Amiga 2000

The Amiga 2000, or A2000, is a personal computer released by Commodore in March 1987. It was introduced as a "big box" expandable variant of the Amiga 1000 but quickly redesigned to share most of its electronic components with the contemporary Amiga 500 for cost reduction. Expansion capabilities include two 3.5" drive bays (one of which is used by the included floppy drive) and one 5.25" bay that could be used by a 5.25" floppy drive (for IBM PC compatibility), a hard drive, or CD-ROM once they became available. The Amiga 2000 is the first Amiga model that allows expansion cards to be added internally. SCSI host adapters, memory cards, CPU cards, network cards, graphics cards, serial port cards, and PC compatibility cards were available, and multiple expansions can be used simultaneously without requiring an expansion cage like the Amiga 1000 does. Not only does the Amiga 2000 include five Zorro II card slots, the motherboard also has four PC ISA slots, two of which are inline with Zorro II slots for use with the A2088 bridgeboard, which adds IBM PC XT compatibility to the A2000. The Amiga 2000 was the most versatile and expandable Amiga computer until the Amiga 3000 was introduced three years later. The machine is reported to have sold 124,500 units in Germany. Aimed at the high-end market, the original Europe-only model adds a Zorro II backplane, implemented in programmable logic, to the custom Amiga chipset used in the Amiga 1000. Later improved models have redesigned hardware using the more highly integrated Amiga 500 chipset, with the addition of a gate-array called "Buster", which integrates the Zorro subsystem. This also enables hand-off of the system control to a coprocessor slot device, and implements the full video slot for add-on video devices. Like the earlier Amiga 1000 and most IBM PC compatibles of the era (but unlike the Amiga 500), the A2000 comes in a desktop case with a separate keyboard. The case is taller than the A1000 to accommodate expansion cards, two 3.5" and one 5.25" drive bays.