Grzyb wrote:Oh, there was a lot of people who needed something faster than 68000@7MHz, or even 68020@14MHz - but those people were usually purchasing various accelerators, 3rd party tower cases, and so on.
They were? I never saw them.
Yea sure, years after Commodore had kicked the bucket, and the enthousiast community developed these A1200 accelerators, PCI converters, tower kits etc.
But that's not what we're talking about here, is it?
Back in my early Amiga years, I only knew of one friend who had an A2000. Everyone else had an A500, A600 or A1200.
I don't know anyone who had an accelerator for any classic Amiga. Only for A1200s.
So in my experience, accelerators weren't a thing until the (late) A1200 days. We're talking 1995+.
Grzyb wrote:There must have been something wrong with Commodore's pricing policy if customers prefered to screw around with low-end models and 3rd party enhancements, instead of simply buying an A3000 or A4000.
There was.
The gap between an A500 and A2000 in price was huge.
Same with A1200 and A4000.
In the demoscene, an A1200 with 060@50 accelerator became the 'gold standard'. It was much cheaper than an A4000, and you had what you wanted: the AGA chipset, a fast CPU, enough fastram, and a HDD.
Grzyb wrote:Was it even possible to buy an A1000 with HDD? Must be some later 3rd party thing?
Not in the A1000 itself, but the A1060 sidecar included a HDD which could be used either by the Amiga or by the PC compatibility hardware in the sidecar.
There were also third-party HDD controllers for the A1000 expansion port.
As for PCs shipping with HDD, yes there were... However, there were also plenty of PCs still shipping without one. Case in point: my first PC was a Commodore PC10-III, which I got around 1988. It only had two 360k 5.25" DD drives.
I also have a Philips P3105 from 1987, which has two 3.5" 720k DD drives, no HDD. We had many of those at my school. HDDs were available for PCs, but certainly not standard. And certainly not required. I recall using software such as WordPerfect 5.0 from 360k floppies, which worked quite well.