Jay Miner designed the custom chips of two of the most important machines of their era, and he left Atari because it would not let him build a third. “I wanted to do a 68000 machine with them,” he told a writer from Amiga User International a year or two before he died. Atari had just finished the 800 and would not pay for research into a 16-bit computer. “They couldn’t see the writing on the wall and they just said ‘No’, so I quit!” The machine he designed instead became the Amiga.
Atari
Miner was born in Prescott, Arizona, in 1932 and grew up in southern California. He served three years in the Coast Guard during the Korean War and graduated in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958. His obituary notes that his early career included some of the first digital voltmeters and calculators.
At Atari he designed the TIA (Television Interface Adaptor), the chip that draws the picture and makes the sound in the Atari 2600, the console first sold as the Video Computer System. He then moved on to Atari’s first home computers, the 400 and 800, where he directed the design of ANTIC, the display processor, and CTIA, the Color Television Interface Adaptor. Amiga Computing summed up his record in 1988: he “had designed the chips in the Atari 800 and the VCS”. His dog Mitchy came to work with him, and, according to Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean’s history of the Amiga, she had her own Atari ID badge.
Hi-Toro and Lorraine
After Atari, Miner spent three years at a small company called Zimast, developing microprocessor-controlled heart pacemakers. In 1982 Larry Kaplan, a former Atari programmer who had co-founded Activision, wanted to start a games hardware company, and the investors who backed him set it up in Santa Clara as Hi-Toro, with Dave Morse as its chief executive. When Kaplan left late in 1982 to return to Atari, Morse asked Miner to take his place as chief engineer. Hi-Toro was soon renamed Amiga. “I didn’t like it much,” Miner said of the name. “I thought using a Spanish name wasn’t such a good move. I was wrong!”
The investors wanted a games machine. Miner wanted a 68000 computer, and his plan was a design that could be sold cheaply as a games console while staying expandable into a full computer. The prototype was code-named Lorraine, after Morse’s wife. Part of Miner’s deal was that Mitchy could come to work every day. He was also relaxed about who he hired: “There were guys coming to work in purple tights and pink bunny slippers … I knew talent when I saw it.” Arguments, he said, were settled “by hitting each other with the foam baseball bats”.
The chips
The team designed three custom chips, later named Agnus, Denise and Paula, to do the work the 68000 would otherwise have had to do: moving memory, drawing the display and playing sound. Before they existed as silicon they were built out of ordinary logic on breadboards. “The first Agnus was three lots of eight bread boards, each with 250 chips,” Miner recalled, “and this was repeated for the other two custom chips.” That was the form in which Amiga showed the machine privately at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1984. The team wrote the first version of the Boing ball demo at the show. Dale Luck, one of its programmers, later recalled that this version only bounced up and down and had no sound; both the sideways motion and the sound were there by the Summer CES in June 1984. Its booming sound, Miner said, was Bob Pariseau hitting a foam baseball bat against a garage door, sampled on an Apple II.
Some features arrived late or by accident. The blitter’s line drawing went in about two weeks before that show, at the request of the programmer Dale Luck. Hold-and-modify, the mode that lets an Amiga show 4,096 colours at once, came from Miner’s interest in flight simulators. It was designed for a colour-television output where changing only four bits could hold the hue and alter the brightness. When the design switched to RGB output, Miner asked for it to be taken out, but the chip’s layout engineer said that would leave a hole in the chip or take three months to redesign. “I didn’t think anyone would use it,” Miner said. “I was wrong again.”
Commodore bought Amiga in 1984, and the Amiga 1000 went on sale in 1985. Miner was one of the three writers of Commodore’s first Amiga Hardware Manual. The designers’ signatures, Miner’s among them, were moulded inside the case, along with Mitchy’s paw print. The Amiga custom chipset entry describes how the three chips divide the work.
After the Amiga
Miner left Commodore not long after the Amiga 1000 came out. Amiga Shopper reported that he left when Commodore tried to move the design team to its offices near Philadelphia. He kept a close interest in the machine and was co-sysop of an Amiga bulletin board system. He also went back to medical electronics: the San Jose Mercury News credited him with the chip at the centre of Ventritex’s implantable cardiac defibrillator. In his interview with AUI he criticised Commodore’s decisions, from shipping the Amiga 1000 with only 256K to chasing IBM PC compatibility. “Hey, we’re different,” he recalled telling them. “Try to take advantage of that, not imitate or simulate other people.”
He had lived with kidney disease all his life. He died at El Camino Hospital in California on 20 June 1994, aged 62, two months after Commodore had gone into liquidation. The news, Amazing Computing wrote, was not carried by the wire services or the newspapers: it passed by telephone and then across bulletin boards.
Sources
- Amazing Computing, vol. 9 no. 9, September 1994, p. 6: “Jay Miner: The Amiga has lost its most important founding father”, by Don Hicks, with the obituary supplied by Caroline Miner (birth, Coast Guard, Berkeley, early career, death on 20 June 1994) and quotations from Mark Lundstrum in the San Jose Mercury News, 22 July 1994 (the VCS, the Atari 400 and 800, the Ventritex defibrillator).
- Amiga Shopper, issue 41, September 1994, p. 6: “Jay Miner dies”: El Camino Hospital, his resignation from Atari, the foam bats, the breadboard Agnus, leaving Commodore over the move to Philadelphia, the bulletin board, his lifelong kidney problems.
- Amiga User International, May 1995, pp. 63–67, “AUI Special Report”: the account Miner gave the writer about two years earlier, including the 68000 machine Atari refused, the name Amiga, Mitchy, the staff, the foam bats, line drawing, hold-and-modify, the CES prototype and the Boing sound, the 256K decision and IBM compatibility.
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), pp. 17–18: the first Boing demo written at Winter CES 1984, Dale Luck’s recollection that it was silent and bounced only vertically, and its sound and sideways motion by Summer CES in June 1984.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Commodore Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), pp. 8–11: the TIA, ANTIC and CTIA, Mitchy’s Atari badge, Zimast, Larry Kaplan, Hi-Toro and Dave Morse; p. 32: the signatures and Mitchy’s paw print in the case.
- Amiga Computing, December 1988, pp. 24–26: Miner “had designed the chips in the Atari 800 and the VCS”.
- Commodore User, November 1984, p. 46: the Lorraine code name, after Morse’s wife.
- Amiga Hardware Manual (Commodore-Amiga, 1985): “The text of this manual was written by Robert Peck, Susan Deyl, and Jay Miner.”
- Amiga Format, issue 130, December 1999: the A1000 case signatures, “including Mitchy the dog”.