Interview with Jay Miner

Introduction

This interview with the late Jay Miner, "father of the Amiga", was recorded in Paris on the evening of February 9th, 1990, during an Amiga Developer's Conference. In the interview, which took place at the conference's hotel bar (as can be heard from the bottles and glasses in the background), Jay spoke with Cloanto developers recalling the birth of the Amiga, but also discussing topics ranging from computers and society to issues totally unrelated to technology. The most relevant parts of this interview are included in the following text, as well as in audio format on the CD-ROM.

The original recording was done with a portable device which was running on batteries that were progressively discharging during the interview. Running the original tape today, Jay Miner's voice initially sounds like that of a young man, and at the end it is more similar to that of a cartoon character speaking very quickly. This is barely sufficient for a transcript, but it is definitely not the best for audio reproduction on a CD! So we went through considerable and extremely hi-tech efforts to "repair" the tape in order to best share this unique piece of Amiga history with all enthusiasts. For the Amiga Forever CD-ROM edition, the original recording was sampled, filtered and processed with professional hardware and software, first at a recording studio, and then with an Amiga 4000 running Samplitude and AudioLab. Please refer to the Credits section for additional information.

The hyperlinks on this page point to the corresponding Windows "WAV" files on the CD-ROM. For space reasons, the audio files (21 Mbytes) are not copied by default to the hard disk during installation. Unless these files are installed to the hard disk, the links will only work if this documentation is launched from CD-ROM. Additionally, a higher quality version of the interview is stored on the three audio tracks of the CD. When played on a CD player, these will be last three tracks (the first tracks contain the Amiga Forever filing system data in various formats). The Online Edition of Amiga Forever does not include the audio data.

Jay Miner (1932-1994). Photograph taken during the interview.

Track 1 - Birth of the Amiga

The Amiga - a company called "Amiga" - was started in 1982 by myself, and Dave Morse, the president. I was not part of it originally. It started with a fellow named Larry Kaplan. Larry Kaplan was one of the founders of Activision, and he used to work for me at Atari, and when he left Atari, to start Activision, I gave him a letter of recommendation and helped him start Activision. That was in 1979. And then, about... 1982 Larry Kaplan called me up on the phone one day, and said he was tired of working at Activision, and he wanted to start a new games company. And he asked if I knew anybody with money and lawyers and stuff. And I said "No, not personally, but my boss does". At this time I was working for Zymos, and Burt Braddick was president of Zymos. And he knew these fellows from Texas, that helped to start Zymos. And they had money, and they were very interested in starting a video games company, because at that time it looked like video games were going to keep going up through the roof. Little did they know that the whole video games thing was going to turn around and go through the cellar in a year or two. But, anyway, so I introduced them together, my friend Larry Kaplan and my boss Burt Braddick, and together they came up with a business plan, and they found this guy Dave Morse to be president, from back East. He was vice president of Tonka toys, in charge of marketing (at Tonka toys). They brought him out here, got him all situated in a house and everything. They had this business plan, they had the investors, they got an office, empty office, in Santa Clara. At that time, Larry Kaplan decided to quit. He got cold feet or something, or maybe things weren't happening fast enough for him, or maybe he wasn't getting a big enough piece of the action, I don't know why, but he quit, and left them with no engineer to make things go. Although Larry wasn't really an engineer, he was a programmer. They talk about programmers being engineers, but I still distinguish between the two.

It started with the idea of a video games machine and I was working at Zymos for Burt Braddick, and they wanted me to design the chips, so that Zymos could build the chips and Amiga could sell the games, and everybody would make money, that was the idea. But when Larry Kaplan left, they needed some help, so they asked me if I would take over and be the vice president of engineering of Amiga. And I said "sure", provided, number one, we get to use the 68000, and number two I get to make it not only a games machine, but a computer. I had a lot of ideas for a computer, that Dave Morse and the investors seemed to like, even though they were primarily interested in a video games machine. As long as we could make it expandable and it didn't cost too much extra, they were willing to go along with it also being a computer.

OK, so, there we were me and Dave Morse, and an empty office, and a vague plan to make the best video games machine that was also a computer.

I think that both Dave Morse and I both got our wish. We got the best video game machine, and we also got the best computer. And I had visions of it being something that it's not yet, and that is, something that really competed with IBM and took a bite out of IBM. And I don't think that's the Amiga's fault. I think it's the fact that it hasn't been too competitive. I think that Commodore was very bad off financially, about 1983, '84, right in there. And C-64 sales were down, and Commodore was having trouble with the banks, and they didn't really advertise it well enough, and they didn't have the money for good software support, good support for developers. They not only didn't have the money, they didn't have the experience and incentive for good software support: they were more of a games machine mentality, than they were a computer mentality, and they weren't interested in competing with IBM like I was. So in that sense it's not quite what I had expected. I had expected that we would be a business machine, as well as a video machine.

Of course at the beginning, when the chips were done, in '84 we had a lot of companies looking at us, but nobody wanted to invest in a small computer company, at that time, especially a video games computer company, because video games had gone "phew", down...

I'm very glad to see that Commodore is working hard on new chips that are coming in the future. I was concerned about this, because the technology has gotten much better since we did the first Amiga chipset. We did those with the 5 micron design rules. And now they've got 1 and 1.5 micron design rules. You can put five times as much on the same chip area. And I was afraid that Commodore was not pursuing the new chip design well enough, but I've been reassured by people that they are coming out with a new Amiga chip set that will make it very competitive.

Track 2 - Computers and Society

My vision is very negative there, so I don't know if you really want to hear it...

My general feeling is that computers are doing more harm than good. I see the IRS is using computers extensively now to catch people on their taxes. And if you're in the government I suppose that's good. But, you know, when they issued us our social security cards, they promised they would never be used for purposes of identification. In fact, my social security card has written on it "Not to be used for identification". But now, look what happens: pretty soon they will have numbers tattooed on the forehead. And this is the only reason they can do this, is because of computers. I see computers bringing closer and closer the day of the "big brother" concept of... where government can control every aspect of your life because you are on the computer.

One of the problems with computers is that even the... most of the people who... they are trying to teach computers to everybody... and most people really have no need for them. It's a very expensive way to churn money in the society, and to... People design computers so that other people can play with them... And it looks to me like most of it is a great big waste.

The whole technology thing, the result has been more and more crowding... I don't think it has improved the average person's lifestyle that much.

Sure, I do better letters now. I have a word processor and I like my 2000. I play games on it. I do letters on it. I have my spreadsheets on it. But that isn't necessary, it isn't really necessary. And that's my feeling about computers, it's that they are not really necessary. Sure, you can design airplanes that go a 100 miles per hour faster than you could without computers. But so, what?

The only people that are really still doing useful working jobs, I think, are the farmers, and the doctors, and the people that make clothes, the necessities, and beyond that, we don't really need it. Every household has more toys, more electronic gadgets than they really need.

Oh, play the game, learn programming, learn to design computers, because that's where the future is. I'm not saying it's not real. It's definitely real, and it's definitely coming, as a big thing. It's going to further separate the classes, though. Because the people that can't go to school at a level to learn computers are going to be tomorrow's second class citizens. And it's going to further make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. It doesn't bring society together - it separates.

Track 3 - A New Job

I didn't tell you that I started a new job. People might be interested in the fact that I am now working at a small medical electronics company designing chips that go into pace-makers and what they call "implantable defibrillators". A defibrillator shocks the heart into working again if it fails. And it goes inside the body and it charges a capacitor - a big capacitor - to about 750 Volts, and if the person's heart stops beating it goes "wamp" and delivers the shock. So that's why they call it an implantable defibrillator, and I am doing chip design for that now, and it's very interesting...