The Birth of Amiga

tech stuff. Listener Matt asked if I might do an episode or two, or maybe three or four about the Amiga series of personal computers, and Amiga has a pretty fascinating history with lots of ups and significant downs, And I've definitely touched on Amiga a few times and episodes about the early PC era, as well as the episodes

I've done about Commodore because Commodore acquired Amiga. But this computer line deserves its own set of episodes because it's it's not just fascinating from a technology standpoint, but it plays into a lot of other things that were happening in tech in the eighties that are also really important

and interesting all on their own. So the story is likely going to take a few episodes to tell because of how complex it is and how much the Amiga's story plays into these other stories of other companies and big events that were happening in the personal computer and video game industries. But I think That's part of what makes this hall fascinating because it gives you an opportunity to understand some of those other topics from a new

angle within the context of Amiga. So I know it's going to be at least three episodes because I've got two to go right now. Probably gonna be four, we'll see. Also, if you really want a true deep dive into the history of Amiga, because this is peanuts compared to what some folks have done, and if you want to know more about all the people involved with Amiga, I have a recommendation for you. There's a website called ours Technico.

It's one of my favorite websites, especially for technology, and over it Ours Technica, a software developer named Jeremy Reymer has written what I considered to be the definitive history of Amiga. It's so far a twelve part article series, and the very first article published on August first, two thousand seven. The most recent part of this series published on March twenty nine, two thousand eighteen. So it's a series of articles that have spanned more than a decade now.

When I pulled this twelve part series over into notes so that I could print it, out. It was about seventy five pages and the word count was around forty two five words. So while I'm going to be talking about Amiga for several episodes and you still want more, that's where you need to go. There's also a couple of spinoff articles I did not include in my notes, but they are related to Amiga. So if you're really fascinated,

that's the place to go, I would say. So the Amiga it was one of the lines of computers that emerged in the early nineteen eighties, back before things had really shaken out, so that they were essentially a face off between Apple and IBM, and then later on various IBMBC clone manufacturers, and then later still Microsoft, so it was always Apple versus IBM, then IBM clones, and then

Microsoft in particular. But back in those days, there were a lot of different competing computers that were on the market, and I've talked about those in previous shows. There was the TRASH eighty or the TRS eighty from Radio Shack Slash Tandy. There was the t I ninety nine Slash

four from Texas Instruments. There was the various computers from Commodore, including the Commodore sixty four, which was the best selling PC of all time, and those were all in that same space that were there when Apple had its Apple to come out, and before even the IBM personal computer had shown up. J Minor is often credited as being the father of Amiga. J Minor was born in Prescott, Arizona, on May thirty one, nineteen thirty two, and as a

kid he became interested in electronics. He enrolled in San Diego State College, and while he was in college, there was an enormous event that happened. North Korea invaded South Korea, precipitating the Korean War that happened on June twenty, nineteen fifty. So J. Minor would then go and enlist in the Coast Guard and he continued studying electronics. Once he was discharged from the Coast Guard, he moved back to California

with his wife. He had had met a woman and married her in nineteen fifty two, and then he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering in nineteen fifty eight, with an area of focus in designing generators and servo motors. Kind of interesting but his first gig, according to an interview that he gave to the magazine Amiga User International back in was to develop a computer control console with

a video display. Even though his expertise, at least a scholarly expertise, was in generators and servo motors, so he had to go back to teaching himself. He started to read from books and learn logic design and how to lay out transistor circuits. But he said the nice thing was that in those days it wasn't too complicated to learn from a book. You could still actually buy books and become self taught and be able to work in

that space. Miners resume after college included several companies, including fledgling ones that were sort of a sign of the future for California and technology and kind of a a foreshadowing of the birth of Silicon Valley. And j. Minor found he really liked designing electronics. He wasn't as interest it in other parts of engineering, and so he never really felt tied down to any one employer if there was another interesting opportunity to do design work on the horizon,

so he kind of hopped run company to company. In nineteen seventy four, one of Miner's friends, a guy named Harold Lee, convinced Minor to come and check out the company that Harold Lee was working for. He was an engineer for a little company called Atari. Now, Atari is gonna end up being a very important part of the Amiga story. Nolan Bushnell had founded Atari in nineteen seventy two after he had designed an early arcade game called Computer Space. The company at that time was known for

building arcade games like Pong and Space Race. Minor would design components for many of Atari's early arcade games, and then he became the lead chip designer of a new project in nineteen seventy five, and that project's goal was to create a reprogrammable gaming machine. Now, up to this point, all the gaming machines were custom built for a specific game.

The circuitry of the machine was the game. But in the phase of competition, Atari wanted to create a gaming machine that could accept some form of media, which would turn out to be cartridges, and run that media interchangeably so that you could switch out between games using the

same hardware. This project would evolve into the video computer system the VCS, also known as the Atari twenty hundred one of the challenging aspects of building out this kind of computer was keeping the costs low enough to make it a marketable consumer device, which meant finding the right

processor to act as the CPU for the machine. It needed to be powerful enough to do the job, but not so expensive as to drive the price of the final product out of the market range, and ultimately Atari settled on the most technology six five O two chip. And to be fair, I say CPU CPU is being very generous for these video game consoles, but it was

serving that purpose. Now. The six two chip was not particularly powerful, it's an eight bit processor, but Miner's design got the most out of its capabilities and made the VCS a viable product. Not just viable, it became the runaway success of the late nineteen seventies. The at E vcs would debut in nineteen and by the next year it was already they must have item on everyone's list.

J Minor would move on to design new products for at riis uh line, and this time they were was focusing on personal computers, which were also emerging at this time. In nine there are only a few personal computers that were available on the market outside of the kits that you could purchase to put to your own computer together.

So Apple had been founded in nineteen and had introduced the Apple two in nine at Radio Shack Slash Tandy had the TRS eighty and seventy seven, Commodore had the PET or PET did not yet have the Commodore sixty four that would come later. Digital Research had created the CP slash M Operating Systems style UH interface, which Bill Gates would later leverage when his company would create MS DOSS. But no one knew where the industry was going yet.

It was slowly transitioning from the realm of hobbyists and bleeding edge adopters to mainstream consumers. J Minor would use the six five O two chip as the main microprocessor for a pair of computers from Matari. They were the four hundred and the eight hundred, and as you might guess, the eight hundred was a more powerful computer than the

four hundred. The Atari computers could display a maximum of forty colors on a screen simultaneously, which today obviously is nothing, but back then it left the nearest competitor, which would have been Apple at that time, in the dust. J Minor designed chips to handle sound and graphics as well, something that would foreshadow a future era of expansion cards. They were meant to do the same thing that one really take effect until the nineties. In Nolan Bush Now

sold his company to Warner Communications. Ray Cassar, the new CEO of Atari, would clash with the company's programmers in a big way. The programmers wanted to share in the

success of their work. They wanted royalties, but ray Cassar refused, and in addition, Atari chose to write off the costs of developing the four hundred and the eight hundred systems up front, so all the costs of developing went right into the budget at the front of it, instead of being distributed across the lifetime of the four hundred and the eight hundred. That meant that on the books, it looked like the company had not met its profit goals and because of that, it was not going to trigger

bonus payments. Programmers were not going to get paid bonuses because at least on paper, Atari was just barely eking out of profit, when in reality you could argue that it's because they frontloaded all of the development costs. At the very beginning of the year, some of the programmers felt that they were being cheated, that they were being abused,

and people began to leave Atari. One of those programmers was a guy named Larry Kaplan, and he will also become very important in the Amiga story in just a moment. But upon the four hundred and eight hundred release, Atari

did something a little weird. The computers, which were capable of playing pretty neat games for that era, were not marketed as multi purpose machines that could do gaming because Atari did not want to cannibalize their console sales, and so the four hundred and eight hundred were keted as serious machines meant for serious stuff like business and academics. Despite limiting the marketing reach for the product, the computer

models sold pretty well. And here's a fun fact. The Atari four D PC would serve as the innards for ataris fifty two hundred console, the successor to the A twenty. Sure, but the software written for the two platforms was not really compatible. All right, I've got more to say about the era that would launch the Amiga, but first let's

take a quick break to thank our sponsor. After the four hundred and the eight hundred, j Minor wanted to move forward and really had his eye on a different microprocessor,

and this one was from Motorola, not most technologies. It was the sixty eight thousand, So the six five oh two was an eight bit micro processor, but the sixty eight thousand was a sixteen slash thirty two bit Mike grow processor, meaning it could handle much more complicated processes than the six five oh two, and it was being used in micro computers and would become the chip that

would power Apple's Macintosh in the mid nineteen eighties. So J Miner pitched a computer system to Atari management that would rely on the sixty eight thousand chip. It would be the most advanced computer, especially in terms of graphics and sound systems. It would be able to play incredible games,

but Attari management shut him down. In addition, Attari was starting to do the same thing to engineers that it had done to programmers previously, meaning the company was refusing to pay out bonuses, and J. Minor did not want to keep doing the same thing, that is, designing systems for the six five oh two, and he was frustrated his voice wasn't being heard. He felt that the company

wasn't valuing his work. He didn't like the fact that he wasn't gonna get paid his bonus, so he decided to put on his walk and shoes and he left the company. So after he left Atari, j Minor joined another company called z Mast. This company made special microprocessor chips for specific types of products, and the specific type

of product that Minor worked on were pacemakers. So he worked with z Mast for three years and in nineteen eight two he got a call from Larry Caplan and that was that Atari programmer I had mentioned earlier who had left Atari in a huff in nineteen seventy nine. After Atari, Larry Caplan had gone on to join a

brand new company called Activision. In fact, he joined so early that typically we call him a co founder of Activision, although Encyclopedia Britannica actually says that he was not a true co founder but joined shortly after the founding of the company. But he helped define that company. And I'll have to do a full episode or maybe a short series of episodes about Activision someday, because that company has continued to be incredibly important in the video game world.

But the original incarnation of Activision was meant to be a place where developers would get recognition for their work, including getting credited on game boxes and receiving royalties as a result of good sales for their titles. And these are good things, but Larry Kaplan got disenchanted with this company in nineteen eighty two. He wanted to go into developing some hardware, but Activision did not the other exact

Activision did not want to go in that direction. They wanted to focus solely on developing game titles, and so Kaplan would leave the company that he had joined in nineteen seventy nine, and he reached out to J. Minor to see if Minor knew of anyone who might help him get funding to get a new business off the ground. So J Minor takes Larry Caplan's call and he introduces Kaplan to his own boss, Bert Braddock over at Z Mast and together these three began to put together a

plan for Larry Caplan's new business venture. They got an office in Santa Clara, California. They hired away a vice president over at Tonka Toys to be the CEO of this new company, and the plan was that J. Minor would design chips for the hardware. Z Mask would take the designs and build those chips, and Larry Kaplan would design games to run on that hardware, and this is the business they would form. They have some sort of video game console or computer business and they would all

work and make money from it. They were originally called this venture High Toro uh or really it was just High Toro, I guess, because they thought it sounded kind of like a high tech company, and also it sort of paid tribute to being a company born out of Texas. But this process was going to take some time putting all this business together, and while they were working on it, Larry Kaplan, the guy who was asking for this in

the first place, started to get cold feet. He might have worried that maybe the base was getting way too competitive in creating hardware for the video game world. Maybe he was worried about the prospects of this business being able to hold its own. But for whatever reason, in late nine two he bailed on the whole plan. Not only that, but he decided to return to Atari, the company he had quit three years earlier, and apparently Nolan

Bushnell had presented a very attractive offer. So Larry Kaplan was out, and that left j Minor and z Mast holding the ball. So Minor was asked to serve as the chief engineer for High Toro, and he agreed to do it under two important conditions. The first was that he wanted to create a video game machine around the sixty eight thousand Motorola chip, and the second was that the video game machine should also be a computer, not

just a video game console. Now, this was in late nine two, and the landscape was very different from what it would be in just one year. In late video game consoles were seen as money printing devices. There was just a ton of cash in video games. Companies were rolling in it, and everyone at the time was convinced that the party was never going to stop. So investors were willing to get behind something like a video game console. But personal computers, on the other hand, were still seen

as a luxury product that very few people owned. Investors were less keen to get behind those products, so the company decided. High Toro decided that the wisest decision was to hitch High Toro first as a video game console company, that the product they were making was a video game console, and then just kind of hide or ignore all the computer elements when it came to trying to get investors. J Minor had one standard that he personally wanted to

meet with this new machine. He wanted make a personal computer that would be capable of running a really good flight simulator on it. He had a friend named al Pound at a company called Singer Link who had shown Minor military grade flight simulators, and Minor thought these things were amazing, So he wanted to create a machine that could run something like that on your desktop without having

to have the multimillion dollar equipment to do it. Now, that meant that Minor needed to build out a computer that could be both a stripped down video game machine and expandable into a high performance computer. Now. J. Minor was a bit frustrated that they weren't just taking the kid gloves off and going toe to toe with IBM, because IBM was just at this point trying to get

established in the home computer space. They had dominated in business, but we're just starting to get into home computers, and Minor thought we actually have the opportunity here to take the lead. However, the general thought was that video games were where the money was, and that was better to focus on that part of the market and to let

the computer stuff come later. J Minor would eventually say that was probably the right decision for the time, just because it would have been very difficult to get the financing the investment for going after IBM, but he still said he was sad that they were never able to jump on that because the IBM PC when it came out, it was monochromatic, it was crazy expensive, it had limitations on memory. These were all areas that miners saw as opportunities for them to take over, but it was just

not meant to be from an investment standpoint. So they decided to divide operations for High Toro into two big categories, and J Minor would head one side, which would be the chip designers and engineers the hardware experts, and they began working on prototypes for chips to go in this future computer, and they didn't have a way to fabricate chips to test their designs in a way that was economically feasible, so instead they first would sketch their designs

out on white boards, and then they would move to build prototypes on bread boards more and that in a little bit. The other side of the operations was a video game centric part of the business. The company would make peripherals for existing systems from other companies, namely the AT, and they would make video games for those systems as well,

and this served a couple of purposes. For one thing, it brought in some revenue while the other side was still working on getting the internal components together for their future video game system, Slash Computer for another, and almost

acted like a front for the business. C. J. Minor was really worried that if other companies had heard that he was working on a new personal computer design, they might try to do some industrial espionage snoop in and find out what was going on, and once they figured out what J. Minor was trying to do, they might try to rush their own projects through their own existing companies and try to beat the fledgling company to market.

So one of the products that they made at this time was something called the Joyboard, which looked kind of like a foot rest, and it was actually a balance board and a control system, so players would stand on this thing and they would lean in order to control a video games like leaning to the Left and make your character go to the left. And they actually made a few games like skiing games and stuff that would use this control system shortly after becoming a company to

really big things would change everything. I'll explain more in a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. The first thing that changed was that the company Hi Toro had to swap out its name because there already was a Japanese lawnmower company called Hi Toro, and they didn't want to be confused with it, so they got the brainstorming a new name for this company. Minor reportedly suggested they use Amiga, which is the feminine

version of the Spanish word for friend, amigo. So he supposedly suggested this, but also did not actually like the suggestion. It was one of those things the kind of said but what didn't really have a whole lot of feeling behind. But no one could come up with anything better, so they stuck with it. They made a few games for the A under this company name, and they made some peripherals for the video game industry, but that only worked

for a short time. And the reason I say this is because in just a few months after the company had been coming together in the first place, the bottom fell out of the home video game market. This was the infamous video game crash of nine eight three, and I've done full episodes about this, so I'm just they have a super short overview here to explain what happened leading up to There were a ton of companies. They

were all in the home video game space. You had console companies, you had in television, you had Atari, you had Colleco and others that were all creating video game consoles. You had tons of third party game developers of varying degrees of skill and business sense making games for these systems.

And then you had executives who behaved as if video games were always going to be a gravy train, and in some cases they were making truly astoundingly dumb decisions, such as making more copies of a game than there were consoles out on the market. If you have five hundred thousand consoles out on the market and you make a million copies of a game, that's five thousand extra copies that don't go anywhere. So this all came to a head in three and eventually the market lapsed in

on itself. It could not sustain this sort of activity. The video game crash had an enormous effect on the company that was just about to become a Mega. It was making that transition from Hi Toro to Amiga. Video game companies were folding left and right. Companies like Atari, which had been really cash rich just a couple of years earlier, now found themselves over extended and in possession of massive inventory that they could not move, and Amiga's

business of selling to that industry was pretty much wiped out. Moreover, investors were now terrified at the thought of backing a video game console, so in J Minor was told, we have to market this as a video game console first and ignore the fact that it's a computer, because otherwise no one's going to put money behind it. The same investors who were gung ho on supporting a video game console,

now we're terrified. So they asked, hey, do you think maybe you could take this thing you're designing and instead of making it a video game console, could you upgrade it so it's a personal computer. Well, that's what J. Minor hadn't mind all along, and in fact what he had been working on, so it suited him just fine. It validated his arguments, and the team continued to focus on building out the chips that would go into the

first Amiga computer. Dave Morse, who was the CEO of the company, decided that the chips all needed to have code names, which would protect the company's intellectual property. Anyone overhearing the employees talking about these chips would just hear the code names and not instead of whatever the chips actually were. So he decided that all the chips should be given women's names. So the three major chips in the Amiga chips set were called Agnes, Denise, and Paula.

The computer's code name was Lorraine, so you had a rain the computer with Agnes, de Nice and Paula as the chips. The design team held frequent meetings and everyone was free to pitch ideas at those meetings, arguing for features they felt should be included in the chips set. To reach a consensus, the team instituted an unusual practice involving toy baseball bats made of foam, so if you pitched an idea and people didn't like it, they bat you over the head with the bats. They just hit

you with these foam baseball bats. It was harmless, but according to j Minor, it was a humiliating experience. Minor had read about and taken a course in a special type of co processor called a blitter, also known as a blitter circuit. A blitter, which is b L I T T e R, can manipulate and move data inside a computer's memory quickly without having to text the CPU,

so it works in parallel with the CPU. It can copy data from one block of memory, can move it to where it needs to be, and the CPU can just continue its own operations without having to expend any resources to do this. And this blitter would allow the Amiga to handle much more advanced graphics without overtaxing the

CPU compared to other computers on the market. Minor also ended up working on a design for what was called a hold and Modify mode or HAM mode h a M. This was a way to kind of trick the system into showing more colors on screen than it was technically capable of doing, just based on the amount of memory in the machine. So the memory served as a limitation,

a limiting factor. You couldn't show too many colors because the amount of information you needed to represent the colors, hue, its brightness, it's you know, it's opaqueness, all of those things.

Those values would take up memory space, and memory was expensive, so to keep costs down and maximize efficiency, Minor and his team started to work on this design, and HAM mode would allow programmers to designate a line of pixels as a single color and then make changes to just one of the three properties that define that color, as in hue, saturation, or luminosity. In this mode, the Amiga computer would be able to display four thousand, nineties six colors,

which was light years ahead of the competition. They also designed what they called the Copper chip. This chip had three different instructions on it, all in order to exert direct control of the computer's display, and the chip could also access any part of the other display chips. It would allow the Amiga to have multiple windows open side by side at once, even when each window had contents

displaying at different resolutions, which is pretty phenomenal. The chip code named AGNES, would contain the blitter and copper chips and was in charge of handling direct access to the computer's memory. Denise was a display chip that would produce sprites, and a sp it is a two dimensional object that hardware makers can use to create a composite of the sprite along with the background. It allows the sprite to move across the background without the need to having to

with redraw everything every time the sprite moves. Paula's job was as a dedicated sound generation chip. It would control four channels of audio, two on the left stereo channel, two on the right stereo channel. That would give the Amiga much greater sound reproduction capability than competing computers in the early nineties. So this design phase slowly moved from white boards to bread boards. So now it's time to talk about bread boards what that means, and kind of

wrap up this episode. A bread board is a base for building circuits and electronics. Uh It was also known as or It is also known as a plug board because it's a board into which you can plug chips and wires. Today's bread boards are really super nice. You don't have to solder connections between components. You just plug everything in and the bread board itself has a little layer of metal on the underside that allows connections, so you don't have to actually solder everything together. But back

in the day you did have to do soldering. The reason why that's really important is that today, because you don't have to solder everything, you can reuse breadboards. You just unplugged stuff and you plug new stuff in, so you can very rapidly test out different circuit layouts, different designs. Breadboard circuits are much much larger than the finalized type of circuits that make their way into electronics. It's sort of the macro scale of what you would eventually plan

to produce. So these chips that Miners team was developing, UH, when manufactured, they would all fit to plug into the motherboard for the first Amiga computer, But at this time on breadboard form, they were huge, and by huge, i'm talking about chips that would measure several feet along one side. Each chip would have eight bread boards connected together to simulate what the final chip would do. So Agnes was eight bread boards, Denise was eight bread boards, Paula was

eight bread boards. Each bread board would hold three hundred m s I logic chips. So for all three of the simulated chips for Agnes, for Denise, for Paula, collectively you had seven thousand, two hundred separate logic chips for these simulated chips, and they all had to be wired together. All those bread boards had to be wired together, all

those components had to be wired properly. So there were a ridiculous number of wires connecting everything and each of those simulated chips, and as you can imagine, that made connecting and moving the bread boards really difficult to do because one wrong move and you would introduce a system crashing bug by knocking loose another connection. Then you'd have to track down which connect was loose and reconnected properly.

The team hooked up their simulated chip set to a sixty eight thousand processor and then they fired it up and it worked. But that was just the hardware side.

In our next episode, we'll pick up by talking about the software that was in development to run on this first Amiga computer, and we'll also look at how the company nearly got swept up by Atari after finding itself in financial trouble, and we'll learn the crazy Game of Thrones like story involving the company Commodore as well, and it really does get pretty crazy in the meantime, If you have any suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff,

whether it's a company, a technology, a person in tech. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or have on as a guest host, let me know. Send me an email the address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle with both of those is tech Stuff h s W. Maybe you are getting a little chilly, you know, as the weather starting to cool down, you could probably use an extra shirt. I got a suggestion, go to t public dot com

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