A look into the past

Jay Miner is also called "The Father of the Amiga". He was there where it all began, he was a part of the fundations that created a strong computer. But some others well known people were involved too. Here is the story told by Jay and RJ Mical.

Some informations here are from a Jay Miner interview, Pasadena, September 1992 and a RJ Mical interview reported by Gary Oberbrunner (sometimes before 1989).

Where does it come from ?

Jay starts: "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 the investors wern't too keen with this name, 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.

"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.

The Amiga was, RJ reminisced, the hardest he or most anyone there had ever worked. "We worked with a great passion...my most cherished memory is how much we cared about what we were doing. We had something to prove...a real love for it. We created our own sense of family out there."

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.

"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. There late in the night, in their drunken stupor, Dale and RJ put the finishing touches on what would become the canonical Amiga demo, Boing. And this demo blew people away.
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."

"RJ Mical pretty much did Intuition 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."

In 1984, Amiga needed money and Commodore entered the game. From 1985 when the first Amiga called Amiga 1000 went out to the release of the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 computers at end of 1993, things went well. Maybe things could go faster but at least products were selling well and the operating system was updated (from version 1.0 to 3.1).

Amigans keeping the faith...

In 1994, Commodore died because of wrong choices and above all because of stupid owners. The Amiga community was starting a very long trip going from troubles to troubles. But the community always kept the hope to see the Amiga being bought by a strong company. The Amiga was a computer using a great technology. Everybody knew that, so it was a really interesting product for any company.

And so it went in 1995, Escom and after that Viscorp, tried to push the Amiga forward. But they were not financially viable enough to buy Amiga and then to continue the development of the Amiga line of computers. So everything stopped again and the community had to wait once again for the good owners to come.

In 1997, Gateway 2000 bought the Amiga and all the remaining stock. A new Amiga Inc was created. A new logo was designed. As Gateway were the first company selling PC by post and a well respected company, Amigans thought it was finally the time for the Amiga to live again. In fact, new people were hired, new computer cases were designed, new partners were found but nothing concrete were done.
Then the community thought that Gateway didn't knew what to do with the Amiga as a computer. The evidence was they bought it in order to use its technology (5 years old and still interesting) into their PCs. As the community got nervous, sad and desperate, end of 1999 was reached.

The phoenix flies again.

On the first days of 2000, the info was released. Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss that left the Gatewayed Amiga a few weeks before, joined into a company named Amino. And with this name, they bought Amiga from Gateway.
What's the difference between this affair and all the previous ones ? This time the owners of Amiga are Amigans and it will make all the difference !

Obviously in 6 years of no new products, no enhancements of the Amiga, PCs and MACs were far away and a lot of people left the Amiga community. That's why a lot of people told that Amiga was dead and that nobody could make it live again.
But in only a few months, Amiga Inc found a partner (Tao Group) with a great kernel and a Software Development Kit (Amiga SDK) was released allowing people to start working on applications for the new Amiga Digital Environment. A few months later the Windows version of the SDK was out and a specification list for a new computer is released: the AmigaOne.