I have been using Commodore computers since 1984. My first computer was a Commodore 64 purchased from Montgomery Wards. The complete system included a C-64, a 1541 disk drive and an MPS-801 printer.
Over the years, the C-64 system grew and grew, to date, I own 4 'bread box' C-64s, an SX-64 (portable 64 with built in disk drive and 4" color monitor), a C-128, 8 1541 disk drives, 2 1571s, and a 1581.
In November of 94, I had the oportunity to purchase an Amiga 500 for $75. It had 1 meg of RAM (512k chip/512k slow-FAST). No hard drive or anything, but I was hooked. Over the next few weeks, I purchased a monitor and an external floppy for it. Worked great! Then one day, I was poking around inside of it, trying some hardware hack and I shorted something. It wouldn't boot anymore. Sadly, I plugged my 128 back in and started the search for a replacement unit. I hated not being able to multitask.
This time, I decided to go with an A2000. Same functionality
as the A500, but this gave me room for expansion. I found one
for sale for $350, it had 1meg of CHIP ram, an A2090 SCSI/MFM
controller and a 20 meg MFM drive. Woohoo! Hard drive...
=)
This computer grew to get a 2091 SCSI controller with 2megs of RAM and a Supra RAM card with another 2megs of RAM. Wow...look at all that memory! I also had to drop the MFM drive and go with an 80 meg SCSI drive that a friend had and no longer used. More recently, I got an A2065 ethernet card for it to use with a LAN that my roommates have set up. The last addition to the A2000 was a FlickerFree Video adapter which let me use higher resolutions without flicker on a VGA monitor. 724x481 resolution is much nicer than 640x200.
So there I was, merilly computing on an A2000. But I wanted faster... I wanted to be able to play with more stuff. I wanted to run a UNIX varient. My choices were to either upgrade the 2000 to get more speed with a bigger processor, but still be limited to the Zorro II bus, or to buy a newer, bigger Amiga.
One day, I found it. A nice guy in Aggieland was selling his A3000 with an 030-25, 8megs FAST, 2meg CHIP and 100 megs of HD for a nice, affordable amount. I bought it from him. Bonus, he was coming through Austin
I pulled the A2065 and the hard drive out of the A2000 and plugged everything into the new A3000. Wow... compared to what I had before, pure speed. Still nothing compared to my roommate's P120, but he runs Windows95, so I can deal with running AmigaDOS on a slower processor.
A few weeks later, a friend of mine found a good deal on some one gig hard drives, the only problem was that he had to commit to buying at least six of them. I put in an order for two, and a few other friends kept putting in orders till he had enough to get the low price. After a little bit of juggling and copying, I had the data transfered from the two older drives to one of the gig drives, the other gig was going to have a unix varient installed on it.
As it sits right now, my A3000 has: