Amiga, Happy 30th Birthday!

[AdamAnt316]

Congrats on picking up your Amiga 2000 from a TV station. Great find! I never knew TV stations used the Amiga for graphics. Can't say it really surprises me though. The good ol' Amiga is such a versatile machine. I wonder if the collectors market for the Amiga is a lot larger in Europe? Most of the games I see on Ebay for the Amiga in addition to being really pricey are from Europe. I wouldn't mind picking up another Amiga myself maybe an A1200 this time.

Yeah, I found it at the MIT Swapfest, being sold along with a whole bunch of other TV production equipment. Think I paid all of $10 or $20 for the thing, though it didn't have a keyboard, mouse, or any accessories with it other than what was installed inside the case. Had to buy a keyboard for it off of eBay, and borrowed the mouse from my Amiga 1000 to use with it. The Amiga lends itself really well to TV production work, particularly using a genlock and appropriate software such as Scala.

I used an Amiga 1200 in high school as part of our "school news" broadcasts, utilizing Scala to trigger graphics to pop up on the screen, which would then be overlaid on top of the live video feed via the genlock. Many Amiga computers were used for this sort of purpose, as well as other general video graphics and production work using software like Video Toaster. The old "Prevue Guide" channel used Amigas to generate the on-screen channel listings well into the late '90s, long after Commodore had gone out-of-business.

As for popularity, I do believe you're correct. The vast majority of Amigas sold in the US were probably bought for/by professionals, for the aforementioned video production work. In Europe, the Amiga was far more widespread among consumers, and was even turned into a video game system as the CD32. Commodore did try and sneak the Amiga hardware into the US consumer market by way of the earlier CDTV (which contained the guts of an A500), but it never caught on.

This is a system I've always been interested in but never found one. Since it appears that my good will is going to stay carrying computer stuff now i might have a chance at nabbing one

Good luck with the search. For some reason, not many Amiga computers made it to the consumer market, at least here in the US. The A1000 I own is the only Amiga I've come across which definitely was home-used, rather than as part of a video production setup. If you find one, it'll likely be an Amiga 500; be sure it has a power supply brick with it, and look around for other accessories or software which might go with it.
-Adam