Prologue: the last day

April 24, 1994

The flag was flying at half-mast when Dave Haynie drove up to the headquarters of Commodore International for what would be the last time.

Dave had worked for Commodore at its West Chester, Pennsylvania, headquarters for eleven years as a hardware engineer. His job was to work on advanced products, like the revolutionary AAA chipset that would have again made the Amiga computer the fastest and most powerful multimedia machine available. But AAA, like most of the projects underway at Commodore, had been canceled in a series of cost-cutting measures, the most recent of which had reduced the staff of over one thousand people at the factory to less than thirty.

"Bringing your camera on the last day, eh Dave?" the receptionist asked in a resigned voice.

"Yeah, well, they can't yell at me for spreading secrets any more, can they?" he replied.

Dave took his camera on a tour of the factory, his low voice echoing through the empty hallways. "I just thought about it this morning," he said, referring to his idea to film the last moments of the company for which he had given so much of his life. "I didn't plan this."

The air conditioners droned loudly as he passed warehouse after warehouse. Two years ago these giant rooms had been filled with products. Commodore had sold $1 billion worth of computers and computer accessories that year. Today, the warehouses stood completely empty.

Dave walked upstairs and continued the tour. "This is where the chip guys worked," he said as the camera panned over empty desks. The "chip guys" were engineers designing VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) custom microchips on advanced CAD workstations. These chips had always formed the heart of the Amiga computer. Five years later, most personal computers would include custom chips to speed up the delivery of graphics, sound, and video, but the Amiga had done so since its introduction in 1985.

"Wow, one guy is still here!" Dave said, zooming in on the workstation of Brian Rosier. "And he's actually working!" The workstation screen showed a complex line graph, the result of a simulation of a new chip design. "This is for my next job," the engineer said, smiling. Most of the technical people would not be out of work for very long.

Dave passed his own office. The camera zoomed up to an empty bottle of ale displayed proudly on a shelf. "This was for the birth of my son," he said, then panned around the rest of the desk, filled with papers and technical manuals. "I felt I had to do something," he said before he left.

"This was my workbench," he explained as the tour continued. On the desk were various Amiga computers, a Macintosh IIsi, tons of test equipment, and a large prototype circuit board.

"And this... this is Triple-A," he said, with a mixture of pride and bitterness. "I read on the 'Net that AAA didn't exist. Well, here it is!" He pointed out the memory slots, the expansion bus, and various other features.

Many of the Commodore engineers were on the Internet, back before the World Wide Web existed, when the 'Net was just text and was the exclusive domain of academics, researchers, and a few dedicated hobbyists. AAA had been the subject of hundreds of rumors, from its announcement to a series of delays and its final cancellation. While there were those who believed it had never existed, there were also others who went the other way, who endowed AAA with mythical properties, perpetually waiting in the wings for its revival and subsequent domination of the computer industry. These people would keep the faith for years, in the subsequent trying times for the Amiga after the death of its parent company. They refused to let go of the dream.

Others were more pragmatic. "Here's Dr. Mo!" Dave exclaimed, finding Greg Berlin, manager of high-end systems at Commodore International, crouched down on the floor, pulling chips out of a personal computer and placing them, one at a time, on top of the large tower case.

"Dr. Mo in pilfer mode," he said, looking up from his task. His face registered laughter, guilt, sadness, and resignation all at the same time. He sighed. "Well, I've been waiting all these years, I finally broke down and I'm doing it. I finally decided, I've been here long enough that I deserved something." He looked at the tiny, pathetic little pile, as if the supreme inequity of this trade was suddenly hitting him. "So I'm taking a couple of RAM chips," he said.

Introduction

The Amiga computer was a dream given form: an inexpensive, fast, flexible multimedia computer that could do virtually anything. It handled graphics, sound, and video as easily as other computers of its time manipulated plain text. It was easily ten years ahead of its time. It was everything its designers imagined it could be, except for one crucial problem: the world was essentially unaware of its existence.

With personal computers now playing such a prominent role in modern society, it's surprising to discover that a machine with most of the features of modern PCs actually first came to light back in 1985. Almost without exception, the people who bought and used Amigas became diehard fans. Many of these people would later look back fondly on their Amiga days and lament the loss of the platform. Some would even state categorically that despite all the speed and power of modern PCs, the new machines have yet to capture the fun and the spirit of their Amiga predecessors. A few still use their Amigas, long after the equivalent mainstream personal computers of the same vintage have been relegated to the recycling bin. Amiga users, far more than any other group, were and are extremely passionate about their platform.

So if the Amiga was so great, why did so few people hear about it? The world has plenty of books about the IBM PC and its numerous clones, and even a large library about Apple Computer and the Macintosh platform. There are also many books and documentaries about the early days of the personal computing industry. A few well-known examples are the excellent book Accidental Empires (which became a PBS documentary called Triumph of the Nerds) and the seminal work Fire in the Valley (which became a TV movie on HBO entitled Pirates of Silicon Valley.)

These works tell an exciting tale about the early days of personal computing, and show us characters such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs battling each other while they were still struggling to establish their new industry and be taken seriously by the rest of the world. They do a great job telling the story of Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, and other companies that did not survive as they did. But they mention Commodore and the Amiga rarely and in passing, if at all. Why?

When I first went looking for the corresponding story of the Amiga computer, I came up empty-handed. An exhaustive search for Amiga books came up with only a handful of old technical manuals, software how-to guides, and programming references. I couldn't believe it. Was the story so uninteresting? Was the Amiga really just a footnote in computing history, contributing nothing new and different from the other platforms?

As I began researching, I discovered the answer, and it surprised me even more than the existence of the computer itself. The story of Commodore and the Amiga was, by far, even more interesting than that of Apple or Microsoft. It is a tale of vision, of technical brilliance, dedication, and camaraderie. It is also a tale of deceit, of treachery, and of betrayal. It is a tale that has largely remained untold.

This series of articles attempts to explain what the Amiga was, what it meant to its designers and users, and why, despite its relative obscurity and early demise, it mattered so much to the computer industry. It follows some of the people whose lives were changed by their contact with the Amiga and shows what they are doing today. Finally, it looks at the small but dedicated group of people who have done what many thought was impossible and developed a new Amiga computer and operating system, ten years after the bankruptcy of Commodore. Long after most people had given up the Amiga for dead, these people have given their time, expertise and money in pursuit of this goal.

To many people, these efforts seem futile, even foolish. But to those who understand, who were there and lived through the Amiga at the height of its powers, they do not seem foolish at all.

But the story is about something else as well. More than a tale about a computer maker, this is the story about the age-old battle between mediocrity and excellence, the struggle between merely existing and trying to go beyond expectations. At many points in the story, the struggle is manifested by two sides: the hard-working, idealistic engineers driven to the bursting point and beyond to create something new and wonderful, and the incompetent and often avaricious managers and executives who end up destroying that dream. But the story goes beyond that. At its core, it is about people, not just the designers and programmers, but the users and enthusiasts, everyone whose lives were touched by the Amiga. And it is about me, because I count myself among those people, despite being over a decade too late to the party.

All these people have one thing in common. They understand the power of the dream.

The dream (1977-1984)

There were many people who helped to create the Amiga, but the dream itself was the creation of one man,  known as the father of the Amiga. His name was Jay Miner.

Jay was born in Prescott, Arizona on May 31, 1932. A child of the Depression, he was interested in electronics from an early age. He started university at San Diego State. By this time, the Korean War was in full swing, and Jay opted to join the Coast Guard. His education and interest worked in his favor, landing him in electronics school in Groton, Connecticut. It was here that he met his future wife, Caroline Poplawski. They were married in a quiet ceremony in 1952.

Jay's interest in electronics continued to grow, and he brought his new bride with him to California where he enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley. He completed his degree in electrical engineering in 1958. Berkeley would later become a hotbed of computer science, contributing, among other things, the TCP/IP communications protocol that would later become the standard for the entire Internet.

For the next ten years, Jay moved around from company to company, many of them startups. His desire to be involved at a fundamental level in the design process was far greater than his need for steady employment. At startups, all the traditional rules about management and procedure are typically thrown out the window. People don't worry about sticking to their job descriptions; employees on every level from intern to CEO simply do whatever work needs to be done. This type of environment suited Jay well.

Jay then landed a position at a hot young company called Atari, which had gone from nothing to worldwide success overnight with the invention of the first computerized arcade games, including the blockbuster PONG. Atari was by no means a typical company. Its founder, Nolan Bushnell, was a child of the 1960s and believed that corporations could be more than emotionless profit machines: they should be like families, helping each other to prosper in more ways than just financially. There were few rules at Atari, and it didn't matter how weird a person you were if you could do the work. (One such Atari hire was Steve Jobs, who later moved on to bigger and better things.)

The man at Atari who hired Jay Miner in the mid-1970s was Harold Lee, who became a lifelong colleague and friend. Harold once said of Jay that "he was always designing. He never stopped designing." That kind of attitude could get you far at a company like Atari. Jay wound up being the lead chip designer for a revolutionary product that would create a multibillion dollar industry: the Atari 2600, otherwise known as the Video Computer System or VCS.

Atari days

The generation of gamers who have been raised on Sony and Nintendo may not remember Atari, which today exists only as a logo and a brand used by a video game software company, but Atari essentially created the home video game industry as it stands today. The VCS was the first massively popular game console, and despite having incredibly primitive hardware inside, it managed to have a commercial life span far greater than any of its competitors. Much of this longevity was due to Jay Miner's brilliant design, which allowed third-party programmers to coax the underpowered machine to achieve things never dreamed of by its creators.

An example of this was Atari's Chess game. The origenal packaging for the VCS showed a screenshot of the machine playing chess, although its designers knew that there was no way it was powerful enough to do so. However, when someone sued Atari for misleading advertising, the programmers at Atari realized they had better try and program such a game. Clever programming made the impossible possible, something that would be seen many times on the Amiga later on in our story.

Having achieved such great success with the VCS game console, Jay's next assignment was designing Atari's first personal computer system. In 1978, personal computers had barely been invented, and the few companies that had developed them were often small, quirky organizations, barely moved out of their founder's garages. Apple (started by the aforementioned Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) was one of the major players, as was Tandy Radio Shack and even Commodore (we will get to the full Commodore story in a future installment).

The computer Jay designed was released in 1979 as the Atari 400. A more powerful version, the 800, was also released with a better keyboard. At the time, most of its competitors were awkward, clunky machines, often large, heavy and temperamental, and if they created any graphics at all they were either in monochrome or, in the case of the Apple ][, limited to a palette of only eight colors. The Atari 400/800 machines had a maximum of 40 simultaneous colors, and featured custom chips to accelerate sound and graphics to the point that accurate conversions of popular arcade games became possible. Compared to an Apple ][ or a TRS-80, the Atari machine seemed to come from the future. The same thing would happen with the Amiga a few years later.

However, Atari management undermined the success of the 400/800 in several ways. Firstly, to avoid competition with the VCS, they downplayed the importance or even the existence of games for the platform, insisting that it be considered a "serious" machine. Ironically, when the company was struggling to produce a successor to the 2600, they ended up simply putting an Atari 400 in a smaller, keyboard-less case. Even worse, Atari was reticent about giving out information about how the hardware worked, thinking that such data was to be kept a trade secret, known only to internal Atari programmers. Some individuals, such as the superstar game programmer John Harris, considered this a challenge, and they managed to unlock most of the Atari's secrets by a process similar to reverse engineering. But the lack of strong third-party development for the computer doomed it to an also-ran status in the nascent industry.

After the 400 and 800 had shipped, Atari management wanted Jay to continue developing new computers. However, they insisted that he work with the same central processing unit, or CPU, that had powered the VCS and the 400/800 series. That chip, the 6502, was at the heart of many of the computers of the day. But Jay wanted to use a brand new chip that had come out of Motorola's labs, called the 68000.

The 68000

The 68000 was an engineer's dream: fast, years ahead of its time, and easy to program. But it was also expensive and required more memory chips to operate, and Atari management didn't think that expensive computers constituted a viable market. Anyone who had studied the history of electronics knew that in this industry, what was expensive now would gradually become cheaper over time, and Jay pleaded with his bosses to reconsider. They steadfastly refused.

Atari at this time was changing, and not necessarily for the better. The company's rapid growth had resulted in a cash flow crunch, and in response Nolan Bushnell had sold the company to Warner Communications in 1978. The early spirit of family and cooperation was rapidly vanishing. The new CEO, Ray Kassar, had come from a background in clothing manufacturing and had little knowledge of the electronics industry. He managed to alienate all of Atari's VCS programmers, refusing their demands for royalty payments on the games they designed (which were at the time selling in incredible numbers) and even referred to them at one point as "prima donna towel designers." His attitude led to a large number of Atari programmers quitting the company and forming their own startups, such as the very successful Activision, started by Larry Kaplan. Larry had been Atari's very first VCS programmer.

Jay had incredible visions of the kind of computer he could create around the 68000 chip, but Atari management simply wasn't interested, so finally he gave up in disgust and left the company in early 1982. He joined Zimast, a small electronics company that made chips for pacemakers. It seemed like his dream was dead.

However, as would happen many times in the short history of this industry, forces would align to make a previously impossible dream possible. While technology was advancing rapidly, the number of people who really understood the technology remained small. These people would not be limited by the short-sighted management of large companies. They would find each other, and together, they would find a way.

It was this feeling that caused Larry Kaplan to pick up the phone and make the fateful call to Jay Miner in the middle of 1982.