#AmigaIRC

History has taught us a lot of useful things, like why you shouldn't fill a blimp with hydrogen. On boring Sunday afternoons I'm sure many of us have taken the hard lessons of the Hindenburg to heart and, as a result, opted to spend our time in a less potentially explosive manner.

So in the interest of bettering mankind, and because it's Sunday and I want to kill some time, I've decided to document the history of the Amiga computer. If you haven't heard of the Amiga, then this will be an educational journey for you, filled with tragedy, comedy, and even a catchy dance number. For those of you who already know what the Amiga is all about, you'll find this to be a pleasant journey down memory lane, filled with tragedy, comedy and even a catchy dance number. And for those of you who stopped reading this a few sentences ago... hey, fuck you pal. Anyway, maybe it won't better mankind, but at least it'll kill some time until the hydrogen gets here...

Before I begin, I feel I should give fair warning to those of you who consider the Amiga to be more of a holy artifact than a well designed collection of silicon, plastic and metal. You may find my version of history to be what critics commonly refer to as "irreverent." But rest assured, this is all based on actual facts, and no mimes were killed during its writing.

As I've alluded to above, there are those who have come to think of their Amiga as more than just a mere computer. For some, The Amiga has become more of a pagan religion. If you've ever been wandering in a field late at night and noticed a nude madman on a moonlit hill with a red and white checkered ball painted on his chest dancing around the burning remains of an IBM mainframe while singing the theme to Gilligan's island, then you may have seen one of these Amiga fanatics.

These are the type of people who feel the need to insert statements like "I believe in the Amiga cause" or "We should all pay in advance for vaporware to support the Amiga" or "Hey, let's sacrifice that goat in the name of the Amiga!" into an otherwise normal conversation.

Well, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit. But one has to wonder, just what the hell were you doing wandering around that field in the first place? You're one of them aren't you?

At any rate, the reason I bring all of this up is to properly introduce the guy pictured below. To Amiga fanatics, this guy is God.

Back in 1980, which is coincidentally when our tale begins, Jay was just an employee for Atari. But he had big things in mind, and I'm not just talking about the beard.

You see, Atari may be a joke these days, but back then they pretty much 0wned the home video game market. In fact, they started the whole thing. Unfortunately for Atari, the guys upstairs weren't exactly visionaries and figured the Atari 2600 would keep them on easy street for at least the next 20 years. If they'd had their way, we'd all still be sitting on the couch playing games like Congo Bongo or River Run instead of emulating them on our expensive PCs.

Jay Miner, realizing that people might someday get bored with 2-color characters that looked like something Picasso might have painted back in his cubist period, suggested the company fund development of a new computer based upon the Motorola 68000 processor. It was a bold idea, one that would propel Atari to the forefront of technology.

Naturally, Atari responded by telling him to go fuck himself.

Little did the geniuses at Atari realize that this employee, known then merely as "Jay Miner", would later be christened "Father of the Amiga" and would eventually create something they would battle bitterly against until their eventual demise. And if they had known, they probably would have shrugged and asked who was up for a game of shuffleboard.

For now, Atari remained smugly content with the 8-bit video game industry, perhaps thinking people would be satisfied with games like "Circus" for at least another decade.

Jay Miner, meanwhile, got frustrated with the slack-jawed execs at Atari, put his ideas on hold and went to work designing chips for a pacemaker company. Somewhere, a mime wept.

1981 and 1982: Attack of the millionaire dentists

As exciting as designing chips for pacemakers sounds, it didn’t take much for Jay to be lured away from his rock and roll lifestyle and back into the gaming industry. An old buddy of his, Larry Kaplan, called and pretty much said, “Dude, Atari sucks, we should start our own game company to piss them off.” Kaplan had left Atari years earlier to form Activision, which apparently also sucked. Jay was all for forming a new company because he still had visions of a Motorola based computer in his head. And hey, the potential to piss off Atari couldn't have hurt either. As luck would have it, he knew of some dentists who wanted to invest $7 million in the growing games market. This can only lead us to one conclusion: dentists make way too much money.

Jay convinced these dentists that he was their man, and they dumped their wheelbarrows of cash on him (No word on whether they threw in a free root canal). Kaplan and Miner ran all the way to the bank, possibly while singing the theme song to Gilligan's Island, and formed their company, calling it Hi-Toro, based in Santa Clara, California.

Of course, the question you're probably asking yourself right now is, what the hell kind of name is "Hi-Toro"? Hey, I don't know, maybe one of the dentists came up with it after sampling some of his own ether.

Ironically, the first products "Hi-Toro" (try saying Hi-Toro without sounding like you're cheering for a Spanish soccer team... it's fun, make a game out of it) produced were joysticks and games for the venerable Atari 2600. They did this merely as a front so nobody in the industry would suspect what they were really up to. Given Miner's past experience with Atari, this gave them a head start and they began to create a familiar user base. One of their first productions was "JoyBoard", a controller that you used by sitting on it.

There were a number of games designed for it, but the only historically notable one is "Zen Meditation" in which you have to sit absolutely still. Yes, that's right.. a game whose only goal is to sit totally still. It really doesn't get any better than that, does it? The only reason this is notable is that this is where the infamous Guru Meditation error in AmigaOS comes from. If you moved while on the board, you jokingly made a Guru Meditation error.

Alas, if you think the joyboard concept sucks, fear not, this was just a cover for the creation of one of the most advanced game machines ever.

Another member was soon added to the Hi-Toro team: Dave Morse as project manager. I'm not sure what a project manager does exactly, but I'm sure it must be damn important because they let him name the prototype. He code named the machine 'Lorraine' after his wife.

Soon after, an impatient Larry Kaplan, who apparently possessed the attention span of a tit mouse, left Hi-Toro, leaving Jay Miner to take over his role as Vice President. It seems odd to me that Kaplan would leave so early in the game after proposing the idea of starting the company in the first place. Perhaps Jay had purposely led Kaplan on, convincing him that they could throw together a next generation console in a matter of days with a few household items and a coil of copper wire, knowing he'd get impatient and leave. I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there.

Perhaps Kaplan had been the one to think of the lousy name too, because not long after this, Hi-Toro changed its name to Amiga Corporation, allegedly to avoid confusion with the Japanese lawnmower, Toro.

Where did they get the name Amiga, you ask? History tells us they stumbled upon it after looking in the dictionary for a name that "sounded friendly". You see, Amiga is the Spanish word for "female friend". Of course, the fact that it came before Apple and Atari in alphabetical listings was also a factor. It is important to note, however, that despite this brilliant naming logic, at no point in the Amiga's life span did they find a hot Spanish chick to serve as a marketing spokesperson, even though it would've made perfect sense. Here's a picture of a Spanish chick to illustrate my point:

As the developers made progress on the prototype, they began to realize that it could easily be much more than a mere game console. It had the potential to be the greatest kick-ass end-all-be-all home computer ever built. Although they were obligated to make it a console, they asked their financial backers if maybe they could make it a computer instead. The financial backers, however, were a stubborn lot and probably didn’t know what a computer was at that point, so they insisted it remain a game console. I imagine the conversations went something like this:

If you remember, Miner’s original idea he presented to Atari was a computer. Even though he was now using his ideas for this wacky top-secret dentist-funded game console, he had clearly never let go of the computer idea. He let the backers have their way, but in a move which would pay off later, he decided the console would have some special “hidden features” like a keyboard interface and expandable memory. He also added a cartridge port, just to make the backers feel better.

The video game and computer industry was a high stakes business at this time, and anyone who has studied the contentious history of Apple and Microsoft knows that it wasn't unusual for ideas to be stolen. Even bad ideas were at a premium and had to be protected. Hence, there was some concern that information on the new machine would leak out. To combat corporate espionage they gave each chip a woman's name. This way if anyone overheard a conversation, all they would hear were things like "Agnes wouldn't let Daphne do her work", or "I blew Paula last night after plugging in Agnes." Yes, kids, this is how the Amiga chipset got their names.

1983: "Hey, I have thought... let's make it a computer."

If you've ever studied video game history, and hey, why wouldn't you, then you've heard of the great video game crash of the early 80's. If not, let me sum up.. it was just like the big dot.com crash of recent years, except for video games. There's books on it. Go get one.

The reason this is important to the history of the Amiga, is that this crash is why the Amiga ended up being a computer instead of a game console. Video game companies were dropping like flies, and the dentists didn't need a shot of Novocain to the see the writing on the wall.

Around mid 1983, the media began questioning whether the game console industry was just a short-lived phenomenon. As we know now, it wasn't. But it certainly seemed like it at the time. Here's the conversation that likely occurred as a result:

Backers: "You know, we were thinking... this game console thing seems a bit short sited. Let's make it a computer instead."

So Lorraine was finally transformed from console to computer. This wasn’t difficult, since this is what the developers had basically been building anyway. While other companies in the industry were downsizing, Amiga was giddily hiring more people. Yes, all of the pieces were now in place to make history. Two teams were formed, Hardware and Software. Jay Miner led the hardware team, and a new hire, Dale Luck, led the software team.

One of the things the Amiga would eventually become known for was it's cutting edge graphics. Perhaps looking for inspiration, or perhaps because this was how he spent Friday nights, Jay Miner visited a military flight simulator company called Singer-Link. What he saw there led him to develop a new graphics mode called HAM (Hold and Modify). HAM made it possible to show 4096 colors on screen at once, which made the 8 colors a PC could display at the time look rather, well, lame. As fate would have it, when Jay later became frustrated with how slow it was and decided to remove it, he was told it was too late because it would leave a hole in the middle of the motherboard design. This is how the Amiga ended up with a graphics mode named after a meat...

By September the three custom chip prototypes were mostly finished: Agnes (Address Generator), Daphne, later renamed Denise (Display Adapter) and Portia, eventually called Paula (Ports and Audio). Rumor has it they were named for local hookers who... no, I'm kidding. It's pretty obvious that the names were based in part on their function. If you didn't pick up on that then there would be no point in me explaining it further, as you're probably too busy drowning in your own drool. The chips at this point were incredibly large, and resembled something you might see in an old mainframe.

Unfortunately, despite all of the extensive cloak and dagger antics of the development team, by this time the Amiga's secret had gotten out and a number of corporations were eyeing the company with great interest... Some of them may have even cackled evilly...