Another Virgin Commodore Amiga Emerges, Touched For The Very First Time
Some three decades later, what's old is new again with the Commodore Amiga 2000 HD making an unlikely comeback. Well, sort of. Just over a week before Halloween, some lucky expo attendee stumbled upon a never touched and fully functioning Amiga system powered by a Motorola 68000 processor running at all of 7.16MHz. Oddly enough, his rare find wasn't even the first decades old virgin Amiga system unearthed this month!
Around three weeks ago, a Facebook user posted pictures of a non-HD Amiga 2000 that was still in its retail packaging to the Commodore Amiga Facebook group. The system was sold as of an estate sale after the original owners passed away. He paid £200.00 (around $244 in U.S. currency) for what was still a brand new machine 30 years after it was produced.
Now three weeks later, a site admin for the Amiga Love web forum posted pictures of a similar find, an Amiga 2000 HD, which is the same PC but with a SCSI hard disk controller and, in this case, a 40MB hard drive with the Amiga Workbench 2.04 OS installed. Like the other one, this was an untouched machine.
The forum admin found the Amiga while attending the Portland Retro Gaming Expo at the Portland Convention Center. After passing by booth upon booth of mostly NES and SNES cartridges, he noticed a vendor with some boxes on the table that had the Amiga logo.
"My Spidey-sense started to tingle as I got closer," he explains.
The tape on the box had been broke so peeked inside. What he saw first was an immaculate white keyboard wrapped in the original pink plastic. Then as he lifted the styrofoam he spied the Amiga 2000 HD sill in its plastic bag with a Commodore logo.
"Part of me wondered if, when I got home, the thing would be simply a case; a trashed motherboard covered in battery acid and mouse droppings; all of the innards removed, etc. Either way, I reasoned to myself, from what I saw I could at least get my money back if I so desired from a history fan wanting a nice keyboard and non-yellow case," the admin said.
To his delight, the motherboard wasn't trashed. Turns out the vendor scored the Amiga system from a guy who used to own a small computer retail shop in Eugene, Oregon. He had several bits of inventory left when his business went belly-up, including two Amiga 2000 systems, one of which had yellowed over time. The other was never opened, and that's the one he bought.
Now it belongs to a forum admin. It's essentially a brand new system—even the mouse was never used. Same goes for the original Workbench disks since the OS was pre-installed. His only gripe is that the fan is loud, but given the condition of this thing, it's safe to say he's more than thrilled with his find.
Image credit: AmigaLove
