The AUI Interview: Jay Miner – the father of the Amiga | Look… I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet.

The Commodore Amiga is a now-legendary series of home and business computers that had its origins in the fertile minds of some very inventive and creative people who got mixed up in the computer wars between Atari and Commodore back in the early 1980s. The first of the line Amiga A1000 was years ahead of its time and was an important milestone and pointer to the future of computing. The Amiga remains one of the most popular hobbyist and creative computer systems ever, and is still beloved of thousands of retro-computing enthusiasts and hobbyists, occupying a proud place in the history of computing. We enjoy its legacy today in many ways.

July 2015 sees the thirtieth birthday of the Amiga A1000 computer itself, and that will be loudly celebrated around the globe, but before that, a very special group of Amiga fans, organised through a Facebook group, decided last year to dedicate an annual day, International Amiga Day, to remembering and using their Amiga computers in memory and celebration of the late Jay Miner, the remarkable engineer who is generally honoured with the title ‘father of the Amiga’.

Our editor and publisher, Stuart Williams, is proud to have been a regular contributor to the now-defunct Amiga User International magazine ‘back in the day’, and we are therefore delighted to be able to re-publish this interview from the pages of AUI, both in tribute to Jay Miner and to the much-missed Amiga User International, in this thirtieth year of the Amiga.

Amiga User International masthead June 1988

Sadly, there is no indication in the June 1988 issue of Amiga User International, where this interview was first published, as to who conducted the interview. Possibly it was the Managing Editor and Publisher Antony Jacobson, but credit was not given, and we would be glad to hear who it was if anyone out there knows.

Nonetheless, it stands today as one of the most interesting and insightful slices of computing history from the twentieth century.

…

THE AUI INTERVIEW

JAY MINER – ‘The father of the Amiga’

Jay Miner, 1988 (pic Amiga User International)

‘The father of the Amiga’ – the man most credited with its initial development gives AUI an exclusive interview in which he tells how the computer came into being, says some very tough things about how it nearly never happened, and predicts what may come next.

I completed six months of Electronics Technician School in the Coast Guard, and then I spent three years on Coast Guard in the North Atlantic Weather Patrol repairing radars, radios and also the Captain ‘s Hi-fi. That’s how my interest in electronics got started. After the service I studied engineering. I graduated in 1958, with a major in the Design of Generators and Servo Motors.

The first thing, however, that I was asked to do after graduation was to design a Computer Control Console with a Video Display, I had to teach myself transistor circuit design and logic design out of the few books which were then available. This was an advantage however since it was easy in those days to learn enough out of one book to become the company expert.

In 1964, I went to work for General Micro Electronics, the first spin off in Fairchild devoted exclusively to MOS chips. Again it was easy to become an expert in this field, because the field was so new. We designed sixty-four of their chip register chips and the world’s first MOS Calculator with twenty-three custom chips.

In 1974 after ten years of calculator, watch and computer chip design at a lot of different chip companies, Atari was just starting up and needed a chip designer. My friend Harold Lee was already there and he introduced me to Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari). Harold had done the chip for the first video game and Nolan Bushnell asked me to do a chip for the video game twenty six hundred system. You probably know how successful the twenty six hundred or the Video Computer system as it became called, was, so in 1977 they asked me to design the new Atari computer the 400 – 800 model. I directed the architecture and the chip designing of this new machine and this too was a huge success.

The year was 1979 and Atari was rolling in money. However, they made a decision to write off all of the development costs in that first year production. This allowed them to show just enough profit that year to not quite trigger the bonus payment they promised to the engineers and programmers. The chief programmer on the project’s name was Larry Caplin and a half a dozen of his team went off to start Activision.

This was the beginning of the end for the old Atari however, I wanted to do an advanced sixty-eight thousand machine at that time to compete with Apple but Atari decided that they did not need another computer. They decided not to pay the bonus they promised me and the engineers. So I quit, as did nearly all of the engineers and programmers. Atari then started to produce a bunch of junk cartridges, thinking that the public would buy anything I guess, I blame them in large part for the crash in the video game business that happened a few years later. I spent the next three years in a chip company called Zimast doing special purpose computer chips for heart pacemakers.

It was in 1982 that the programmer I mentioned earlier, Larry Caplin, called me up and said he was unhappy with Activision and did I know anybody with money who could help him start a company. Most people don’t know but it was actually Larry Caplin who started AMIGA although it was not called AMIGA then.

Jay Miner and his dog, Mitchy, whose paw print is moulded inside the A1000 case

I was Vice-President

I introduced Larry to my boss at Zimast, Bert Braddock, because he knew people with money and how to make a business plan. He leased an office in Santa Clara and found a chief executive offer, a vice president of marketing from Tonka Toys; Dave Morse. Larry was going to design the games and I was going to design the chips and Zimast was going to build chips and all of us would prosper.

Well, things weren’t going fast enough for Larry Caplin, so he bailed out, leaving the offices, a business plan, and financing. They had the money and a chief executive officer, but no engineer or programmer; the financial backers still wanted a video game company, so Dave Morse asked me to take Larry Caplin ‘s place. This meant leaving Zimast. Dave Morse was President and I was Vice President.

I had wanted for years to build a super personal computer based around the Motorola sixty-eight thousand micro processor. Atari had turned me down and here was my big chance, as long as it could be sold in a stripped down, low-cost version for video games Dave Morse and the financial backers were happy. As long as it was unlimited in its expandability as a high level home personal computer, I was happy. My goal was to design a low cost computer that could do good flying aeroplane simulations. My friend at Singer Link, AI Pound, had shown me the real million dollar simulators and I was hooked. I had to have a low cost version of that to practice on at home.

I read about blitters in one of the computer magazines and this seemed the ideal low cost way to improve animation such as flight simulators. Also, since good sound was important to both games and flight stimulators we put in four independent VMA sound channels. Dave Morse hired some marketeers and manufacturers to pursue the video games business and joystick, joy board and game cartridges, while I started hiring a technical team to design the chips. This meant that the early AMIGA was really divided into two parts, one part devoted to the video game business such as joystick and joy boards, that was one half of the company, the other half of the company was in the backroom where I was in charge doing the chip design for this new computer.

I drew several sketches for the outside of the computer showing a large IBM style box with lots of card slots and a large IBM keyboard. Dave Morse had his own ideas about what a computer should look like and he felt that the card slots were too expensive for the machine he wanted to sell.

The Amiga A1000 (pic Amiga User International)

Go after IBM

It was my biggest regret that we did not go after IBM right from the start, I know that sounds weird. But really IBM was very vulnerable just then in the PC market, they had no colour or sound and could only address 640k memory. We had a much better machine and a much better processor. Dave Morse was insisting however, probably because of the investors, that we make as low cost a game type machine as possible; even though the only computers that had done well at that time were ones with card slots, such as the Apple and IBM. This was probably a good decision in retrospect, since Commodore was not at all interested in a high level machine and most likely would not have purchased AMIGA otherwise. So there we were designing this super graphic computer with four blitter channels, eight sprites and four sound channels and the bottom just fell out of the video game market. This killed the joystick half of the company, and the cartridge market and that half of AMIGA started losing money fast.

The computer was still buyable as a personal computer and the work continued, but with severe financial restrictions. It seemed like we owed money to every supplier in town. I had to mortgage practically everything I owned personally to help meet the company payroll. Steve Jobs of Apple came around several times to look us over but he never actually made an offer to help us. He felt we had too much hardware, even though it was all integrated in three chips. Atari wanted to use our chips for their computers and they loaned us some money while they were negotiating the licensing agreement. They got real tough however just about the time that [Jack] Tramiel was buying Atari.

The original Amiga logo

Commodore came along then and bought AMIGA and saved us. Commodore was very good for AMIGA in the beginning. They made many improvements in the chips. Commodore made a lot of improvements in the things that we wanted but we did not have the resources to accomplish. The AMIGA originally only had three hundred and twenty colours across the screen, even in the six forty mode. They helped us put in full colour in the six forty mode. They also improved the colour by moving the NTSC converter off the chip. They paid off our creditors including my loans to the company and they got us a beautiful facility in Los Gatos and most surprising in 1984, sent the entire company including wives and sweethearts out to New York for a grand AMIGA launching party at the Rockerfeller Centre here in New York City and what a party that was, tuxedos, champagne . . . all just to launch a computer. They really did it top notch. For me the most honourable thing about launching a new computer like this – and this was my third – is seeing what the software experts do with it years later.

The Hold and Modify feature of the Amiga was left over from the time the NTSC television conversion was on the chips. I almost took the HAM off the chips since it wasn’t very useful with RGB colour. Well, look what Digiview has done with HAM. Another feature that really tickles me is the design of developers tools by Thomas Rokkiki, such as the one called Blitlab. This is a mouse visual control panel for the blitter. The blitter and line draw control registers are all shown there on the TV screen as well as a memory map that shows you exactly what the various blitter commands do. It even tells you when you try to set an illegal memory move with the blitter. Things like that are just great!

Commodore logo

What happened to Amiga?

What happened to Amiga, the company? Well, it’s a very sad story. You all know that CBM got into real financial trouble after they took over the Amiga. The sales of the 64 slumped, they had lots of Plus/4’s and other stuff left over from the Tramiel era and the sales of the Amiga didn’t zoom up as fast as they had hoped, though it sold as many as the Macintosh did in its first period. There weren’t enough sales to cover its expenses. The Bank insisted that Commodore cut its expenses. So it cut heavily into the engineering facility in Westchester and also at the Amiga facility in Los Gatos. A 70% or so cut in engineering in Westchester still left 50 or so people in engineering but similar cuts at Amiga left only ten. People started giving notice and quitting but Commodore stuck to its policy of no raises and no replacements. In spite of very limited manpower, we managed to finish the 1.2 software release, and design a revised set of custom chips for the next generation of Amiga computers. Amlga did all these things not Commodore.

Amiga did all these things not Commodore

Then Commodore laid off more people in Los Gatos and closed Los Gatos. Let’s face reality, Los Gatos was a very expensive place to live. We had to pay 25 to 50% more to get good people. And our rent per square foot was twice what Commodore paid in Westchester. Commodore didn’t like paying gobs of money to support Amiga when their German and Westchester design teams could design better boxes faster and cheaper. Those teams promised to have the 500 and the 2000 ready by September – that’s September 1986. Both of those machines used the chips and software that Amiga designed. But they were still more than a year late. Commodore refused to cost reduce the 1000 line. Because in my opinion, they didn’t want a low cost 1000 to compete with Westchester’s keyboard-attached 500. They cancelled the original Amiga 2000 being completed in Los Gatos in June of 1986. Because it only had two IBM card slots instead of three and the Amiga slots were not shaped enough like IBM cards. Commodore were convinced that their 500 and German made 2000 would be ready by September ’86. So why advertise the 1000 when there wouldn’t be any around soon? So an entire year was lost while there was no advertising and no PR for the Amiga, no push to sell 1000s. But IBM and Apple used that year to good advantage. They both have colour and sound and are even close to getting multitasking. I can ‘t tell you how angry it makes me feel to see how the Amiga was handled. The advertisements they did have were absolutely awful. Old men changing into babies and kids competing in race cars. It was ghastly. And then a full year with no ads at all. They lost dealers and worst of all they lost public awareness. I am happy to say that things are changing now and things seem to be shaping up. Now we have the 500 and the 2000.

The Amiga A500 (pic Amiga User International)

The Amiga A2000 (pic Amiga User International)

What comes next?

What comes next? Everyone agrees that the next step is more resolution, more computing power, more graphics engines and more memory. More resolution means up to ten twenty four across the screen. More computing power means bigger engines, probably from Motorola. And more memory is obvious and there is going to be better and better software.

Video RAM

Commodore now has a high resolution chip set of Amiga chips that I worked on when we were with Amiga in Los Gatos. These chips use video ram and can produce a very high resolution ten twenty four display along with the present Amiga display simultaneously. They increase the display address range to two megabytes. These chips are completed and tested and only require a computer and memory to hold them together. I’d like everyone to know that Amiga in Los Gatos designed these chips! These improved Amiga chips can use a new type of ram called video ram. This new type of ram – video ram – is a giant step in computer improvement because it frees up the bottleneck into memory caused by competition between the computer itself and the memory fetchers required for the high resolution display. Imagine having an additional gigantic parallel output port thousands of bit wide, just for video. You wouldn’t have to access it very often to dump a lot of memory data to a video picture.

The way it works is the video data for the high resolution display is dumped from memory into a large parallel to serial shift register right on the video ram chips. This outputs hundreds of picture bits – pixels – in one memory cycle, leaving 99% of the memory bandwidth for the computer. This is critically important for very high resolution multi-bitplane colour displays.

Video ram can also be used for other things than video. It can provide a very fast path to hardware parallel processors; such as blitter and all kinds of I/O such as audio, hard disk and networking ports. Special purpose multiport chips like the video ram will continue to evolve and we will see multi-shift register ports for dumping many of these datatypes bi-directionally and simultaneously. So keep your eye on video ram and on the next generation of Amiga computers that will probably use it.

Why was the Amiga a success?

Why was the Amiga a success? It was a success, you know, even though it stumbled. The first year it sold almost as many as the Macintosh did in its first year and the Macintosh didn’t have all the competition we have now. I believe to be successful you have to give value. Personal success requires giving value to what you do. Product success requires giving value to the product. Companies usually fail when they stop giving value and they become greedy.

It wasn’t essential to have 256 logic functions in the blitter. It wasn’t essential to have 4 DMA channels on the blitter. Or 4 DMA channels of stereo audio. Or eight sprites. Or 4000 colours. Hardware linedraw was definitely overdoing it. People would buy it anyway! I was told this over and over and over again. To a certain extent it is true. They will buy lesser quality for a while. And if it is cheap enough.

I believe though that eventually the quality product will win. Because costs will come down with time but the quality will still be there. There is a rule of thumb that your selling price must be three to four times your costs. And this is generally a good rule. However if I should add another 512K of ram to a product why should I charge the customer three times what I have to pay for it? It didn’t increase my development costs. It didn’t increase my marketing costs. This is just another way to gouge the customer instead of giving value. I believe the Amiga is a success because it is really terrific value!

He turns away. The man is regarded as most responsible for the development of the best small microcomputer in the world. Will he ever work on such a project again? He shrugs and smiles grimly:

“You never know!”

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. I had an idea 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 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 re-mortgages 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 plug-in 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 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 Aight 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 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.

* Sad footnote: After suffering a long bout with a kidney illness, Jay Miner passed during the summer of 1994. His death is mourned by all the Faithful.

The light he lit burns on.

- TBM

The AUI Interview: Jay Miner – the father of the Amiga, JUNE 1988.