I thought I’d share this recent pick-up.
This beauty arrived on my door step yesterday. This is in fact my third A1000 (yes, I have a problem!) but I decided to pull the trigger on this one since it came with the original 1.1 disks and looked to be in fantastic shape. The main unit is as close to mint as I’ve seen. Normally you would at least see a scratch or two where someone’s dragged a monitor across the lid but this one is happily perfect. The sidecar door is still attached and the 256k front RAM expansion is installed.
The keyboard is a little dirty but should clean up nicely. No yellowing. Strangely it’s missing two of its square feet. If anyone knows where I can find replacements please let me know. The clear plastic screw protectors are still intact so it doesn’t look like anyone’s been in there before. One other nice surprise was that this machine came with a large-coiled keyboard cord. I believe these were only included with early NTSC models before they switched to the more common small-coiled cord - but I could be wrong.
Unfortunately the mouse is broken. I opened it up to find the little plastic post that holds the x-axis wheel had snapped off and is long gone. Pity. Perhaps I’ll keep it around for parts.
So the next step was to fired her up.
The first thing I noticed was that the fan is on this machine is gloriously quiet, definitely the quietest 1000 I’ve had so far. The disk drive is also very quiet, but still has that lovely A1000 crunch! All of the included disks worked apart from Workbench which looks to have gone bad. The first thing I tried was booting into Kickstart 1.1 (for that authentic 1985 experience). It displays the usual Workbench hand but there is no version info like you have with 1.2 or 1.3. I soon discovered that of the software I had at hand, very little was happy about running under 1.1. Oh well.
I was happy to finally have an original copy of Graphicraft, and I hope to delve a bit deeper with that soon.
The next step is to open up the machine and check out its innards, and give everything a light clean, hopefully tomorrow. I’ll probably add some fast RAM at a later date. Should be fun!