Amiga 4000T: The Best Amiga in the World
There had never been an Amiga better than Amiga 4000T. The T stands for tower, but this computer did not stand out in Amiga history due to its format factor, as Commodore had already been selling the tower version of A3000. Rather, it was the ultimate Amiga in what many call today the "classic" series, and nothing better — or anything else for that matter — has ever been produced in the classic Amiga line since this model was released. Let us take a deep dive into what one of the first reviewers in 1994, the year when it was released, called "the mother of all Amigas" and appreciate some of its unique features.
If you prefer watching to reading, a very detailed video covering large parts of what has been covered in this article (plus more) can be found in the YouTube video below.
Legacy
The computer was still designed by the original Commodore company, and prototypes were shown in 1993, but Commodore istelf managed to sell very few of them before they went banktrupt in May 1994. The company's assets were incorporated, under the new name Amiga Technologies, into a German home computer manufacturer Escom. That is also when Amiga computers changed their logos to this one:
Figure 1. Amiga gets a new logo.
Only a few, maybe a few dozen original Commodore-made 4000 towers exist, and hence have become rare collector items. Most of Amiga 4000Ts which we see today were made by Escom. While they are still relatively rare, based on interviews given by Petro Tyschtschenko, the head of Amiga Technologies, we can estimate that Escom sold between 5,000 and 20,0000 Amigas 4000T, with more likelihood that the actual number falls somewhere on the lower side of that range. We also know that even though the UK market was by far the most interesting one for the A1200 which Escom was also selling, the towers seemed to have been sold mostly in the US and German markets. The difficulty in estimating the actual number of units sold stems from the fact that by 1996 Escom themselves had already fallen into financial problems, and most of the information found is about their expectations and hopes to sell the towers rather than the actual numbers sold. When Escom, in turn, was selling Amiga assets to another buyer, this time to VIS corp, a configuration with 040 CPU and a 1GB drive cost USD 2700 on the retail market which translates to today's USD 5100.
The A4000 tower I purchased was in working condition, but not the cleanest and also quite messy inside. The front fan stopped working, the CPU fan fell off, and in the cobweb of cables many plugs came loose. Everything inside was covered in dust. It seems the machine had been expanded with various components until the late nineties, but after that it was left untouched until I acquired it in 2022. One thing that stood out immediately was the hard disk. The aftermarket 8.1 gigabyte Seagate SCSI drive was so loud, that I immediately decided to replace it with a quieter option, a CF card. SCSI disks were considered reliable and fast in the 90s, but that is not the case anymore a quarter of a century later.
Figure 2. A4000T prototype revealed by Commodore in 1993 (source: Aminet), and the Escom version of the computer refurbished by this article's author.
However, since the disk contained a working Workbench system, configured to perfection by the original owner, I first made a copy of it using TSgui, an Amiga partition and disk copying tool. Even though the system was localized into German, it seemed wrong to just leave all those meticulously edited S:Startup-Sequence and S:User-Startup files on a device which is likely to become unrecoverable very soon. SCSI drives are decades old by now, and from experience I can tell you they are the first thing to cause problems next to burst batteries and capacitors.
... continue reading