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AMIGA 3000

The Commodore Amiga 3000 is the successor of the Amiga 2500 (itself a successor of the Amiga 2000). It was replaced three years later with the Amiga 4000.

Amiga Interactive Guide description :
The A3000 is a powerhouse in comparison to previous Amiga, it was sold as a high-end graphics workstation. For a time it was used by W Industries as the basis of their highly acclaimed Virtuality machines. At the heart of the A3000 was the powerful 68030 (described in ST/Amiga Format as a 'as a mainframe on a chip'). In addition the A3000 was the first Amiga to feature the new Kickstart 2 upgrade and Zorro III slots.

To emphasis the A3000s capabilities as a high-end workstation, two operating systems were included:
The first was the newly released Kickstart/Workbench 2. This was unusual by the fact that Kickstart was stored on the hard disk rather than in ROM. This was similar to the A1000 that required Kickstart to be loaded from floppy disk before anything else could be done.

The second OS to be included with the A3000 was the Unix System (SVR4) V operating system. This allowed the use of the Unix graphical interface, X Windows and Open Look. It also came with standard networking capabilities (probably a first for Commodore), such as TCP/IP, NFS and RFS for networking between different operating systems. In a bizarre twist, the Unix OS was sold on a magnetic tape rather than floppy disk.

Three Amiga 3000 models were produced : 3000, 3000UX, and 3000T.

The 3000 was the desktop model (pictured here) which shipped with flippable 1.3 or 2.0 AmigaOS Roms. The Amiga 3000T, released in 1991, was a tower system with built-in speaker, 32Mb RAM, high-resolution mouse, 100 Mb hard-drive, a lot of Zorro II slots, a variety of drive bays, and a 25Mhz 68030 with a 68882 math coprocessor. The 3000UX shipped with "AMIX", Commodore's System-5 derived UNIX which was very nice and came with X-windows. It was Commodore's only serious attempt to get into the UNIX workstation market, and a noble effort that unfortunately failed utterly.

Notice there are some rare versions of the Amiga 3000: the 3000/16 (the speed is only 16 MHz) and the Amiga 3000+ which uses an AGA video chip and a DSP. The 3000+ was a prototype only. A few units are known to exist, but they are not supported. The DSP was able to function as a software modem in some configurations, which was extremely cool.

Jurgen Schober adds:
Also note, the A3000 (A3000T/4000/4000T) came with Zorro3 slots. This was unique at the time, as it is comparable to todays PCI expansion. It was a true 32 bit high speed expansion system, fully backwards compatible to (older) Zorro2 16bit bus. 16Bit cards could be used in the 32bit slot in parallel with 32bit cards without harming the performance.
The buscontroller (Buster) had known flaws and the protocol was hard to implement and Zorro3 boards were very expensive, but even Comodore released a 32bit SCSI-II HD controller for these Amiga models. A lot of hi-res graphics boards have been built for the faster 32bit mode, too.