The first Amiga on the market, the Amiga 1000 appeared in 1985. It was based around the Motorola 68000 processor and a bunch of custom hardware. It originally shipped with 256K of RAM, though that was usually upgraded to at least 512K. The OS was read off disk on boot and stored in 256K of WOM, a feature it shared with early models of the Amiga 3000. All Amiga 1000s have the design team's signatures moulded into the inside of the case, along with the paw-print of Jay Miner (the chief designer)'s dog.

The early Amiga 3000s had Kickstart 1.4 bootloader ROMs that got the Kickstart image from harddisk or floppy and mapped it into the Kickstart address space using the MMU of the 68030. This is different to the Amiga 1000's WOM, which was actual RAM chips wired to the Kickstart address space due to the lack of an MMU.