't require a loan, but that's because I got a bare-bones 256K A1000 with no monitor, single floppy, just mouse and keyboard, for about $800. I later purchased a Skyles Electric Works CHIP RAM expansion board for under $50, IIRC (that's still on the machine!) I repurposed a Commodore 1702 monitor interface that I hacked to do analog RGB - still a bit fuzzy owing to the limited video bandwidth of the original product, but *much* cheaper than the going rate for a "proper" analog RBG monitor. Unfortunately for me, that monitor was stolen in a burglary in 1990, along with an A500, and a "Wedge" ISA disk interface (fortunately for me, they dumped the A1000 on the floor but didn't take it with them). I did happen to get that A1000 while I worked at the aforementioned job, and am proud that the warranty was voided before the computer even made it home. We were doing MC68000 embedded product development there, so there was no way I could help cracking the Amiga case and showing off the innards to our engineers, which started a session comparing the guts of the Amiga to our own 68K designs. I still have one of those boxes that was under development at the time - about the size of an A2000, able to be stuffed with 2MB of 41256s, and with enough proprietary slots to support 32 serial ports. It even had an early-model 3.5" disk drive. No custom chips, though, so very different from the Amiga once you got outside of the CPU/memory area. -ethan