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The Amiga 500, also known as the A500, was the first popular version of the Amiga home computer, "redefining the home computer market and making so-called luxury features such as multitasking and colour a standard long before Microsoft or Apple sold these to the masses."
It makes hard drive, 4x floppy disk and write support possible. [10] The FPGA core is the same for the new ARM and PIC firmware but only the ARM has enough resources to support four drives. The PIC only supports two. The upgrade also allows an increase of the CPU speed from 7.09 to 49.63 MHz with a 4 KB zero wait state CPU cache.
As the majority floppy-disks shipped by software-companies or as magazine-coverdisks still used this DOS type (which would boot on pre-2.x machines like the Amiga 500), this enabled users with existing OFS-formatted drives, that all older OFS-based disks could still be read afterwards, once they had installed FFS to the RDB of their start-disk.
All Amiga computers use two 8520 CIAs (Complex Interface Adapter) for peripheral interfacing and the system timers, except for the CD32, where these functions are performed by the Akiko chip. The CIA chips were also used in some other Commodore devices. 'Even' CIA functions: floppy control, serial control, some parallel port status
Hard-drive equipped versions were labeled "A2500HD" Amiga 1500: 1990–1991 68000 1 MB 1.3 3.9 / 3.2 UK only, variant of A2000 with two floppy drives and no HDD. This version originated with CBM UK Marketing who found it necessary to distinguish the floppy-only version from the A2000 with the general public. Amiga CDTV: 1991–1992 68000 1 MB 1.3
The Amiga's floppy disk drive allowed 880 kilobytes on a single disk, comparable to the RAM of most Amigas (512 kilobytes to 1 megabyte). To increase capacity, Amiga used data compression. The disk drive had a slow transfer rate, such that using processor-based decompression could actually reduce loading times versus loading uncompressed data.
The entire Workbench operating system consisted of three floppy disks: Kickstart, Workbench and ABasic by MetaComCo. The Amiga 1000 needed a Kickstart disk to be inserted into floppy drive to boot up. An image of a simple illustration of a hand on a white screen, holding a blue Kickstart floppy, invited the user to perform this operation.
Amiga support and maintenance software performs service functions such as formatting media for a specific filesystem, diagnosing failures that occur on formatted media, data recovery after media failure, and installation of new software [citation needed] for the Amiga family of personal computers—as opposed to application software, which performs business, education, and recreation functions.