When the Amiga 1000 drew a window, filled a shape or slid one overlapping layer behind another, it was running Dale Luck’s code. The Kickstart Guide to the Amiga (1987) credits him with the graphics library, the routines for lines, area fills, circles and text that drive the custom chips and the blitter, and with the layers library that lets windows overlap. He was also half of the pair who wrote the Boing Ball demo overnight at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1984. RJ Mical summed him up for Jimmy Maher: doing “this incredible graphics stuff” had been Luck’s “undying dream since he was in college”.
Fast facts
- Education: Michigan Technological University.
- Before Amiga: graphics workstations at Hewlett-Packard.
- At Amiga: from 1983, in charge of the graphics software.
- Wrote: the Amiga’s graphics and layers libraries; the Boing demo with RJ Mical.
- Later: his companies Boing! and GfxBase sold the Boing Mouse and an Amiga version of the X Window System.
From Hewlett-Packard to the Cave
Luck told INFO in 1989 that after graduating from Michigan Technological University he went to work for Hewlett-Packard in California, developing graphics workstations. About three years in he became interested in Unix and ported it to the colour graphics system he was working on. In 1983 he was offered a job at Amiga Corporation: “Within a couple of days I had made my decision, and within a couple of weeks I was in charge of the graphics software at Amiga.”
The team wrote its code on Sage 68000 computers, which they called “Crime” and “Punishment”, and downloaded it to the Lorraine prototype, a 68000 with 128K of memory and circuit boards standing in for the custom chips. Colour monitors were strapped to the tops of the terminals and fed by an RGB cable run in a ring round the room, so everyone could see each other’s work. The room had no windows and was known as “the Cave”. The hardware was so sensitive to static that Luck and Mical put down a grounding mat and encouraged everyone to work barefoot. While the Sages compiled, the two of them turned up the music and danced to stay awake, which earned them the name “the Dancing Fools”. “I don’t know if I will ever work with a more enthusiastic, incredible group of people again,” Luck said. “Everyone was on a mission from God.”
Graphics, layers and the blitter
The graphics library was the layer between programs and the chips. The Kickstart Guide to the Amiga describes it as “Amiga graphics routines by Dale Luck; in charge of the PAD graphics capabilities, including the blitter”, with routines for screen management, points, lines, area fills, flood fills, circles, ellipses and text. The layers library, “also by Dale Luck”, let a single drawing area be treated as overlapping layers, which is what Intuition’s windows are built on. Jay Miner recalled that the blitter’s line-drawing mode was added at Luck’s request about two weeks before the chips were shown at CES. Miner told him there was no room, “but he fiddled about and showed me what registers were needed, so in it went”.
Luck worked closely with Intuition, the window system, but its design was RJ Mical’s. The same guide credits Intuition as “designed and originally coded by R.J. Mical”. Luck is listed among the contributors to Commodore’s Intuition Reference Manual, and is thanked in the 1986 Amiga Hardware Reference Manual and the ROM Kernel manuals.
Boing
At Winter CES in January 1984 the Lorraine was a set of circuit boards that “failed constantly”, with no operating system and no keyboard. Mical and Luck wrote the first version of the Boing Ball demo in Amiga’s rented back room during the show. Luck’s own recollection, which Maher accepts, is that this first version was silent and the ball only bounced up and down. By the Summer CES in June it moved from side to side and boomed. The ball spun by colour cycling and moved by scrolling the display, so it was drawn only once; the Boing Ball entry explains how.
After Commodore
Commodore bought Amiga in 1984, and cut the original team down in layoffs in 1986 and 1987. Luck told INFO that the West Coast team was axed “except for Bart Whitebook and me”, that he became a part-time contractor, and that he started work on the X Window System for the Amiga in his spare time. By 1989 he had two companies. Boing!, in Milpitas, sold the Boing Mouse, the first optical mouse for the Amiga, with three buttons. GfxBase sold X Windows, which let any Amiga on a network open windows on any other, or on a Sun or VAX. Antic’s Amiga Plus reviewed both in February 1990.
He was not shy of criticising Commodore. In the same interview he said that it was “like they’re pretending to be a computer company”, and that “even in the high level management of Commodore there really isn’t anyone who grasps the technology”. He had raised such points as a shareholder at its annual meeting, and said he would make a good chairman.
He stayed close to the Amiga’s technical side. At Commodore’s Atlanta developer conference in 1990 he proposed the Standard Amiga Network Architecture, SANA, which grew into the SANA-II network driver standard. In 1991 he wrote for the AmigaWorld Tech Journal on genlock handling in the new Super Denise chip. In 1996 he was among the guests at an Amiga user group event in Atlanta, one of the “Amiga legends such as RJ Mical and Dale Luck, from the original Amiga team”.
Sources
- Mindy Skelton, “Keeping the Faith: An Interview With Dale Luck”, INFO issue 27, July/August 1989, pp. 22–24: education and Hewlett-Packard; joining Amiga in 1983; the Sages, the Lorraine and the Cave; the “dancing fools”; the layoffs; X Windows, the Boing Mouse and Boing!; his views on Commodore.
- The Kickstart Guide to the Amiga (Ariadne Software, 1987), p. 17: the graphics and layers libraries by Dale Luck; Intuition by R.J. Mical.
- Commodore-Amiga, Amiga Intuition Reference Manual (Addison-Wesley, 1986): contributors. Amiga Hardware Reference Manual (Addison-Wesley, 1986): acknowledgements. Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual: Libraries and Devices (1986): contributors.
- Amiga history feature, Edge issue 69, March 1999, p. 45: Jay Miner on the line-drawing mode and the “Dancing Fools”.
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), pp. 11–37 and 153: the dancing; Winter CES and the Boing demo; Luck’s recollection of the January version; Mical on Luck.
- COMPUTE!’s Amiga Resource, August 1989, p. 44: the Boing! Mouse and GfxBase, “a company started by Dale Luck, who wrote much of the Amiga’s graphics”.
- Steve Carter, review of the Boing Mouse and X Windows, Antic’s Amiga Plus vol. 1 no. 6, February 1990, p. 73.
- Commodore, 1993 International Amiga Developers Conference notes, p. 560: SANA-II and Luck’s 1990 SANA proposal.
- Dale Luck, “Improved Genlock Handling”, AmigaWorld Tech Journal vol. 1 no. 2, June 1991.
- Amazing Computing vol. 11 no. 4, April 1996: the Amiga Atlanta event.