Seeking details relating to Amiga 3000 serial numbers

Question

I am the original owner of my Amiga 3000. As I remember it, I purchased the machine fairly early after release. I'm cleaning and detailing the machine, and I took a quick picture of the serial number sticker on the mainboard.

Obviously this indicates the board is an A3000, serial number 7779. But I'm not sure what the N signifies, and assuming they started at the number 1, I would have to guess this was the 7,779th machine built or assembled. Further, I would infer the 4/90 (with 91 scratched out) is a production, inspection, or ship date.

Can anyone tell me what the HKC or WW markings refer to? Or offer any other interesting information (manufacturing location, etc) that could be determined from this serial number?

I did some googling but my google-fu is apparently weak.

As always, all responses are much appreciated!

UPDATE 10/28/2018

I have recently had an opportunity to look more closely at my A3000 mainboard. I also did a review of some excellent images found on www.bigbookofamigahardware.com and am convinced the answer by Brian H below is spot on.

After looking at the images I was able to find online that were clear enough to read, I located a REV 6.1 board from WW 3 (I think, it was difficult to read) with a SN of 00101, and a REV 7.2 board from WW 21 (again, difficult to read) with a SN of 00804, and a REV 8.9 board (nothing written on the WW sticker) with a SN of 02845. My board is a REV 9/01 (from the silkscreen) from WW 41 with a SN of 07779 (shown above). This seems to indicate the SN are simple counters going upward over time.

It might be interesting to collect the Rev, SN and WW from other owners to form a more concrete conclusion.

Answer 1

The Amiga 3000 was offered in 4 configurations: 25MHz NTSC, 25MHz PAL, 16MHz NTSC, 16 MHz PAL. Besides the ID of "A3000 N" which appears on your A3000, the other possible ID is "A3000 P". It might be considered an obvious conclusion that the "N" refers to NTSC and the "P" refers to PAL configurations. However, I think that requires some more explanation.

The only difference between NTSC & PAL for an A3000 is a jumper setting (J200). That seems like a relatively minor configuration setting to base your component labeling off of. Especially, given that the distinction between the 25MHz and the 16MHz configurations included not only many jumpers, but many expensive components soldered to the board (like 25MHz vs. 16MHz rated CPU and FPU).

Because of the above, I don't think the marking of "N" for NTSC and "P" for PAL was so much about the board configuration. Rather, it was intended to sort the systems heading West from Hong Kong (Europe) from those heading East from Hong Kong (California). So the "N"-marked boards should primarily originate from North America, while the "P" boards ought to primarily originate from European markets. I am over-simplifying, given that some A3000's might have shipped to non-European PAL regions. Sorting at the factory was probably based on destination country, not just my simplified East/West dichotomy.

As far as "HKC" on the sticker, it refers to "Hong Kong City". On most A3000 motherboards, and also the daughterboards, you can also locate a separate sticker that reads "QC Assembled in Hong Kong PASS". This is a secondary confirmation of the location of assembly for the boards. Incidentally, the S/N sticker on the A3000 Daughterboard is the identical format to the motherboard S/N sticker, but uses "DAUGHTER" ID instead of the "N" or "P".

For the date of assembly, it is coded with the handwritten week of the year following the "WW", and crossing out of the non-applicaple year. So, your example was assembled week 41 of 1990; pretty early in the A3000's life.