To pay for college, I worked in a small computer store the year the Amiga 1000 came out. I gave a demo of the device to the local Commodore User's group and remember how everyone was blown away when I showed a 3D bouncing ball demo that was running in the background.
It was the coolest computer that we never sold and for one trivial reason. The video port used a non-standard 23 pin connector, and while we had lots of Amigas and monitors, for months the store had no cable to connect the two.
Someone finally had the idea to take a standard 25-in parallel port connector and use a hack saw to remove the extra two pins. Problem solved!
I was about to write "if only there was an online copy of the old Amiga Rom Kernel Reference Manuals" (aka the "RKM" books) when I realized I actually never checked about that. Turns out there's something on the Internet Archive, and it's totally worth a look even today. Just look at how good is the layout of those decades old books. If memory serves there were 4 of them, I had 3, and the "libraries" linked below was among the most used.
Seems like the donations are (partly) used to allow the site maintainer to increase his personal Amiga collection.
"All donations are exclusively used for the up-keep of the site or shipment of donated hardware."
"If you want to donate hardware to BigBookOfAmigaHardware.com I will pay shipment for the donated hardware."
And then donators get a special "reward" of receiving PDF scans of some documents that they want to keep secret. They are essentially selling these PDFs.
"The package contains scans (exclusive to BBoAH) of Commodore documents which until now (for the most part) hasn't been available before as PDF files."
Indeed, the one ecosystem that has traditionally been more worried about money than preservation. You know what's funny? Cloanto themselves distribute Kickstart ROMs for free, if you know where to look. I got the prerelease v24 "Velvet" ROM from them that way lol
It was the coolest computer that we never sold and for one trivial reason. The video port used a non-standard 23 pin connector, and while we had lots of Amigas and monitors, for months the store had no cable to connect the two.
Someone finally had the idea to take a standard 25-in parallel port connector and use a hack saw to remove the extra two pins. Problem solved!