Whelp, in 1984 an Amiga 1000 (first gen) cost $1295. That got you 256K of RAM, and a floppy drive. With a monitor, figure $1700. For reference, a Commodore 64 sold for $299 at that time without discounts.
As the IBM PC was selling for $5000, that was a big deal. PC clones (like the Compaq and Kaypro) were in the $2000-$3000 range.
One thing that sold a lot of Amigas for us was the promise of the "IBM compatibility box" (sorry, forget the product name) that would allow Amiga to emulate an IBM PC for a coupla hundred bucks more. People bought Amigas like crazy, expecting to be able to do everything an Amiga could + run all the IBM software at some point in the future. Note that the IBM box was delayed for a loooong time, but that didn't stop people from placing advance orders for it. It was crazy.
When it finally did come out, it was a bit of a disappointment. The "compatibility box" consisted of a separate module (and power supply?) that actually had an Intel processor and RAM on it. It connected to the Amiga's motherboard via a ribbon cable and allowed the user to dual-boot into the Amiga or MS-DOS. But not both at the same time. Which was kind of retarded.
Nobody had hard-drives or CD-ROMs; those were freakishly expensive. I think I special ordered a 3rd party Amiga hard-drive once and it was over $5000.
We started accepting orders for the Amiga 1000 a full year before we ever saw one. On the strength of the brochure alone we took in many dozens of advance orders. When shipments first arrived, the machines were beautiful... but very fragile. One had the impression Commodore was cranking them out the door 24/7 without regard for build quality. Our technician spent much of his time the first months after deliveries started resoldering broken traces on the Amiga motherboard.
Near riots would break out when we'd get our shipments, as customers learned our schedule and would stake out the store. We'd get maybe six or twelve machines at a time (despite our having ordered hundreds from Commodore; they were soooo backordered) and I was the lucky one who'd break out The List and call the next lucky customers at the top. It was almost a lottery atmosphere, with people jumping in the air and yelling if they happened to be in the store when I was reading off The List.
And I took a *lot* of abuse from folks who'd paid their money and were still waiting. And honestly, I didn't blame them. The only thing that kept me alive was that they could see the small shipments from Commodore themselves. Not our fault. But I could easily imagine a convoy of pissed off customers driving to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania to torch Commodore headquarters.
Eventually the frenzy died down and shipments came in regularly, and build quality came up. We stopped crossing our fingers whenever we'd hand somebody a new Amiga box.
Then the cycle repeated itself when the 256K memory expansion modules were announced...
