Same story here. Christmas 1985. I remember distinctly how my dad showed me how to type "DPaint" at the "CLI>" line, and the magic that followed.

He made friends with a sales guy at Federated, so we got a bootleg copy of Workbench 1.2 when it came out.

I used that computer daily for over ten years. From 1st grade through my junior year of high school. While the TV played advertisements for Windows 95 in the background, I was still plugging away on my A1000 (with upgrades, of course. I had 2MB of RAM and a second floppy drive. Never had a hard drive or modem, though!)

I still have it in a closet. It booted up about ten years ago, but I'm afraid to power it up now without taking a look at all the capacitors.

> I still have it in a closet. It booted up about ten years ago, but I'm afraid to power it up now without taking a look at all the capacitors.

I was surprised that the capacitors and the motherboard in general on my A1000 looked so good ~35 years later. Either way, yes, replace them.

The earlier machines had much higher quality capacitors that are mostly still OK afaik. Consensus (if I may be so bold as to try to represent it) in the Amiga community today is: definitely recap the later Amigas (A600, A1200, A4000, CD32) with their cheaper SMT caps that usually leak and slowly destroy the motherboard, but A1000* and A500 usually don’t need it.

*The caps on the motherboard, anyway. I am not sure about the durability of the internal PSUs. I haven’t bothered to replace anything in either of the A1000s I acquired recently.

I recall the sales guy giving us copies of something too!

I used the icon editor until I got Deluxe Paint. My first real job was doing graphics for a couple of game companies, mainly cross-platform conversions by hand.

I still have my A1000 keyboard and the manuals and quite a few floppies, but the main unit kicked the bucket.

There's still a big Amiga scene and an active forum community over at https://eab.abime.net/

Thank you for sharing! A year or two after you got your 1000, my dad bought the family an Amiga 500. It began my love of computing, gave me a scrappy hacker mind set (owning an Amiga in the US a rarity), and ultimately sowed the seeds of my career.