From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sunic!trane.uninett.no!astfgl.edb.tih.no!larsg Sun Jul 17 13:59:52 CDT 1994 Article: 71758 of alt.folklore.computers Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sunic!trane.uninett.no!astfgl.edb.tih.no!larsg From: larsg@edb.tih.no (Lars Garden) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: From Commodore to Amiga to Commodore Date: 15 Jul 1994 14:30:23 GMT Organization: Trondheim College of Engineering Lines: 210 Distribution: world Message-ID: <3066hv$16k@astfgl.edb.tih.no> References: <305vl0$ouk@eccdb1.pms.ford.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: oversoul.edb.tih.no X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Status: R Joseph S. Wisniewski (wiz@rcsg30.eld.ford.com) wrote: : One of our Amiga gurus recently told a rather far fetched story of the : history of the Amiga, and I was wondering if anyone here could shed some : light on it. Legend tells that Commodore created the Amiga, but fumbled : marketing it, lost a bit of money, then tried to recoup their loss by : selling the whole mess to a mix of ex-Commodore developers and investors : who became the Amiga computer corp. When these guys found a way to make : a lot of money selling Amigas, Commodore decided they wanted Amiga back. : By pure coincidence, Amiga had a major factory fire about at this time, : enabling Commodore to get the Amiga technonogy back for a song. That Amiga guru must have been smoking something funny lately. Jay Miner, the 'father' of the Amiga did unfortunately pass away a little while ago. Here is an article i found in c.s.a.misc. [Start quote] Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Jay Miner Tribute Message-ID: From: Green_Ghost@neonate.atl.ga.us (Green Ghost) Date: 2 Jul 94 21:47:29 EST Distribution: world Organization: The Village BBS Lines: 175 Just learned of Jay Miner's apparent demise.Hadn't seen any details it just seems he is dead.Below I offer my tribute to the fine man and if anybody has any complaints about bandwidth I suggest you go play with an IBM instead of wasting your time complaining about it. Jay Miner Interview Pasadena, September 1992. The name badge says it all, Jay Miner, VIP, Father of the Amiga. During my recent jaunt to the A4000 launch in Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to meet and talk to Jay as he cast his fatherly eye over the next generation of the architecture he created all those years ago. We talked and ate as he reiterated the fascinating history of the secret project that resulted in the birth of a remarkable machine, which has survived mainly because of his foresight and supreme effort. It was all far from plain sailing, however, and plenty of skullduggery was afoot from a number of parties, not least the design team themselves! The story about the Amiga's genesis has been told before, but it is only relatively recently that Jay and Commodore have been seeing eye to eye about the machine and its evolution. Also, there are many little anecdotes untold before now... Jay: "The story starts in the early 1980`s with a company not originally called Amiga, but Hi Toro, which was started by Dave Morris, our president, but before all that I used to work with Atari and I wanted to do a 68000 machine with them. We had just finished the Atari 800 box and they were not about to spend another umpteen dollars on research for a 16-bit machine and the processor chip itself cost $100 apiece. RAM was also real expensive and you need twice as much. They couldn't see the writing on the wall and they just said "No", so I quit!". Jay Miner is not a man to say "No" to, and it's quite clear that Atari must still be regretting their myopic decision. Anyway, Jay still held the concept of an all-powerful 16-bit machine but the bills had to be paid. "I went to a chip company called Xymos as I knew the guy who started it. He gave me some stock and it looked like an interesting startup company (I've worked for a lot of new companies). Going back to Atari, Larry Caplan was one of the top programmers on the Atari 2600 video game. Him and the other programmers wanted a pay rise, or at least a small royalty, a nickel per cartridge in fact, on the software that was selling like crazy. Atari was making a fortune and they said "No" so they all said "Goodbye" and they went off and started a little company called Activision. Larry rang me up about two years later in early '82 and said he wasn't happy at Activision and suggested we start up a company. I had a lot of stock in Xymos and suggested we get some outside finance from back East. We hired a little office on Scott Boulevard, Santa Clara and they got a Texas millionaire to put up some money. He liked the idea of a new video game company which is what Larry Caplan wanted to do. He was going to do the software and I was going to design the chips". "I told Dave Morris about some of the ideas I had about designing a games machine that was expandable to a real computer and he though that was a great idea but didn't tell any of his investors. I moved to Santa Clara from Xymos. They were still called Hi Toro but the investors wern't too keen so they chose "Amiga" and I didn't like it much - I thought using a Spanish name wasn't such a good move. I was wrong!" The design team at Hi Toro/Amiga was assembled from a bunch of people over the next few months. Jay says that they were looking for people not just interested in a job, but with a passion for the Amiga (codenamed Lorraine after the president's wife) and the immense potential it offered. "We worked out a deal whereby I got a salary and some stock and I also got to bring my dog Mitchy into work every day. Dave did reserve the right to go back on that one if anyone else objected but Mitchy was very popular." I asked Jay to sum up what it was like to work on the Amiga: "The great things about working on the Amiga? Number one I was allowed to take my dog to work and that set the tone for the whole atmosphere of the place. It was more than just companionship with Mitchy - the fact that she was there meant that the other people wouldn't be too critical of some of those we hired, who were quite frankly weird. There were guys coming to work in purple tights and pink bunny slippers. Dale Luck looked like your average off-the-street homeless hippy with long hair and was pretty laid back. In fact the whole group was pretty laid back. I wasn't about to say anything - I knew talent when I saw it and even Parasseau [the "Evangelist] who spread the word] was a bit weird in a lot of ways. The job gets done and that's all that matters. I didn't care how solutions came about even if people were working at home. "There were a lot of various arguments and the way most were sorted out was by hitting each other with the foam baseball bats. The stung a bit if you got hit hard. There was a conflict in the fundamental design philosophy with some like RJ Mical wanting the low cost video game (the investors side, you might say). Others like Dale Luck and Carl Sassenrath wanted the best computer expansion capability for the future. This battle of cost was never ending, being internal; among us as well as with the investors and Commodore. "You go through stages in any large project like the Amiga of thinking "This looks great and it's going to sell really well", and then things go wrong and you just want to quit!" The unique spirit at Amiga was such that people worked tirelessly on their various projects, remembering that the software was well on the way to completion before any silicon had been pounded into the graphics chips. Carl Sassenrath was brought in to do the operating system and was asked at the interview "What would you like to design?". He just replied that he wanted to do a multi-tasking operating system, and thus was born the Exec which lies at the very heart of the Amiga. Carl has maintained his close links with Commodore and was instrumental in designing CDTV. Incredible really that they opted for such a sophisticated backdrop for a games machine. Already, strange things were afoot.... "I started thinking about what we wanted to design. Right from the beginning I wanted to do a computer like the A2000 with lots of expansion slots for drives, a keyboard etc. I'd also read a bit about blitters and so I talked with a friend called Ron Nicholson who was also interested in them and he came to join us. We came up with all sorts of functions for the blitter. Line drawing was added much later at the request of Dale Luck, one of our software guys. This was about two weeks before the CES show where the Amiga was unveiled. I told him we can't put that in there as the chips were nearly done and there wasn't enough room. He fiddled about and showed me what registers were needed, so in it went". The chips took three designers including Jay (who did the Agnus) almost two years to design (1982-84) and throughout this time the ever-expanding software team were working on what became the Amiga's operating system libraries and such like. They had a pretty tough job writing for the most advanced, radical hardware ever conceived for a home machine, and which didn't really exist, except for a zillion and one ideas and a white board of obscure diagrams. "Once you've got the design concept for the chips, all you need to do then is pick names for the registers and tell the software people something like "I'm going to have a register here that's going to hold the colours for this part and it's called whatever." They can the simulate it in their software. We then built hardware simulators called bread boards and that was a chore. We originally did the chips using the NMOS process which has much higher current consumption than the state of the art CMOS. I'm surprised that Commodore haven't re-designed the chips in CMOS which is the big stumbling block to bringing out a protable. We did that because at the time, CMOS was much slower than NMOS and not as reliable. It's now much faster, so why are Commodore still using NMOS for some of their chips?" "Hold and Modify came from a trip to see flight simulators in action and I had a kind of idea about a primitive type of virtual reality. NTSC on the chip meant you could hold the Hue and change the luminance by only altering four bits. When we changed to RGB I said that wasn't needed any more at it wasn't useful and I asked the chip layout guy to take it off. He came back and said that this would either leave a big hole in the middle of the chip or take a three-month redesign and we couldn't do that. I didn't think anyone would use it. I was wrong again as that has really given the Amiga its edge in terms of the colour palette." It was Commodore who wanted to leave things as NTSC/PAL output. We wanted to make them RGB but monitors were so expensive in those days - IBM's and Mac's were monochrome. I'd put the converter on the chip and this was a very low cost way of doing things as it saved a lot of parts, but by the time Commodore bought us, the bottom had fallen out of the video game market and we were moving more towards a computer so Commodore agreed to finance RGB as well. Seeing pictures of the early Amiga, it's almost impossible to imagine that the piles of wires and boards could eventually be reduced to something the size of an A500. The first Agnus was three lots of eight bread boards, each with 250 chips, and this was repeated for the other two custom chips which were nicknamed Daphne and Portia in those days and metamorphosed into Denise and Paula. "Those were a nightmare to keep running with all the connections keeping breaking down. They're still around somewhere. We hired lots of other people to design peripherals which kept the notorious silicon valley spies away from the office. All they could see were joysticks -- Via DLG Pro v1.0 * When privacy is outlawed, **(all The /-/acker's /\/\ansion BBS * * only outlaws will have privacy!** 1-803-785-5080 14.4 Supra * *************************************E-mail: Green_Ghost@neonate.atl.ga.us* [End quote] -- // Lars Gaarden. Student at Trondheim College of Engineering. \\ // email: larsg@edb.tih.no IRC: Lynet \X/ "But I will rise and I will return like a phoenix from the flame." - Sinéad O'Conner