Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
Speaker 1: tech stuff. Listener Matt asked if I might do an
Speaker 1: episode or two, or maybe three or four about the
Speaker 1: Amiga series of personal computers, and Amiga has a pretty
Speaker 1: fascinating history with lots of ups and significant downs, And
Speaker 1: I've definitely touched on Amiga a few times and episodes
Speaker 1: about the early PC era, as well as the episodes
Speaker 1: I've done about Commodore because Commodore acquired Amiga. But this
Speaker 1: computer line deserves its own set of episodes because it's
Speaker 1: it's not just fascinating from a technology standpoint, but it
Speaker 1: plays into a lot of other things that were happening
Speaker 1: in tech in the eighties that are also really important
Speaker 1: and interesting all on their own. So the story is
Speaker 1: likely going to take a few episodes to tell because
Speaker 1: of how complex it is and how much the Amiga's
Speaker 1: story plays into these other stories of other companies and
Speaker 1: big events that were happening in the personal computer and
Speaker 1: video game industries. But I think That's part of what
Speaker 1: makes this hall fascinating because it gives you an opportunity
Speaker 1: to understand some of those other topics from a new
Speaker 1: angle within the context of Amiga. So I know it's
Speaker 1: going to be at least three episodes because I've got
Speaker 1: two to go right now. Probably gonna be four, we'll see. Also,
Speaker 1: if you really want a true deep dive into the
Speaker 1: history of Amiga, because this is peanuts compared to what
Speaker 1: some folks have done, and if you want to know
Speaker 1: more about all the people involved with Amiga, I have
Speaker 1: a recommendation for you. There's a website called ours Technico.
Speaker 1: It's one of my favorite websites, especially for technology, and
Speaker 1: over it Ours Technica, a software developer named Jeremy Reymer
Speaker 1: has written what I considered to be the definitive history
Speaker 1: of Amiga. It's so far a twelve part article series,
Speaker 1: and the very first article published on August first, two
Speaker 1: thousand seven. The most recent part of this series published
Speaker 1: on March twenty nine, two thousand eighteen. So it's a
Speaker 1: series of articles that have spanned more than a decade now.
Speaker 1: When I pulled this twelve part series over into notes
Speaker 1: so that I could print it, out. It was about
Speaker 1: seventy five pages and the word count was around forty
Speaker 1: two five words. So while I'm going to be talking
Speaker 1: about Amiga for several episodes and you still want more,
Speaker 1: that's where you need to go. There's also a couple
Speaker 1: of spinoff articles I did not include in my notes,
Speaker 1: but they are related to Amiga. So if you're really fascinated,
Speaker 1: that's the place to go, I would say. So the
Speaker 1: Amiga it was one of the lines of computers that
Speaker 1: emerged in the early nineteen eighties, back before things had
Speaker 1: really shaken out, so that they were essentially a face
Speaker 1: off between Apple and IBM, and then later on various
Speaker 1: IBMBC clone manufacturers, and then later still Microsoft, so it
Speaker 1: was always Apple versus IBM, then IBM clones, and then
Speaker 1: Microsoft in particular. But back in those days, there were
Speaker 1: a lot of different competing computers that were on the market,
Speaker 1: and I've talked about those in previous shows. There was
Speaker 1: the TRASH eighty or the TRS eighty from Radio Shack
Speaker 1: Slash Tandy. There was the t I ninety nine Slash
Speaker 1: four from Texas Instruments. There was the various computers from Commodore,
Speaker 1: including the Commodore sixty four, which was the best selling
Speaker 1: PC of all time, and those were all in that
Speaker 1: same space that were there when Apple had its Apple
Speaker 1: to come out, and before even the IBM personal computer
Speaker 1: had shown up. J Minor is often credited as being
Speaker 1: the father of Amiga. J Minor was born in Prescott, Arizona,
Speaker 1: on May thirty one, nineteen thirty two, and as a
Speaker 1: kid he became interested in electronics. He enrolled in San
Speaker 1: Diego State College, and while he was in college, there
Speaker 1: was an enormous event that happened. North Korea invaded South Korea,
Speaker 1: precipitating the Korean War that happened on June twenty, nineteen fifty.
Speaker 1: So J. Minor would then go and enlist in the
Speaker 1: Coast Guard and he continued studying electronics. Once he was
Speaker 1: discharged from the Coast Guard, he moved back to California
Speaker 1: with his wife. He had had met a woman and
Speaker 1: married her in nineteen fifty two, and then he enrolled
Speaker 1: at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned
Speaker 1: a degree in electrical engineering in nineteen fifty eight, with
Speaker 1: an area of focus in designing generators and servo motors.
Speaker 1: Kind of interesting but his first gig, according to an
Speaker 1: interview that he gave to the magazine Amiga User International
Speaker 1: back in was to develop a computer control console with
Speaker 1: a video display. Even though his expertise, at least a
Speaker 1: scholarly expertise, was in generators and servo motors, so he
Speaker 1: had to go back to teaching himself. He started to
Speaker 1: read from books and learn logic design and how to
Speaker 1: lay out transistor circuits. But he said the nice thing
Speaker 1: was that in those days it wasn't too complicated to
Speaker 1: learn from a book. You could still actually buy books
Speaker 1: and become self taught and be able to work in
Speaker 1: that space. Miners resume after college included several companies, including
Speaker 1: fledgling ones that were sort of a sign of the
Speaker 1: future for California and technology and kind of a a
Speaker 1: foreshadowing of the birth of Silicon Valley. And j. Minor
Speaker 1: found he really liked designing electronics. He wasn't as interest
Speaker 1: it in other parts of engineering, and so he never
Speaker 1: really felt tied down to any one employer if there
Speaker 1: was another interesting opportunity to do design work on the horizon,
Speaker 1: so he kind of hopped run company to company. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, one of Miner's friends, a guy named
Speaker 1: Harold Lee, convinced Minor to come and check out the
Speaker 1: company that Harold Lee was working for. He was an
Speaker 1: engineer for a little company called Atari. Now, Atari is
Speaker 1: gonna end up being a very important part of the
Speaker 1: Amiga story. Nolan Bushnell had founded Atari in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: two after he had designed an early arcade game called
Speaker 1: Computer Space. The company at that time was known for
Speaker 1: building arcade games like Pong and Space Race. Minor would
Speaker 1: design components for many of Atari's early arcade games, and
Speaker 1: then he became the lead chip designer of a new
Speaker 1: project in nineteen seventy five, and that project's goal was
Speaker 1: to create a reprogrammable gaming machine. Now, up to this point,
Speaker 1: all the gaming machines were custom built for a specific game.
Speaker 1: The circuitry of the machine was the game. But in
Speaker 1: the phase of competition, Atari wanted to create a gaming
Speaker 1: machine that could accept some form of media, which would
Speaker 1: turn out to be cartridges, and run that media interchangeably
Speaker 1: so that you could switch out between games using the
Speaker 1: same hardware. This project would evolve into the video computer
Speaker 1: system the VCS, also known as the Atari twenty hundred
Speaker 1: one of the challenging aspects of building out this kind
Speaker 1: of computer was keeping the costs low enough to make
Speaker 1: it a marketable consumer device, which meant finding the right
Speaker 1: processor to act as the CPU for the machine. It
Speaker 1: needed to be powerful enough to do the job, but
Speaker 1: not so expensive as to drive the price of the
Speaker 1: final product out of the market range, and ultimately Atari
Speaker 1: settled on the most technology six five O two chip.
Speaker 1: And to be fair, I say CPU CPU is being
Speaker 1: very generous for these video game consoles, but it was
Speaker 1: serving that purpose. Now. The six two chip was not
Speaker 1: particularly powerful, it's an eight bit processor, but Miner's design
Speaker 1: got the most out of its capabilities and made the
Speaker 1: VCS a viable product. Not just viable, it became the
Speaker 1: runaway success of the late nineteen seventies. The at E
Speaker 1: vcs would debut in nineteen and by the next year
Speaker 1: it was already they must have item on everyone's list.
Speaker 1: J Minor would move on to design new products for
Speaker 1: at riis uh line, and this time they were was
Speaker 1: focusing on personal computers, which were also emerging at this time.
Speaker 1: In nine there are only a few personal computers that
Speaker 1: were available on the market outside of the kits that
Speaker 1: you could purchase to put to your own computer together.
Speaker 1: So Apple had been founded in nineteen and had introduced
Speaker 1: the Apple two in nine at Radio Shack Slash Tandy
Speaker 1: had the TRS eighty and seventy seven, Commodore had the
Speaker 1: PET or PET did not yet have the Commodore sixty
Speaker 1: four that would come later. Digital Research had created the
Speaker 1: CP slash M Operating Systems style UH interface, which Bill
Speaker 1: Gates would later leverage when his company would create MS DOSS.
Speaker 1: But no one knew where the industry was going yet.
Speaker 1: It was slowly transitioning from the realm of hobbyists and
Speaker 1: bleeding edge adopters to mainstream consumers. J Minor would use
Speaker 1: the six five O two chip as the main microprocessor
Speaker 1: for a pair of computers from Matari. They were the
Speaker 1: four hundred and the eight hundred, and as you might guess,
Speaker 1: the eight hundred was a more powerful computer than the
Speaker 1: four hundred. The Atari computers could display a maximum of
Speaker 1: forty colors on a screen simultaneously, which today obviously is nothing,
Speaker 1: but back then it left the nearest competitor, which would
Speaker 1: have been Apple at that time, in the dust. J
Speaker 1: Minor designed chips to handle sound and graphics as well,
Speaker 1: something that would foreshadow a future era of expansion cards.
Speaker 1: They were meant to do the same thing that one
Speaker 1: really take effect until the nineties. In Nolan Bush Now
Speaker 1: sold his company to Warner Communications. Ray Cassar, the new
Speaker 1: CEO of Atari, would clash with the company's programmers in
Speaker 1: a big way. The programmers wanted to share in the
Speaker 1: success of their work. They wanted royalties, but ray Cassar refused,
Speaker 1: and in addition, Atari chose to write off the costs
Speaker 1: of developing the four hundred and the eight hundred systems
Speaker 1: up front, so all the costs of developing went right
Speaker 1: into the budget at the front of it, instead of
Speaker 1: being distributed across the lifetime of the four hundred and
Speaker 1: the eight hundred. That meant that on the books, it
Speaker 1: looked like the company had not met its profit goals
Speaker 1: and because of that, it was not going to trigger
Speaker 1: bonus payments. Programmers were not going to get paid bonuses
Speaker 1: because at least on paper, Atari was just barely eking
Speaker 1: out of profit, when in reality you could argue that
Speaker 1: it's because they frontloaded all of the development costs. At
Speaker 1: the very beginning of the year, some of the programmers
Speaker 1: felt that they were being cheated, that they were being abused,
Speaker 1: and people began to leave Atari. One of those programmers
Speaker 1: was a guy named Larry Kaplan, and he will also
Speaker 1: become very important in the Amiga story in just a moment.
Speaker 1: But upon the four hundred and eight hundred release, Atari
Speaker 1: did something a little weird. The computers, which were capable
Speaker 1: of playing pretty neat games for that era, were not
Speaker 1: marketed as multi purpose machines that could do gaming because
Speaker 1: Atari did not want to cannibalize their console sales, and
Speaker 1: so the four hundred and eight hundred were keted as
Speaker 1: serious machines meant for serious stuff like business and academics.
Speaker 1: Despite limiting the marketing reach for the product, the computer
Speaker 1: models sold pretty well. And here's a fun fact. The
Speaker 1: Atari four D PC would serve as the innards for
Speaker 1: ataris fifty two hundred console, the successor to the A twenty. Sure,
Speaker 1: but the software written for the two platforms was not
Speaker 1: really compatible. All right, I've got more to say about
Speaker 1: the era that would launch the Amiga, but first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break to thank our sponsor. After the
Speaker 1: four hundred and the eight hundred, j Minor wanted to
Speaker 1: move forward and really had his eye on a different microprocessor,
Speaker 1: and this one was from Motorola, not most technologies. It
Speaker 1: was the sixty eight thousand, So the six five oh
Speaker 1: two was an eight bit micro processor, but the sixty
Speaker 1: eight thousand was a sixteen slash thirty two bit Mike
Speaker 1: grow processor, meaning it could handle much more complicated processes
Speaker 1: than the six five oh two, and it was being
Speaker 1: used in micro computers and would become the chip that
Speaker 1: would power Apple's Macintosh in the mid nineteen eighties. So
Speaker 1: J Miner pitched a computer system to Atari management that
Speaker 1: would rely on the sixty eight thousand chip. It would
Speaker 1: be the most advanced computer, especially in terms of graphics
Speaker 1: and sound systems. It would be able to play incredible games,
Speaker 1: but Attari management shut him down. In addition, Attari was
Speaker 1: starting to do the same thing to engineers that it
Speaker 1: had done to programmers previously, meaning the company was refusing
Speaker 1: to pay out bonuses, and J. Minor did not want
Speaker 1: to keep doing the same thing, that is, designing systems
Speaker 1: for the six five oh two, and he was frustrated
Speaker 1: his voice wasn't being heard. He felt that the company
Speaker 1: wasn't valuing his work. He didn't like the fact that
Speaker 1: he wasn't gonna get paid his bonus, so he decided
Speaker 1: to put on his walk and shoes and he left
Speaker 1: the company. So after he left Atari, j Minor joined
Speaker 1: another company called z Mast. This company made special microprocessor
Speaker 1: chips for specific types of products, and the specific type
Speaker 1: of product that Minor worked on were pacemakers. So he
Speaker 1: worked with z Mast for three years and in nineteen
Speaker 1: eight two he got a call from Larry Caplan and
Speaker 1: that was that Atari programmer I had mentioned earlier who
Speaker 1: had left Atari in a huff in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: After Atari, Larry Caplan had gone on to join a
Speaker 1: brand new company called Activision. In fact, he joined so
Speaker 1: early that typically we call him a co founder of Activision,
Speaker 1: although Encyclopedia Britannica actually says that he was not a
Speaker 1: true co founder but joined shortly after the founding of
Speaker 1: the company. But he helped define that company. And I'll
Speaker 1: have to do a full episode or maybe a short
Speaker 1: series of episodes about Activision someday, because that company has
Speaker 1: continued to be incredibly important in the video game world.
Speaker 1: But the original incarnation of Activision was meant to be
Speaker 1: a place where developers would get recognition for their work,
Speaker 1: including getting credited on game boxes and receiving royalties as
Speaker 1: a result of good sales for their titles. And these
Speaker 1: are good things, but Larry Kaplan got disenchanted with this
Speaker 1: company in nineteen eighty two. He wanted to go into
Speaker 1: developing some hardware, but Activision did not the other exact
Speaker 1: Activision did not want to go in that direction. They
Speaker 1: wanted to focus solely on developing game titles, and so
Speaker 1: Kaplan would leave the company that he had joined in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, and he reached out to J. Minor
Speaker 1: to see if Minor knew of anyone who might help
Speaker 1: him get funding to get a new business off the ground.
Speaker 1: So J Minor takes Larry Caplan's call and he introduces
Speaker 1: Kaplan to his own boss, Bert Braddock over at Z
Speaker 1: Mast and together these three began to put together a
Speaker 1: plan for Larry Caplan's new business venture. They got an
Speaker 1: office in Santa Clara, California. They hired away a vice
Speaker 1: president over at Tonka Toys to be the CEO of
Speaker 1: this new company, and the plan was that J. Minor
Speaker 1: would design chips for the hardware. Z Mask would take
Speaker 1: the designs and build those chips, and Larry Kaplan would
Speaker 1: design games to run on that hardware, and this is
Speaker 1: the business they would form. They have some sort of
Speaker 1: video game console or computer business and they would all
Speaker 1: work and make money from it. They were originally called
Speaker 1: this venture High Toro uh or really it was just
Speaker 1: High Toro, I guess, because they thought it sounded kind
Speaker 1: of like a high tech company, and also it sort
Speaker 1: of paid tribute to being a company born out of Texas.
Speaker 1: But this process was going to take some time putting
Speaker 1: all this business together, and while they were working on it,
Speaker 1: Larry Kaplan, the guy who was asking for this in
Speaker 1: the first place, started to get cold feet. He might
Speaker 1: have worried that maybe the base was getting way too
Speaker 1: competitive in creating hardware for the video game world. Maybe
Speaker 1: he was worried about the prospects of this business being
Speaker 1: able to hold its own. But for whatever reason, in
Speaker 1: late nine two he bailed on the whole plan. Not
Speaker 1: only that, but he decided to return to Atari, the
Speaker 1: company he had quit three years earlier, and apparently Nolan
Speaker 1: Bushnell had presented a very attractive offer. So Larry Kaplan
Speaker 1: was out, and that left j Minor and z Mast
Speaker 1: holding the ball. So Minor was asked to serve as
Speaker 1: the chief engineer for High Toro, and he agreed to
Speaker 1: do it under two important conditions. The first was that
Speaker 1: he wanted to create a video game machine around the
Speaker 1: sixty eight thousand Motorola chip, and the second was that
Speaker 1: the video game machine should also be a computer, not
Speaker 1: just a video game console. Now, this was in late
Speaker 1: nine two, and the landscape was very different from what
Speaker 1: it would be in just one year. In late video
Speaker 1: game consoles were seen as money printing devices. There was
Speaker 1: just a ton of cash in video games. Companies were
Speaker 1: rolling in it, and everyone at the time was convinced
Speaker 1: that the party was never going to stop. So investors
Speaker 1: were willing to get behind something like a video game console.
Speaker 1: But personal computers, on the other hand, were still seen
Speaker 1: as a luxury product that very few people owned. Investors
Speaker 1: were less keen to get behind those products, so the
Speaker 1: company decided. High Toro decided that the wisest decision was
Speaker 1: to hitch High Toro first as a video game console company,
Speaker 1: that the product they were making was a video game console,
Speaker 1: and then just kind of hide or ignore all the
Speaker 1: computer elements when it came to trying to get investors.
Speaker 1: J Minor had one standard that he personally wanted to
Speaker 1: meet with this new machine. He wanted make a personal
Speaker 1: computer that would be capable of running a really good
Speaker 1: flight simulator on it. He had a friend named al
Speaker 1: Pound at a company called Singer Link who had shown
Speaker 1: Minor military grade flight simulators, and Minor thought these things
Speaker 1: were amazing, So he wanted to create a machine that
Speaker 1: could run something like that on your desktop without having
Speaker 1: to have the multimillion dollar equipment to do it. Now,
Speaker 1: that meant that Minor needed to build out a computer
Speaker 1: that could be both a stripped down video game machine
Speaker 1: and expandable into a high performance computer. Now. J. Minor
Speaker 1: was a bit frustrated that they weren't just taking the
Speaker 1: kid gloves off and going toe to toe with IBM,
Speaker 1: because IBM was just at this point trying to get
Speaker 1: established in the home computer space. They had dominated in business,
Speaker 1: but we're just starting to get into home computers, and
Speaker 1: Minor thought we actually have the opportunity here to take
Speaker 1: the lead. However, the general thought was that video games
Speaker 1: were where the money was, and that was better to
Speaker 1: focus on that part of the market and to let
Speaker 1: the computer stuff come later. J Minor would eventually say
Speaker 1: that was probably the right decision for the time, just
Speaker 1: because it would have been very difficult to get the
Speaker 1: financing the investment for going after IBM, but he still
Speaker 1: said he was sad that they were never able to
Speaker 1: jump on that because the IBM PC when it came out,
Speaker 1: it was monochromatic, it was crazy expensive, it had limitations
Speaker 1: on memory. These were all areas that miners saw as
Speaker 1: opportunities for them to take over, but it was just
Speaker 1: not meant to be from an investment standpoint. So they
Speaker 1: decided to divide operations for High Toro into two big categories,
Speaker 1: and J Minor would head one side, which would be
Speaker 1: the chip designers and engineers the hardware experts, and they
Speaker 1: began working on prototypes for chips to go in this
Speaker 1: future computer, and they didn't have a way to fabricate
Speaker 1: chips to test their designs in a way that was
Speaker 1: economically feasible, so instead they first would sketch their designs
Speaker 1: out on white boards, and then they would move to
Speaker 1: build prototypes on bread boards more and that in a
Speaker 1: little bit. The other side of the operations was a
Speaker 1: video game centric part of the business. The company would
Speaker 1: make peripherals for existing systems from other companies, namely the AT,
Speaker 1: and they would make video games for those systems as well,
Speaker 1: and this served a couple of purposes. For one thing,
Speaker 1: it brought in some revenue while the other side was
Speaker 1: still working on getting the internal components together for their
Speaker 1: future video game system, Slash Computer for another, and almost
Speaker 1: acted like a front for the business. C. J. Minor
Speaker 1: was really worried that if other companies had heard that
Speaker 1: he was working on a new personal computer design, they
Speaker 1: might try to do some industrial espionage snoop in and
Speaker 1: find out what was going on, and once they figured
Speaker 1: out what J. Minor was trying to do, they might
Speaker 1: try to rush their own projects through their own existing
Speaker 1: companies and try to beat the fledgling company to market.
Speaker 1: So one of the products that they made at this
Speaker 1: time was something called the Joyboard, which looked kind of
Speaker 1: like a foot rest, and it was actually a balance
Speaker 1: board and a control system, so players would stand on
Speaker 1: this thing and they would lean in order to control
Speaker 1: a video games like leaning to the Left and make
Speaker 1: your character go to the left. And they actually made
Speaker 1: a few games like skiing games and stuff that would
Speaker 1: use this control system shortly after becoming a company to
Speaker 1: really big things would change everything. I'll explain more in
Speaker 1: a second, but first let's take another quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. The first thing that changed was that
Speaker 1: the company Hi Toro had to swap out its name
Speaker 1: because there already was a Japanese lawnmower company called Hi Toro,
Speaker 1: and they didn't want to be confused with it, so
Speaker 1: they got the brainstorming a new name for this company.
Speaker 1: Minor reportedly suggested they use Amiga, which is the feminine
Speaker 1: version of the Spanish word for friend, amigo. So he
Speaker 1: supposedly suggested this, but also did not actually like the suggestion.
Speaker 1: It was one of those things the kind of said
Speaker 1: but what didn't really have a whole lot of feeling behind.
Speaker 1: But no one could come up with anything better, so
Speaker 1: they stuck with it. They made a few games for
Speaker 1: the A under this company name, and they made some
Speaker 1: peripherals for the video game industry, but that only worked
Speaker 1: for a short time. And the reason I say this
Speaker 1: is because in just a few months after the company
Speaker 1: had been coming together in the first place, the bottom
Speaker 1: fell out of the home video game market. This was
Speaker 1: the infamous video game crash of nine eight three, and
Speaker 1: I've done full episodes about this, so I'm just they
Speaker 1: have a super short overview here to explain what happened
Speaker 1: leading up to There were a ton of companies. They
Speaker 1: were all in the home video game space. You had
Speaker 1: console companies, you had in television, you had Atari, you
Speaker 1: had Colleco and others that were all creating video game consoles.
Speaker 1: You had tons of third party game developers of varying
Speaker 1: degrees of skill and business sense making games for these systems.
Speaker 1: And then you had executives who behaved as if video
Speaker 1: games were always going to be a gravy train, and
Speaker 1: in some cases they were making truly astoundingly dumb decisions,
Speaker 1: such as making more copies of a game than there
Speaker 1: were consoles out on the market. If you have five
Speaker 1: hundred thousand consoles out on the market and you make
Speaker 1: a million copies of a game, that's five thousand extra
Speaker 1: copies that don't go anywhere. So this all came to
Speaker 1: a head in three and eventually the market lapsed in
Speaker 1: on itself. It could not sustain this sort of activity.
Speaker 1: The video game crash had an enormous effect on the
Speaker 1: company that was just about to become a Mega. It
Speaker 1: was making that transition from Hi Toro to Amiga. Video
Speaker 1: game companies were folding left and right. Companies like Atari,
Speaker 1: which had been really cash rich just a couple of
Speaker 1: years earlier, now found themselves over extended and in possession
Speaker 1: of massive inventory that they could not move, and Amiga's
Speaker 1: business of selling to that industry was pretty much wiped out. Moreover,
Speaker 1: investors were now terrified at the thought of backing a
Speaker 1: video game console, so in J Minor was told, we
Speaker 1: have to market this as a video game console first
Speaker 1: and ignore the fact that it's a computer, because otherwise
Speaker 1: no one's going to put money behind it. The same
Speaker 1: investors who were gung ho on supporting a video game console,
Speaker 1: now we're terrified. So they asked, hey, do you think
Speaker 1: maybe you could take this thing you're designing and instead
Speaker 1: of making it a video game console, could you upgrade
Speaker 1: it so it's a personal computer. Well, that's what J.
Speaker 1: Minor hadn't mind all along, and in fact what he
Speaker 1: had been working on, so it suited him just fine.
Speaker 1: It validated his arguments, and the team continued to focus
Speaker 1: on building out the chips that would go into the
Speaker 1: first Amiga computer. Dave Morse, who was the CEO of
Speaker 1: the company, decided that the chips all needed to have
Speaker 1: code names, which would protect the company's intellectual property. Anyone
Speaker 1: overhearing the employees talking about these chips would just hear
Speaker 1: the code names and not instead of whatever the chips
Speaker 1: actually were. So he decided that all the chips should
Speaker 1: be given women's names. So the three major chips in
Speaker 1: the Amiga chips set were called Agnes, Denise, and Paula.
Speaker 1: The computer's code name was Lorraine, so you had a
Speaker 1: rain the computer with Agnes, de Nice and Paula as
Speaker 1: the chips. The design team held frequent meetings and everyone
Speaker 1: was free to pitch ideas at those meetings, arguing for
Speaker 1: features they felt should be included in the chips set.
Speaker 1: To reach a consensus, the team instituted an unusual practice
Speaker 1: involving toy baseball bats made of foam, so if you
Speaker 1: pitched an idea and people didn't like it, they bat
Speaker 1: you over the head with the bats. They just hit
Speaker 1: you with these foam baseball bats. It was harmless, but
Speaker 1: according to j Minor, it was a humiliating experience. Minor
Speaker 1: had read about and taken a course in a special
Speaker 1: type of co processor called a blitter, also known as
Speaker 1: a blitter circuit. A blitter, which is b L I
Speaker 1: T T e R, can manipulate and move data inside
Speaker 1: a computer's memory quickly without having to text the CPU,
Speaker 1: so it works in parallel with the CPU. It can
Speaker 1: copy data from one block of memory, can move it
Speaker 1: to where it needs to be, and the CPU can
Speaker 1: just continue its own operations without having to expend any
Speaker 1: resources to do this. And this blitter would allow the
Speaker 1: Amiga to handle much more advanced graphics without overtaxing the
Speaker 1: CPU compared to other computers on the market. Minor also
Speaker 1: ended up working on a design for what was called
Speaker 1: a hold and Modify mode or HAM mode h a M.
Speaker 1: This was a way to kind of trick the system
Speaker 1: into showing more colors on screen than it was technically
Speaker 1: capable of doing, just based on the amount of memory
Speaker 1: in the machine. So the memory served as a limitation,
Speaker 1: a limiting factor. You couldn't show too many colors because
Speaker 1: the amount of information you needed to represent the colors, hue,
Speaker 1: its brightness, it's you know, it's opaqueness, all of those things.
Speaker 1: Those values would take up memory space, and memory was expensive,
Speaker 1: so to keep costs down and maximize efficiency, Minor and
Speaker 1: his team started to work on this design, and HAM
Speaker 1: mode would allow programmers to designate a line of pixels
Speaker 1: as a single color and then make changes to just
Speaker 1: one of the three properties that define that color, as
Speaker 1: in hue, saturation, or luminosity. In this mode, the Amiga
Speaker 1: computer would be able to display four thousand, nineties six colors,
Speaker 1: which was light years ahead of the competition. They also
Speaker 1: designed what they called the Copper chip. This chip had
Speaker 1: three different instructions on it, all in order to exert
Speaker 1: direct control of the computer's display, and the chip could
Speaker 1: also access any part of the other display chips. It
Speaker 1: would allow the Amiga to have multiple windows open side
Speaker 1: by side at once, even when each window had contents
Speaker 1: displaying at different resolutions, which is pretty phenomenal. The chip
Speaker 1: code named AGNES, would contain the blitter and copper chips
Speaker 1: and was in charge of handling direct access to the
Speaker 1: computer's memory. Denise was a display chip that would produce sprites,
Speaker 1: and a sp it is a two dimensional object that
Speaker 1: hardware makers can use to create a composite of the
Speaker 1: sprite along with the background. It allows the sprite to
Speaker 1: move across the background without the need to having to
Speaker 1: with redraw everything every time the sprite moves. Paula's job
Speaker 1: was as a dedicated sound generation chip. It would control
Speaker 1: four channels of audio, two on the left stereo channel,
Speaker 1: two on the right stereo channel. That would give the
Speaker 1: Amiga much greater sound reproduction capability than competing computers in
Speaker 1: the early nineties. So this design phase slowly moved from
Speaker 1: white boards to bread boards. So now it's time to
Speaker 1: talk about bread boards what that means, and kind of
Speaker 1: wrap up this episode. A bread board is a base
Speaker 1: for building circuits and electronics. Uh It was also known
Speaker 1: as or It is also known as a plug board
Speaker 1: because it's a board into which you can plug chips
Speaker 1: and wires. Today's bread boards are really super nice. You
Speaker 1: don't have to solder connections between components. You just plug
Speaker 1: everything in and the bread board itself has a little
Speaker 1: layer of metal on the underside that allows connections, so
Speaker 1: you don't have to actually solder everything together. But back
Speaker 1: in the day you did have to do soldering. The
Speaker 1: reason why that's really important is that today, because you
Speaker 1: don't have to solder everything, you can reuse breadboards. You
Speaker 1: just unplugged stuff and you plug new stuff in, so
Speaker 1: you can very rapidly test out different circuit layouts, different designs.
Speaker 1: Breadboard circuits are much much larger than the finalized type
Speaker 1: of circuits that make their way into electronics. It's sort
Speaker 1: of the macro scale of what you would eventually plan
Speaker 1: to produce. So these chips that Miners team was developing, UH,
Speaker 1: when manufactured, they would all fit to plug into the
Speaker 1: motherboard for the first Amiga computer, But at this time
Speaker 1: on breadboard form, they were huge, and by huge, i'm
Speaker 1: talking about chips that would measure several feet along one side.
Speaker 1: Each chip would have eight bread boards connected together to
Speaker 1: simulate what the final chip would do. So Agnes was
Speaker 1: eight bread boards, Denise was eight bread boards, Paula was
Speaker 1: eight bread boards. Each bread board would hold three hundred
Speaker 1: m s I logic chips. So for all three of
Speaker 1: the simulated chips for Agnes, for Denise, for Paula, collectively
Speaker 1: you had seven thousand, two hundred separate logic chips for
Speaker 1: these simulated chips, and they all had to be wired together.
Speaker 1: All those bread boards had to be wired together, all
Speaker 1: those components had to be wired properly. So there were
Speaker 1: a ridiculous number of wires connecting everything and each of
Speaker 1: those simulated chips, and as you can imagine, that made
Speaker 1: connecting and moving the bread boards really difficult to do
Speaker 1: because one wrong move and you would introduce a system
Speaker 1: crashing bug by knocking loose another connection. Then you'd have
Speaker 1: to track down which connect was loose and reconnected properly.
Speaker 1: The team hooked up their simulated chip set to a
Speaker 1: sixty eight thousand processor and then they fired it up
Speaker 1: and it worked. But that was just the hardware side.
Speaker 1: In our next episode, we'll pick up by talking about
Speaker 1: the software that was in development to run on this
Speaker 1: first Amiga computer, and we'll also look at how the
Speaker 1: company nearly got swept up by Atari after finding itself
Speaker 1: in financial trouble, and we'll learn the crazy Game of
Speaker 1: Thrones like story involving the company Commodore as well, and
Speaker 1: it really does get pretty crazy in the meantime, If
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