In 1987 Commodore released the A500 – a cheaper version of the A1000 – which came in the “distinct” Commodore box. The basic system still used the 68000 processor, 512k ram, and OCS chipset but had got rid of the ZORRO slots in favour of a DMA slot at the side of the machine. The operating system had been upgraded to version 1.3, which included the Amiga Command Line Interface (Shell) allowing the user more functionality. This is the machine that kicked the entire Amiga world into focus and brought more people to the Amiga than has been done since. It was voted “Home Computer of the Year” (36.7) in 1991 by a selection of Greek and Italian publications
There are two different revisions of the A500 motherboard:
Amiga 500P (American) the ‘Productivity’ edition features 1Mb memory (512k Chip, 512k Fast).
Amiga 500C (American) an improved version that incorporated the new Agnus chip, providing 1Mb Chip RAM (corresponds to the Amiga 2000C). Evesham micros where I used to work (Birmingham branch) used to sell the memory upgrades and rom switchers under the name of zydec.
Motorola MC68000
7.16 MHz CPU
512k Chip RAM or 1 megabyte Chip RAM on motherboard
Maximum 512k (A500) or 1 megabyte Chip RAM (A500+)
512k Fast RAM in trapdoor expansion bus (optional)
Maximum 8 megabytes Fast RAM
512k RAM (A500) or 1 megabyte RAM (A500+) on motherboard
256k ROM or 512k ROM on motherboard
3.5 drive bay 2.5 drive mountable
3.5 880K internal floppy drive
Integrated keyboard
2 button mouse
A1000 sidecar expansion bus
A500 trapdoor expansion bus
Compact case
External power supply port
External floppy drive port
RS-232 serial port
Centronics parallel port
2 mouse/joystick ports
Monochrome composite video port
15kHz colour RGB analogue video port
2 stereo audio output ports