Building the First Amiga Computer

pick up on our story about Amiga. Now. I left off in the last episode about talking about the simulated hardware of the Amiga chips set with the Motorola sixty eight thousand processor and the breadboard simulated chips. These enormous circuits that would represent the teeny tiny chips that would be on the motherboard in the future Amiga. But what about the operating system? You really need an operating system

in order to do anything useful with a computer. Developers would need an application programming interface or a p I in order to build programs to run on this machine, and users would need some sort of method to navigate the computer system. So for Amiga, that task fell to the team that was led by a man named Bob Parizo, the chief of software engineering and Perizo had previously worked on mainframe computers with a company called Tandem, and Tandem

made giant computer machines for the banking industry. That Prizo's background was in machines that could handle multitasking, and so he set out to create an operating system that would take advantage of the hardware that J Miners team was building over on the other side of Amiga, and he wanted to be able to run multiple applications simultaneously. This was in stark contrast with all the other home computers

at the time. They were all designed so that they would run a single program at anyone given time, generally speaking, and that if you wanted to launch a second program, you first would have to shut down the program you were in, or at least have it go into kind of a sleep mode. But Pariza wanted a machine that could truly run multiple applications side by side, so he hired on several people to join his team, including Robert J. Mical Or r J, Carl Sassin, rath Dale Luck, and

Dave Needle. All joined the Amiga team over the course of the next year or so. M r J had previously worked as a software engineer at Williams Electronics and worked on video games and Amiga. He would build out many of the system's basic routines for the OS that that made it all possible. He was also known for building a game for the Amiga that made use of the joyboard peripheral that I mentioned in the last episode. That was that balance board peripheral that acted kind of

like a joystick. This game was called Zen Meditation, and the goal was to sit perfectly still the high stress environment of building a new computer system, and a lot of folks would kind of give this a world try and calm down. And when it came time to create an error message for the Amiga that would show in the event of a system crash, you know, you would get that message kind of like the blue screen of

death known in the Windows Circles. Well, for the Amiga, it was cheekily decided that they would call it the Guru Meditation error, and that was kind of a nod

to this game that r J had made. Carl Sassin Wrath had worked as a television cameraman when he was a teenager and then would go on to get a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Davis and began working with Hewlett Packard as a programmer and system designer, including heading up a project team to develop a mouse driven graphical user interface or g u I, also known as a gooey. He

became Amiga's manager of operating Systems. Dale Luck got a degree in computer science from Michigan Technological University and would join Amiga as the manager of graphics Software, and Dave Needle worked not just on software but also on chip design, and all four would go on to do big things outside of Amiga later on. Carl Sassin Wrath was already working on ideas for an operating system that could handle

multitasking before he had ever met Prizo. That fell right in line with what Bob Aarrizo wanted to do with the Amiga system. So the challenge was figuring out how to do multitasking without overtaxing the CPU and chip set and memory capabilities of this machine. They had to build out a system that would make efficient use of the resources of the computer would have Assassin Wrath developed an

approach that would later be called a microkernel. This is the collection of features that are needed at minimum to implement an operating system that includes stuff like in her process communications, low level address space management, thread management, that kind of thing. The concept of the micro colonel actually pre dates Assassin Wrath's work, but his was a notable early example. In the home computer space. Herrizo and his team were determined to incorporate a graphical user interface with

this operating system. This g u I or gooey, and this is how we access pretty much all consumer computer systems these days. Files are represented as icons. Clicking on an icon can execute a file. I know what I'm saying is all old news to you guys. This is the stuff you use every single day. But for the programmers out there, and also for old folks like myself,

we remember the days of command lines. And in a command line computer system back in the day, the way you would run a program is you wouldn't type the word run, typically followed by the file name that you wanted to execute. You actually had to type all this stuff in. You had to navigate file trees and systems using typewritten commands, had to change drives this way, and it wasn't really complicated to get the basic commands down, but it acted as a barrier to entry. It was

something that intimidated people because it was rarely intuitive. It wasn't necessarily hard once you learned the basics, but the basics themselves seems so foreign, so alien, that a lot of people felt that that meant computers were for quote unquote smart people or nerds or something. The g U Y made interacting with a computer much more easy, much

more intuitive. I mean, we've seen this over and over again the Mac Os, Windows, all of these different graphic user interfaces that carry over today into things like smartphone interfaces. They show that they're much easier to understand than those command lines, and in nine three they were largely unheard of outside of specific spheres within the computing community. The model had actually been in development for years at other places, such as Xerox's Park facility, but it hadn't really made

its way into consumer computers yet. Meanwhile, r J was getting to work building out the Application Programming Interface or a p I. J Minor once said that r J had done this by locking himself in his office for three straight weeks and emerged only once to get up some clarification from Sassain Wrath on something the a p I that he eventually built was given the name Intuition, and because it was the product of one person, it

was fairly uniform and straightforward. A lot of other a p I s are the products of teams that are working sometimes at different times. Something work might get started by one team and then finished by another team, and so sometimes those sort of interfaces can be a little clunky to work with because different people with different perspectives were working on it. But Intuition was the product of one person at Amiga, So as long as you understood how r J thought, you could figure out how to

build applications for the Amiga. So you had these two teams. You had the hardware team, you had the software team, and they were both working very hard to create what would become the first Amiga computer, and the company planned to demonstrate something at the Consumer Electronics Show or ce

S in January nur in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now they knew they were not going to have the full prototype Amiga computer to show off something that would look like a production model, they would have to rely on the

simulated chips they had built on bread boards. So these enormous bread boards that would represent tiny, tiny chips They knew the operating system was not going to be finished in time for this demonstration, but the team wanted to show off their work and the capabilities of their chips set design, and this would hopefully bring in more investors and pull in the money they would need to keep operations going and move towards a production model because their

revenue generating process. You know, they had been making stuff for the video game industry, the home video game industry, but that industry had collapsed, so now they were desperately trying to get work done and get investment money into the company to keep it going until they had a consumer ready computer they could put on the market. Money was already tight. The team didn't have any idea of how they were going to ship their prototype to the

trade show without endangering it. I mean, you had these enormous bread boards with thousands of wires connected to them, and disconnecting any of those wires would make the simulated chips not work properly. So r J and Dale took it upon themselves and they booked an extra airline seat in between them so that they could put the prototype in an airline seat and make sure that it was

protected in addition, they completely covered this prototype in pillows. Now, to book a seat, they had to give a passenger name. This is again this is in the old days when it was pretty easy to go through an airport, but you still needed to have a name on a ticket if you wanted to book a seat. So the name they gave their passenger this prototype computer was Joe Pillow.

The engineers, perhaps giddy from working so hard for so long, even drew a face on one of the pillows to give Joe Pillow a face, and apparently he wore a tie to Legend has it that Dale and r J even tried to go so far as to get an airline meal for Joe, but the flight attendants drew the line there and said no dice. At c E S, the Amiga team had a booth with a backstage area where they kept their prototype, and this would keep the computer away from prying eyes and allow the team to

control who could actually see it. They would hold demonstrations in this backstage area. They would approve people, bring them back there, and then show off this prototype. It was still working from those simulated chips, and it was enormous.

It was sitting on top of a table, and more than a few onlookers would actually snoop around to make sure that the bread boards were in fact acting as a chip set and that there wasn't some other computer system hiding out of view that was creating the effects that they were seeing. Uh, it was not running the Amiga operating system, because, as I said, the operating system

was not finished at that point. So r J and Dale had built in some demo software that would run directly off the chip set to show off what the computer could do. One of the demos that they built was a large ball, and the ball had a checkered pattern on it, and the ball would bounce up and down on the bottom edge of the screen, and every time it would appear to hit that bottom edge, it

would produce a booming noise and stereo. And it was a hasty demonstration, but that checkered ball would become an iconic symbol and would stand as the symbol for Amiga going forward. I've got a lot more to say about the birth of the Amiga, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The demonstrations at that January c e S where success and the team got back to work. They had a new goal that they wanted to meet, because back in those early eighties there

were actually two c e S shows every year. There was one that would take place in the winter and one that would play take place in the summer. The winter ones would take place in Las Vegas, and the summer ones tended to move around a little bit, but that second show would happen in June in Chicago, Illinois. So the Amiga team had set a goal. They wanted to do more demonstrations of the Amiga, but this time they wanted to use prototype silicon chips, not the simulated

chips on bread boards. They wanted to actually produce the silicon chips and create a motherboard where they could run demonstrations off that show that they had made some progress and that they would soon be able to move into fabrication and production stages, though at the time they would only really be able to do this for a prototype because again they were running short on funds at this point. The Chicago ce S show was another success from a

technological standpoint, but Amiga was out of money. They were not going to be able to stay in operation without a significant investment, and the CEO of Amiga. Dave Morse, who had come from Tonka Toys to head up Amiga, sought out potential investors and partners, including at very established company's stuff like Sony and Hewitt, Packard and Phillips, as well as Apple, which was younger but had been doing quite well. But none of those seemed particularly interested in

investing in Amiga. One company, however, did offer up a pretty cutthroat deal. It was a five hundred thousand dollar loan and the company was Atari, the same company that Amiga co founder j Minor had worked for in the nineteen seventies, and he had left Atari for another company before starting Amiga. Well, he left Atari because he had had disputes about bonuses and the direction of projects. Attari was the same company that had been rocked by the

video game crash a year earlier. And here was Atari saying, yeah, we can loan you half a million dollars. But the deal was a really tough one. According to the agreement, Amiga would get that half million dollar loan, but it would have to repay Atari by the end of June, otherwise Atari would end up owning all of Amiga's technology.

And this was a draconian deal, but at the same time, there weren't really any other options available, and Morse really had no other lifeline, so he signed this deal because it was either this or dissolve. Now it could have unfolded that Amiga was never able to pay back that loan and it would have become part of Atari, and maybe that would have saved Atari, though I doubt it.

But at any rate, it's all a moot point because another company swooped in and kind of sort of rescued Amiga from being devoured by Atari, and that company was Commodore. I've done episodes about Commodore, but here's a quick overview of its history. Commodore had started off as a typewriter repair and assembly company back in nineteen fifty four. It was founded by a guy named i Deck Trammilski, who

changed his name to Jack Tramiel. He immigrated to the United States after he had been rescued from a Nazi work camp during World War Two, and he founded the company Commodore in the nineteen fifty four. In nineteen sixty five, he secured money from an investor named Irving Gould, and Irving Gould will play another important part in our Amiga story.

In the nineteen seventies, Commodore would diversify and start making calculators, largely relying upon chips from another company called Texas Instruments. But then Texas Instruments began building its own calculators and started competing with Commodore, and that taught Tramiel a lesson.

He decided they didn't want to depend upon some other companies products, only to have that company enter into direct competition with him further down the line, and so Commodore decided to get into another business and they acquired another company called Most Technology. Most Technology was the company that made the Most six five O two chip, and that chip powered many early computer systems and video game consoles. Commodore had been one of the early players on the

personal computer scene. They introduced the pet or PET in nineteen seventy seven, the VIC twenty in nineteen eighty one, and in nineteen eighty two, Commodore introduced the best selling computer of all time, the Commodore sixty four. But then Commodore went into kind of a scorched earth policy against competitors like Texas Instruments and tried to drive them out

of the industry and become the dominant player. To do that, one of the big tactics was cutting prices, and they cut prices on their their products to the point where the company was eating into its own reserves. And that's when Gould, the investor and Tremiel the founder budded heads. Gould wanted his investment protected, Tramuel wanted to be the

dominant force in personal computing. In late nineteen eighty three, Gould would go to the board of directors and they decided to force Jack Tramiel to resign from the company he had founded. But while Tramuel wasn't in charge when Commodore would approach Amiga, he still plays an incredibly important part of this story. And this is really where things get Games of Throne ish arelthough with the players in fold,

maybe I should call this video game of Thrones. So Jack Tramiel, he gets pushed out of his own company at the end of nineteen eighty three, and while the folks over at Amiga, we're still getting ready for their first prototype debut at C E S the following January. So at this point Amiga is an independent company and they're building up for C E S night four, Jack Tramiel gets kicked out of Commodore. He does not go into retirement. Instead, he saunters over to Warner Communications. Warner

Communications was the parent company of Atari. Now, this was in the fallout of the video game crash of nineteen eighty three, and at that point Warner Communications really was trying to find a way to dump the personal computer and video game console division of Attari. The only part of Atari the company still wanted to hold onto was

Atari's arcade division because it was still making money. But in the wake of the video game crash, the console and personal computer arms of Attari felt like an anchor. So Jack Tramuel comes over to Warner Communications and says, I'll take that off your hands, and he's able to take over the company without even making a down payment. It was one of the biggest craziest deals in tech history where Jack Tramuel essentially took over control of Atari.

So now Jack Tramuel's in charge of Atari. And you remember that five hundred thousand dollar loan deal I mentioned from Atari, the one that would force Amiga's technology to become Atari property if Amiga failed to pay back that loan by the end of June that was put together by Jack Tramiel, formerly of Commodore, and the company that would rescue Amiga was Commodore, so in a way, Amiga was put in the middle of a really ugly custody

battle between an entrepreneur and his former company. Originally, Commodore was going to enter into a licensing agreement with Amiga to use the company's chip set in return for four million dollars, but ultimately Commodore executives decided that what made the most sense was to acquire Amiga outright, and so Commodore would acquire Amiga for the princely sum of twenty four million dollars, which obviously allowed Amiga to payback that

five thousand dollar loan, and Amiga would become part of Commodore. Jack Tramiel must have been pretty steamed to have his former company come in and rescue Amiga, so under his leadership, Attari got to work designing a new personal computing system, one that would compete directly against Commodore's Amiga computer. The official name for this other computer, the Atari computer, was

the Atari st that. Some people would jokingly refer to this as the jack Intosh because it seemed to eight Apple's Macintosh platform, and it was rushed into production by Jack Tramiel. Ultimately, this feud would be really harmful to both companies spoiler alert. They spent so much time facing off against each other that other companies like Apple, IBM and later Microsoft were able to get a firmer foothold

in the personal computer marketplace. They fought a fierce battle against each other while a larger war was going on. But I am getting ahead of myself, so we'll rejoin that discussion later on. At first, Commodore was pretty darn

awesome to the Amiga team. The group got the resources they needed to keep developing their first computer system, and while there was an initial fear that Commodore was going to require the Amiga group to pick up stakes in California and moved to Westchester, Pennsylvania, which is where Commodore

headquarters were, those fears were initially quelled. The team did move, but they moved into larger offices about ten miles away from where they had been working, so it wasn't that big of a change, and it meant that they were no longer in a very cramped working space. Amiga was able to get more equipment and able to hire on more engineers to get back at it, and things were looking up. But nothing lasts forever. I'll tell you more when we get back after this quick break to thank

our sponsor. As the hardware had been taking shape, so was the operating system. The microkernel named Exact served as the core for this OS. The g u I or Graphical User Interface was coming together, but the OS would still need a way to handle the file system and some of the other tasks that neither EXACT nor the g u I would touch on. There are some things that the OS needed to do that neither of these

components could do now. At first, the solution to this was going to be creating code called the Commodore Amiga Operating System or c a O S CHAOS. That might have been a little prophetic. Carl Sassin Wrath wrote up the design specifications for CHAOS. What CHAOS was supposed to be able to do. This would include some advanced operating system task management capabilities, like the ability to take the resources that were used by one application and then free

those resources up if that application should crash. Since the Amiga was being built as a mole t tasking machine. That was a really important feature because without it, computer resources could get locked up in a crashed application while other applications are still working, and eventually that means you would run out of computer memory or processing power if you couldn't get to those, and you would have to do a hard reboot of your system in order to

free them all up. Again. Design was falling behind, and so the team chose to outsource some elements of Chaos to third party developers. But despite pulling long hours and despite putting outsourced work in there, it became evident that there was no way the team was going to get everything done and be ready to launch the Amiga on time. And while Commodore was being really helpful, that was not

going to fly. The Commodore did expect results. So in addition, the third party that was working on parts of Chaos, they found out that Amiga had been bought out by Commodore, and suddenly this third party was demanding a whole lot more money of that outsourced work, which is kind of like if you won the lottery and then all of your friends and family started hitting you up for cash because they know you've got deep pockets. That was what

felt like was going on with this third party. Commodor tried to negotiate with them, but it all fell apart and it became pretty clear the Chaos just had fallen into some sort of orderless state of being, if only there were a word for that. Anyway, the team would pivot and seek out a new solution for their operating system, and they chose to use an existing operating system as their foundation. It was one that had been developed at the University of Cambridge for the PDP eleven computer system.

It was called trip Os. It was developed by a guy named Dr Tim King, and he created a new company called MetaComCo specifically to work with Amiga. He took the code of trip Os and then began to adapt it so that would work on Amiga's chip sets and capabilities, and this new code was called Amiga Doss. Amiga Doss could do basic operating system functions, but it was not going to do everything that the design spec for Chaos

had called for. It had no resource tracking, which meant that if an application crashed, the resources being used for that application when it was working might get locked up. So that was a bummer. One other battle that was taking place before the computer would launch would revolve around

computer memory. J Minor had really wanted this Amiga computer to ship with five kilobytes of RAM because he knew that the operating system the graphical user interface would both require a decent amount of memory just to work on their own before you ever launched an application. But he wanted developers to be able to make good programs for

this computer system. However, RAM was kind of expensive, and adding that much RAM would dry up the price of the system, and Commodore was worried that that would price the computer out of the market. Commodore wanted to ship the computer with two fifty six kilobytes of RAM. They

fought over this. Eventually they made a compromise. J Minor essentially threatened to walk away from the company, and the compromise was that the computer would ship with two d fifty six kilobytes of RAM as a standard, but it would also feature an expansion slot or expansion cage as it was called, where it would be very easy to plug in additional RAM. Finally, the pieces were in place, The chip set and motherboard were finalized, the operating system

was finished. The team then began to design the case. They even added their signatures to this design so that their signatures would all be on the inside of the Amiga computer case. This was something that a lot of early personal computer manufacturers did, where they had the designers signed their work, but it was all on the inside of the case, where you would not see it unless

you opened up the computer. Every single team member at Amiga, including those who joined after Commodore had purchased were part of this. Plus j miners Dog, which was a cockapoo named Mitchie, had a signature in their pop print. Oh and one other valuable team member had a signature in this Joe Pillow. Joe Pillows signature is inside the original Amiga. Dave Morse, who was the CEO of Amiga he was now kind of the the head of Commodore Amiga, even had a little bit of input on this case designed.

The Amiga computer, which was now called the Amiga one thousand, would have a raised section on the bottom of the machine that would allow the user to kind of slide the keyboard in, so it's kind of nestles underneath the computer case a little bit, and that way you could move the keyboard out of the way whenever you're not using the computer. And it was now time to unveil the Amigo one thousand to the world, and so Commodore

decided to make it a big media event. The company rented out the Lincoln Center in New York City and every Commodore employee in attendance got to wear a tuxedo. They were given tuxedos by Commodore. They hired out a full orchestra to provide music before and during the event, and Bob Parizo was chosen to present on behalf of Amiga. He was joined on stage by a computer operator who

was working on an Amigo one thousand. Cameras would show both Bob Barrizo up on stage as well as the screen of the Amigo one thousand, and that would be projected onto large screens behind the stage so that people in the audience could see what was happening in real time. Pariso, by the way, came out as an incredible presenter. The presentation is actually available on YouTube if you want to

watch it. I did watch it. It's pretty entertaining. The computer capabilities are obviously primitive by today's standards, but you have to think back in terms of nine five. They

were revolutionary back then. Parizzo and the operators showed how the Amiga could handle graphics including animation, how it could display more colors than other computers on the market, how the graphical user interface worked, how the computer could multitask, how you can use the same sets of data in a spreadsheet to generate multiple graphs and charts and different formats at the same time in different windows, how the

sound system on the computer would work, and more. To make sure that the business crowd was appeased and would have something to talk about, he also showed off how the Amigo one thousand could run an IBM PC emulator. They used a program called Amiga Transformer, and the operator showed that using that program you could then put in a PC doss disk into the system, boot into PC doss, then you could load in any software meant for the

IBM PC and run it. And they showed off Lotus one, two three, which was developed for the IBM PC, And the argument here was you can use this device to run all your IBM business stuff, but it also does all this incredible sound and and visual stuff that the IBM PC can't do. The presentation also involved an appearance by two celebrities. One was Deborah Harry, who was the lead singer of an awesome musical group called Blondie. My fellow children of the eighties know what I'm talking about.

Blondie was a super cool music group. Go check them out if you haven't heard of him. And the other celebrity was the pop artist Andy Warhol, known for his counterculture take on iconography. Now. During this demonstration, a camera took a photo of Deborah Harry and a digitizer converted the photo into a monochromatic image on the Amiga screen, and Andy Warhol used tools in a program called pro

Paint to add color. Pro Paint was in prototype form, so it's amazing, but the whole thing worked, and that was a big shock to the programmers who had been struggling with pro Paint because as it was frequently crashing in the weeks leading up to this demonstration, so I'm sure everyone backstage was hoping against hope that it would stay stable, and it did. The Amigo one thousand left a great impression. Lewis Wallace, who wrote about tech, said

that it took the best qualities of the Macintosh. It took the processing power of an IBM computer, and it drastically cut the price tag, which seemed fairly accurate. A Macintosh would set you back about two thousand four dollars, and the Macintosh had one kilobytes of memory. The Amigo

one thousand had two versions. It had a two hundred fifty six kilobyte version that was priced at one thousand, two hundred dollars, and even if you got the full five d twelve kilobyte version that was one thousand four dollars, that was still a grand cheaper than Apple's Macintosh and

had way more memory and had way more capabilities. But while the reaction to the Amiga was positive, the computer wasn't yet available for purchase, and there were other things going on at Commodore that would complicate matters for both the parent company and for Amiga. But we're gonna save that for the next episode, and that next episode we'll talk about changes at Commodore that caused issues with Amiga.

We'll talk about how Jack tramiel Over at Atari kept on the fight against Commodore and Amiga, and talk about some of the cool stuff that actually was developed with the Amiga systems and what happened. So join me for that so we can continue this story in the meantime.

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