Commodore Amiga Retro

Area 97

It is 1986 January and Eric Graham shows his "Juggler"
demo animation on the Amiga, showing the Amiga's capabilities
of ray-traced animation merged with digitized sound. (This
program is the foundation of the Sculpt 3-D software
later released by Byte by Byte.)

Jay Miner, known as "The Father of the Amiga",
passed away on June 20, 1994 at the El Camino Hospital
in Mountain View, California.

FISHing

Since the Amiga's introduction in late 1985, in the days of
net.micro.amiga (Usenet's dawn), when the real Gurus attempted to
discover a wonderful machine, Fred Fish assembled freely available
and distributable stuff and made it available through a floppy
disk-based distribution for Amiga-freaks all over the world.

[ end quote ]

The success of this series of PD disks is without comparison
and a staggering 1000 AmigaLibDisks were circulated by Fred
up to the year 1993.

And so to give you a taste of what FRED gave the Amiga community
I give you Fred Fish disk number 097. And why 097 ? Well it
has the famous Juggler animation on it. You may also note that
this disk has the same number as this page. I wonder why ?

Dave Haynie

'I'm Dave Haynie. I worked at Commodore 11.5 years, first
on some of the 8-bit Commodore systems like the C128, then
on the Amiga. I was on the A500 for about a month, then took
over the A2000. I worked on both A2500 models (the accelerator
cards), I designed the Zorro III bus and bits of the A3000,
I did the first AA and AAA prototype systems, etc. and so forth.'

Dave Haynie's words

Eric W Schwartz

'Jugglette' animation

A few words from Eric

Eric W. Schwartz

For those that do not have 'MoviePlayer' on their Amiga
then click the images below to download the two LHA
files containing the required files... You will need
MoviePlayer to play the Jugglette animation

CUAmiga disk 40A and CUAmiga disk 40B

That amazing bouncing ball

' The Boing Ball demo, written by RJ Mical during a
break at a trade show. At a time when other computers
were only just managing colour display, the Amiga was
displaying smooth animation in full colour.'

Hidden Messages

The large icons above are located on the 2.0 Install disk
2.0Install:Tools/Test/Who.info..with all the
programmer's signatures on it. It also exists in a
hidden directory on the A3000 SCSI install diskette:

Lest we forget

In memory of Rob Peck .... Very important that.

Well Jay Miner had been at Atari but 1n 1982 joined with
Dave Morris Vice President of Tonka toys to form Hi Toro.
This was changed to Amiga because Hi Toro sounded like
a Lawn Mower.

The name Amiga was used to mean friend.

In the early days the team worked out of the 30 x 20 foot
' Software Cave ' up on Scott Avenue creating what was
supposed to be called the Joyboard.

Among the crew was R J Mical, Sam Dicker, Carl Sassenrath,
Dale Luck, Caryn Mical and Dave Needle.

The chips were already designed at this stage.. Agnus, Portia
and Daphne, the latter becoming the Denise and Paula.

By the end of 1983 they were starting to run out of money
and they needed to desperately get the hardware working.

The three chips consisted of what they called 8 breadboards,
and on each breadboard there were 250 chips. A lot of chips.

The first machine was called the ' Lorraine ' after the
company presidents wife.

By CES in January 1984 they were in a closed booth at the
show demonstrating the bouncing ball, which interestingly
used the sound of someone hitting a garage door, recorded
on an Apple II.

They had a great show but had also great debt. Atari knew
of the debt and offered them $500,000 on the basis that if
they couldn't repay this in one month they would get the
company. The Amiga guys knew that Atari only wanted the
technology and not the team or company. They resisted an
offer of a dollar a share. Having refused the dollar, Atari
offered 85 cents.

With 3 and a half days to go in stepped Commodore who on the
last night agreed 4.25 dollars a share and Dave Morris flew
to Atari to give them their money back and to joy at telling
them ' See yah boys I got a plane to catch '

Jay Miner always wanted the computer to have the expansion
but Commodore wouldn't foot the bill for the sockets let
alone the chips. At 3 cents a socket this was too expensive
for Commodore. The saviour was to give the Amiga 1000 the
memory expansion.

It was Carl Sassenrath that was responsible for the
Guru Meditation. They objected to 'software failure'
and installed this without permission.

And Atari would never have been good for Amiga. Commodore
may not have been brilliant but it kept the likes of
Stan Sheperd, Bob Burns, Sheryl Knowles and the
wonderful Rob Peck together.

Never confuse other so called computers with the work of
this team and Jay Miner. The rest couldn't hold a candle
to them. And as for Atari... Not even on the same planet.

Long live the Amiga. The legend continues... OS4.
And the community lives on...

Keep the Faith

Jay Miner, known as "The Father of the Amiga",
passed away on June 20, 1994 at the El Camino Hospital
in Mountain View, California.

The saddest day of all....

Commodore International filed for liquidation
in order to be protected from its creditors
Friday April 29, 1994, at 4:10 P.M.

Commodore's official statement follows:

"Commodore International Limited announced today
that its Board of Directors has authorized the
transfer of assets to trustees for the benefit of
its creditor and has placed its major subsidiary,
Commodore Electronics Limited, into voluntary
liquidation. This is the initial phase of an
orderly liquidation of both companies, which
are incorporated in the Bahamas, by the Bahamas
Supreme Court."

"This action does not affect the wholly-owned subsidiaries
which include Commodore Business Machines (USA), Commodore
Business machines LTD (Canada), Commodore/Amiga (UK),
Commodore Germany, etc. Operations will continue normally."

Amiga 500