Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/SCENE/AMIGA/jaystale.lha/JaysTale.txt

Text File | 1995-09-28 | 24.2 KB | 430 lines

Jay Miner Interview Pasadena, September 1992.

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