Talking with Jay Miner
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...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.
Jay: 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:
Jay: 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.
Jay: 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.
Jay: 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:
Jay: 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:
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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:
Jay: 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!
Jay: 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.
Jay: 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:
Jay: 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.
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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:
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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?
Jay: 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.
Mike Nelson, September 1992