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 multitasking 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 it's 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 and they weren't too much of a threat."
"In 1983 we made a motherboard for the breads to be plugged in, took this to the CES
show and we showed some little demos to selected people away from the main floor. At
the show itself, they wrote the bouncing ball demo and this blew people away. They
couldn't believe that all this wiring was going to be three chips. The booming noise of
the ball was Bob Parasseau hitting a foam baseball bat against our garage door. It
was sampled on an Apple ][ and the data massaged into Amiga samples.CES was
really important to us as we were getting short of money and the response from that
show really lifted the team. We were still short of money and several remortgages
later we managed to keep up with the payroll. It's amazing how much it costs to pay 15
or 20 people!"
With things running desperately close, Amiga were forced to look for more finance to
keep the ball bouncing. They turned eventually to Jay's old employer, Atari:
"Atari gave us $500,000 with the stipulation that we had one month to come to a deal
with them about the future of the Amiga chipset or pay them back, or they got the rights.
This was a dumb thing to agree to but there was no choice."
They offered $1 per share but Amiga were hoping for much more than that. The offer
was refused and as Atari knew about the troubles of Amiga, they then cut the offer to 85
cents a share. Commodore stepped in at the last minute to scoop the prize from under
the noses of their arch rivals and take the Amiga for themselves, shelling out a mere
$4.25 per share and installing the team in the Los Gatos office. Jay continued the
story:
"Tramiel [the president of Atari] was livid when he found out he couldn't get his hands
on the chips, as the whole idea of financing us was just to get the chips, not the people
designing them, unlike Commodore who needed to keep the team intact. The Atari
400 and 800 [which Jay designed also] series were great computers in their day, but
you know things move on. When he didn't get the chipset his only alternative was to
design a new computer without the custom chips so he came up with the ST. This
wasn't a bad little computer but lacked the power of the Amiga's chipset."
Tell us something we don't know, Jay!! What about MIDI, why wasn't that included?
"Actually MIDI isn't so far away from the standard serial port on the Amiga, and soon
after the machine was released, someone came up with a tiny plugin box that gave you
all the MIDI inputs and outputs, but Commodore refused to manufacture and push it
which was one of my big disagreements with them. If you've got a little company doing
great third party products which makes your machine so much more competitive,
you've got to support them. Commodore in the past have been too greedy, wanting
everything for themselves without paying for it, but I think they're changing. I hope
they're changing, anyway."
The Amiga 1000 really didn't take shape until long after Commodore bought it. The
president had the idea of sliding the keyboard underneath the machine and it took
nearly a year to redesign the motherboard to fit in. Everything was set and then
Commodore decided that 512K of RAM was too much:
"They wanted a 256K machine as the 512 was too expensive. Back in those days RAM
was very pricey, but I could see it had to come down. I told them it couldn't be done as
we were too close to being finished, it would spoil the architecture, etc, etc. Dave
Needle came up with the idea of putting the cartridge on the front which worked. I was
in favour of putting sockets on the motherboard so the user could just drop in the
chips."
As events turned out, Jay's opinion was vindicated when, on release, it became patently
obvious that the machine needed the 512K to do anything meaningful and this was the
shipping form in the UK. Commodore's short sightednes cost the world another 6
months without the Amiga, during which time RAM prices fell anyway!
"I spent this time polishing up the software/hardware documentation, renaming registers
to be more meaningful. This was actually time well spent in the end."
Regular readers will know that I'm always going on about how wonderful Intuition is to
work with so I asked Jay to tell me a bit about its development.
"RJ Mical pretty much did it all himself. He was holed up for three weeks (!) and came
out once to ask Carl Sassenrath about message ports. That's it, really! He wrote
Intuition and went on to do the
graphics package, Graphicraft, as noone else could do it right. Remember the Jarvik 7
heart animation they actually talked to the guy and got permission to draw it, and the
animation was cycling the colour registers. A lot of quite beautiful pseudo animations
were done that way. That's how we did the rotating pattern of the bouncing ball. Other
machines couldn't use that system".
Once all the software was done, it was time for the big release of the A1000. Jay's
reaction:
"There were a lot of compromises which I didn't like, but it was better than it might have
been if we hadn't gotten our way on a lot of things. We didn't get our way on everything,
though. The 256K RAM was a real problem. The software people knew it was
inadequate but nobody could stand up to Commodore about it. We had to really argue
to put the expansion connector on the side and this was before the deal was finalised
so we were close to sinking everything. The lowest cost way of doing it was the edge
connector and I'm glad it got through".
"Once the A1000 was out were kind of at a loss. There was so much dealer and
developer support necessary that a large proportion of our company went into that. We
had 11 or 12 people in that and we wanted to expand, but Commodore wouldn't let us,
and in fact they made us lay off some people. We tried to talk Commodore into building
a machine with vertical slots and they eventually came out with the A2000, but they
weren't keen at first".
Once the Amiga was released, work at Los Gatos continued, but the days for this fine,
but maverick, design team were numbered.
"I was really pleased to see Commodore moving in the direction of the A2000 it was
the first Amiga you could really tailor to your own needs and this was one of the reasons
for the success of the early Apples. We then wanted to go onto horizontal slots, like
the A3000 as that would be easier to cool and shield there was a design to do it but at
that time the A2000 came from Germany so that's
the way we went. We wanted to do the Autoconfiguration for the slots but Commodore
weren't keen because it added 50c to the cost, so we had a big battle with them and did
it anyway. Our divisional manager from Commodore was a guy called Rick Geiger. He
was pretty good at keeping Commodore off our backs. However, there were others who
were good at figuring out what we were up to and saying "No"
all the time. Sometimes Rick would protect us and he was trying hard to give
Commodore something they wanted badly, MS-DOS compatability. Some company
promised they could deliver a software solution
but it never really worked that well.
There was a young fellow of Jewish persuasion, an engineer, I knew he was Jewish
because he wore one of those funny little hats to work. That's no problem for me I
didn't mind if people wore pink bunny slippers as long as the job got done. Anyway, he
promised MS-DOS on a small card to make an IBM interface. He worked alone, and
weeks went by with nothing appearing despite all the promises which worried me a lot,
and this really led to Rick's downfall. He promised he could do it and nobody kept close
enough tags on him, always a few more weeks. Commodore started advertising and the
board didn't work so both men were canned. This was the start of the downfall for the
Los Gatos division. I've never really told this before as it was too personal but I can't
remember the designer now so it doesn't matter so much. It shows that you need your
peers looking over your work to get things right".
How important did you think PC compatability was going to be?
"Eventually Sidecar came out from Germany but there were a lot of bugs in the software
and the Los Gatos team helped with solving those. They did that before the 2000. It's
funny but I never really saw MS-DOS compatability as being that important for the
Amiga. I said at the time to Commodore "Hey, we're different. Try to take advantage of
that, not imitate or simulate other people". We could make our commands more similar
to theirs. There's a tendancy when you're writing new software to try and be different
with names and functions, but it isn't really necessary. We could do a better job than
MS-DOS, which would have been enough with the Amiga's superior operating system
and colour resolution capabilities to take a really big bite out of IBM. Instead they kept
promising compatability and not delivering which is worse."
After that, Commodore wanted the design team to move back East, and not surprisingly
they declined, so gradually the Los Gatos facility was closed down and Jay left. We
carried on talking about the interim period and also about the staff recently at
Commodore:
"The VP of engineering [Bill Sydnes] got canned. He designed the PC Junior which
really crashed, one of IBM's big mistakes, and gave the Amiga a window of opportunity
which Commodore failed to exploit a little competitive advertising would have gone a
long way."
What about the overall handling of the Amiga over the years? Does it annoy you that
there are 10 times as many PCs as Amigas?
"Yeah, that really does annoy me. I don't have any financial connections with
Commodore any more so I don't get anything out of Amiga sales. Things should have
been a lot different. I still feel fatherly towards to Amiga, more so than any of the
Ataris. What frustrates me the most is that people are missing out on something very
special in the Amiga. They tell me about their IBMs and wonderful Macs but they're
still missing out".
The Toaster is a killer product over here, what do you think?
"It's a fantastic product. Commodore made a really big mistake in not embracing the
Toaster in its early days, and getting a real piece of it. I never even envisaged it back in
the design stages. TV image manipulation just wasn't around then I put genlock
circuitry and sync signalling into the first designs so that side of things we appreciated. I
had no idea that things like the Toaster were coming."
What would you like to see in the future?
"I'd like to see Commodore grab hold of one of these 24-bit cards like the GVP or DMI
boards and put it in as standard. The Amiga badly needs a standardisation of high
resolution 24-bit colour modes.
The JPEG board from DMI is another wonderful product which needs to be standard in
high end Amigas. They'll wait like they always do until someone else has made the
standard and try and add something in while others are going to make a bundle of
money look at GVP. Gerard Bucas was VP of Engineering and he wasn't doing things
the way Commodore liked, so he left. He saw a chance to make some money and look
at the size of GVP they're competing with Commodore. The next generation Amiga
needs a real time JPEG converter and 24-bit graphics to stay ahead.
"I did get together with Lou Eggibrecht [the new VP Engineering] for about 10 minutes
and I was very pleased. He promised he'd fly out to have dinner with me and talk about
the Amiga. I asked him some questions about the future direction of the chips and got
the kind of answers I was looking for the kind of things we've been talking about. High
resolution, new architecture, more competitive. His understanding of the present
architecture was very encouraging. I'd love to work as a consultant for them, but I don't
know how much I could contribute."
What's your opinion of the A4000?
"You know, Commodore actually gave me one today at the show the first time I ever
got anything out of them!
Putting the IDE drive onto the A4000 motherboard was a terrible mistake every
previous Amiga has benefitted from SCSI. I'm really tickled with the A4000 though. I
was looking at it over the last few days and thinking how could I get to buy one of
these without the wife getting to know. I have two A2000s which are fine for the BBS
stuff I do at the moment.
They've improved the chipset in the 4000, taking the colours to 256 from 8 bitplanes.
The higher resolution and more colours are really fast. The MS-DOS interface
[CrossDOS] is quite nice but I'm unhappy about the SCSI and they didn't go to full
16-bit audio, but according to Eggibrecht that's coming soon. I'm also a little
disappointed they didn't use the 040's memory management facilities. The
3.0 operating system looks very good with datatypes and a number of other great
features. Who needs MS-DOS and Windows?".
What about CDTV?
"CDTV is quite a nice idea, but the software has to be right. Can you think of anything
more horrible than trying to read an encyclopaedia or the Bible on a TV, rather than a
nice crisp RGB monitor? As a low cost entertainment system it's a good viable long
term project. I hope Commodore won't drop the ball if things aren't as good initially; they
can take on Philips."
What's your favourite products?
"I love the bulletin board software as that's what I'm into at the moment. ADPro is also a
fantastic program. I picked up a program called Scala and I'd like to get into that it's
user interface is
very impressive. I have a GVP '030 accelerator and that's incredible. The hard drive on
the 32-bit card is very fast indeed it's like a new machine".
Conclusion:
Talking with Jay Miner is one of the best experiences an Amiga owner can have. He
really is the Father of the Amiga and his passion for the machine is so apparent. It's
easy to understand the frustrations he must have at not seeing things go exactly as he
wanted, with the full potential of the machine yet to be realised, some eight years after
its release. One has to marvel that it is still around and selling well given its superior
competition and the natural tendancy for serious users to turn to the IBM/Mac platforms.
It's also clear that the Amiga Corporation contained one of the most innovative design
teams ever assembled, and it is so tempting to speculate where the Amiga would be
today if they had stuck together, and the efforts of Commodore had been more
constructive. Their marketing people have yet to understand what the Amiga is truly
about, and why it is so special. Trying to sell it as a PC is wrong as it is far more than a
spreadsheet, word processing machine. Unlocking doors is what the Amiga is about,
and it is only recently that the third party software is doing the remarkable hardware
justice. Only time will tell if the Amiga can make the impact it is capable of and maybe
Commodore should take on board the views of the Padre.
Cheers! Mike
Mike:
I don't really mind. You ought to mention it was published in Amiga User International magazine as were most of my articles. I used to do some freelance writing to pay my way through medical school. I am now a trainee surgeon, but still use an A2000 and
A1200 both expanded. I also dislike intensely the overblown Windows/Microsoft thing and think that interesting games and innovative software nosedived along with the Amiga. To get anything more exciting than Excel or Word on a PC seems impossible!!!
Apart from that just keep the Miggy flag flying as high as possible!
Cheers! Mike
Larry: May I give you credit?