An introduction to the Commodore Amiga 500 computer, demonstrating some of the features of the Amiga Workbench 1.2 OS. The Amiga 500 was released in 1987 along with the Amiga 2000, which split the mildly successful Amiga platform into two levels: The high end expandable Amiga 2000 and the the less expensive, entry-level Amiga 500. The Amiga 500 was introduced at a retail price of $595 and became Commodore's best selling Amiga model. In this video I provide a brief overview of the A500 and then boot the system, showing some of the features of the Workbench 1.2 operating system, such as setting colors in Preferences, the RAM disk, the SAY utility and the CLI. In Part 2 I will show how easy it was to add a second floppy drive to the Amiga 500, and then use DIgiPaint 3 to demonstrate the Amiga's HAM (Hold And Modify) graphics mode, which allowed 4096 colors to be displayed on the screen simultaneously. By the way, Bob Yannes, designer of the SID chip for the Commodore 64, later went on to found ENSONIQ, who made some excellent pro-grade synths. Check out some music made with ENSONIQ gear at http://www.stevesisson.com ... how's that for a smooth segue into a shameless plug?