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Technical Specifications: Motorola MC68000 at 7.16MHz 512Kb ChipRAM OCS Chipset OS 1.2 / 1.3 880Kb floppy disk Interface for memory expansion, accelerator card and 3.5" floppy or harddisk 4 channel stereo sound Serial, Parallel, RGB, Mouse and Joystick ports. |
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The Amiga 500 was introduced in October 1987 to replace the A1000 and was still being manufactured in 1991. It continued to use the Motorola 68000 processor running at 7.16MHz clock speed, came with a massive 512 Kilobytes of Random Access Memory (RAM), upgradeable with an under-keyboard cartridge to a whopping 1 Megabyte of RAM, plus an upgraded Custom Chipset (OCS).
The A500 had two expansion slots, one underneath principally designed for memory expansion, and one on the side for a hard disk. This resulted in many third party manufacturers developing a wealth of peripherals for it.
The entire AmigaDOS operating system had been upgraded to version 1.2 and now came on two floppy disks, with the essential routines (the Kernal) continuing to be stored being stored in upgradeable 256K Read-Only Memory (ROM) also at level 1.2. The A590 hard disk drive shown above was released much later.