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Jay Miner -
The Father of Amiga
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June 1988
Amiga User International Magazine
[Roughly transcribed by Wolfie]
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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 Captains Hi-Fi. Thats 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 that
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 spinoff in
Fairchild devoted exclusively to MOS chips. Again it was easy to become a
expert in this field, because the field was so new. We designed sixty-four
of their chip register chips and the worlds first MOS calculator with 23
custom chips.

In 1974 after ten years of calculator, watch and computer chip design at a
lot of different chip companys, Atari was just starting up and needed a cip
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 sucessful the twenty six
hundred or the Video Computer System as it became called, so in 1977 they
asked me to design the new Atari computer the 400-800 model. I directed the
architecture and the chip design 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 the developement costs in the first year of
production. This allowed them to show just enough profit that year to not
quite trigger the bonus payment they promised to the engineers and the
programmers. The chief programmer on the projects name was Larry Caplain and
a half a dozen of his team went off to start Activision.

This was the beginning of the end for 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 had 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 a 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 callled Zimast doing special purpose computer chips for heart
pacemakers.

It was 1982 and the programmer I mentioned earlier, Larry
Caplain, 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 dont know
but it was actually Larry Caplain that started AMIGA although it was not
called AMIGA then.

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 Caplain, 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 Caplain's place. This meant leaving Zimast. Dave Morse was President
and I was Vice President.

I had wanted for years to build a super 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 was 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 expandibilty 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, Al Pound, had shown
me the real million dollar flight 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 simulators we put in
four independent VMA sound channels. Dave Morse hired some marketeers and
manufacturers to pursue the video games business such as Joystick and
Joyboard and game cartridges, while I started hiring a technical team to
design the chips. This meant that the early AMIGA was divided into two
parts, one part was devoted to the video game business such as Joysticks and
Joyboards, 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.
It was my biggest regret that we did not go after IBM from the start, I know
that sounds weird. But IBM were very vulnerable just then in the PC market,
they had no colour or sound and could only address 640k of 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 a low a cost games machine as possible; even though the only
computers that had done well at that time were the ones with card slots,
such as 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 dropped 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 financial 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 to much hardware, even though it
was all intergrated 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 Tramiel
was buying Atari.

Commodore came along 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 to but did
not have the resources to accomplish. The AMIGA originally only had three
hundred and twenty colours across the screen, even in the 64 mode. They
helped us put in full colour in the sixty four 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 got us a beautiful facility
in Los Gatos and most surprisingly in 1984, sent the entire company
including wives and sweethearts out to New York for a grand AMIGA launching
party at the Rockerfeller Center 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-was seeing what the software
experts would do with it years later.

The Hold and Modify feature of the Amiga was left over from the time the
NTSC converter was on the chips. I almost took the HAM off the chips since
it wasnt very usefull with RGB colour. Well, look what digiview has done
with HAM. Another feature that really tickles me is the design of the
developers tool by Thomas Rokkiki, such as the one called Blitlab. This is a
mouse visual control panel for the blitter. The blitter and the line draw
control registers are shown here on the TV screen as well as a memory map
that shows you what exactly what the various blitter commands do. It even
tells you when you try to set and illegal memory move with the blitter.
Things like that are great!

What happened to AMIGA was a very sad story. You all know that CBM got into
real financial trouble after they took over the Amiga. The sales of the C64
slumped, they had lots of Plus/4's and other stuff left over from the
Tramial era and the sales of the Amiga didn't zoom up as they had hoped,
though it sold as many as the Macintosh did in its first period. There
weren't enough sales to cover expenses. The Bank insisted that Commodore
cut its expenses.  So it cut heavily into the
engineering facility at Westchester and also the Amiga facility at Los
Gatos. A 70% cut in engineering still left 50 or so people in engineering
but similar cuts at Amiga left only ten. People started giving notice and
quiting but Commodore still stuck to its policy of no raises and no
replacements. In spite of very limited manpower, we manage to finish the 1.2
software release; and design a revised set of chips for the next generation
of Amiga computers.

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 had paid in Westchester. Commodore didn't like paying gobs of
money to support Amiga when their German and Westchester design teams could
produce better boxes faster and cheaper. Those teams promised to have the
500 and 2000 ready by 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
didnt want a low cost 1000 to compete with Westchesters designed 500. They
cancelled the Amiga 2000 being designed in Los Gatos in June 1986. Because
it had only two IBM slots instead of three and the Amiga slots were not
shaped enough like IBM cards. Commodore were convinced that their 500 and
the 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 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 getting close to Multitasking. I can't tell you how angry it makes me
feel to see how the way 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 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.

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 accross 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 that I worked on when we were
with Amiga at Los Gatos. These chips use video ram and can produce a very
high ten twenty four resolution along with the present Amiga display
simultaneously. The increase the display address range to 2 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 that is created
by the memory itself and the memory fetchers that are required for the high
resolution display. Imagine having a additional having a gigantic parrallel
output port thousands of bits wide, just for video. You wouldnt 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 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, leabving 99% of the memory band width for the computer. This
is critically important for very high resolution multibitplane colour
displays.

Video ram can also be used for other things than video. It can be 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 shall see
multishift register ports for dumping many of these datatype
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?

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
didnt 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. Companys usually
fail when they stop giving value and become greedy.

It wasn't essential to have 256 logic functions in the blitter. It wasn't
essential to have a 4DMA channels on the blitter. Or 4DMA channels of stereo
audio. Or eight sprites. Or 4000 colours. Hardware linedraw was definitely
over doing 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 eventually the quality product will win. Because costs will come
down with the time but the quality will still be there. There is a rule of
thumb that your selling price should be four to five times your costs. And
this is generally a good rule. However if I should add 512k ram to a product
why should I charge the customer three times what I have to pay for it? It
didnt increase me developement costs. It didnt 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's really terrific value!

The man is regarded as most responsible for the developement 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!"

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