Thank you for purchasing the Amiga Forever Online Plus Pack. The Online
Plus Pack is an add-on for Amiga Forever Online Edition, extending the set
of ROM and OS files to the same level of that of the CD Edition of Amiga
Forever, and adding an MP3 audio version of the Jay Miner interview.
This chapter includes the following sections:
Installation
The items in the Online Plus Pack distribution archive are designed to
match the corresponding directories and files in an existing Amiga Forever
installation. Simply drag-and-drop the new "Amiga Forever"
directory to the directory where Amiga Forever
is installed (usually "C:\Program
Files\Cloanto", for English-language versions of Windows).
Note: make sure not to copy
"Amiga Forever" inside an existing "Amiga
Forever" directory. The new files and the old files should be at the
same directory level.
If you already owned some of the Amiga Workbench
disk image (ADF) files which are contained in this archive (versions 1.0, 1.1,
1.2 or 2.1), and you made changes to them, make a safe copy of your
work before overwriting the files.
Existing 1.3 and 3.X configurations are not affected by the installation
of the Online Plus Pack.
Amiga ROM and OS Files
The CD Edition of Amiga Forever includes all
Amiga ROMs and Workbench disks released between version 1.0 and version
3.1, plus newer versions of the same (in the preinstalled 3.X environment). The Online Edition of Amiga Forever only includes
the 1.3 and 3.X environments.
This Online Plus Pack
contains:
- Amiga ROMs v. 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 2.04
- Amiga Workbench disk versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 2.1 (2.1 is meant for
use with the 2.04 ROM)
- Amiga 1000 boot ROM
- CDTV and CD³²
ROMs
- Amiga Forever Boot Floppy Disk
Jay Miner Interview MP3 Files
This Online Plus Pack contains an MP3 version of the Jay Miner
interview which is also included on the Amiga Forever CD.
If your system is not already set up to play MP3
files, you can download one of the many free MP3 players which are
available. If you are running Microsoft Windows, we recommend that you get
the latest version of the
Windows
Media Player, which supports a variety of multimedia formats, and
which contains audio technology used by various other MP3 players.
About the Interview
This interview with the late Jay Miner, "father
of the Amiga", was recorded in Paris on the evening of February 9th,
1990, during an Amiga Developer's Conference. In the interview, which took
place at the conference's hotel bar (as can be heard from the bottles and
glasses in the background), Jay spoke with Cloanto developers recalling
the birth of the Amiga, but also discussing topics ranging from computers
and society to issues totally unrelated to technology. The most relevant
parts of this interview are included here.
The original recording was done with a portable
device which was running on batteries that were progressively discharging
during the interview. Running the original tape today, Jay Miner's voice
initially sounds like that of a young man, and at the end it is more
similar to that of a cartoon character speaking very quickly. This is
barely sufficient for a transcript, but it is definitely not the best for
audio reproduction on a CD. So we went through considerable and extremely
hi-tech efforts to "repair" the tape in order to best share this
unique piece of Amiga history with all enthusiasts. For this Amiga Forever
edition the original recording was sampled, filtered and processed with
professional hardware and software, first at a recording studio, and then
with an Amiga 4000 running Samplitude and AudioLab. Please refer to the
Credits
section for additional information.
Transcripts of the audio tracks are included in the following sections.
Track 1 - Birth of the Amiga
The Amiga - a company called "Amiga" - was started in 1982
by myself, and Dave Morse, the president. I was not part of it originally. It started with
a fellow named Larry Kaplan. Larry Kaplan was one of the founders of Activision, and he
used to work for me at Atari, and when he left Atari, to start Activision, I gave him a
letter of recommendation and helped him start Activision. That was in 1979. And then,
about... 1982 Larry Kaplan called me up on the phone one day, and said he was tired of
working at Activision, and he wanted to start a new games company. And he asked if I knew
anybody with money and lawyers and stuff. And I said "No, not personally, but my boss
does". At this time I was working for Zymos, and Burt Braddick was president of
Zymos. And he knew these fellows from Texas, that helped to start Zymos. And they had
money, and they were very interested in starting a video games company, because at that
time it looked like video games were going to keep going up through the roof. Little did
they know that the whole video games thing was going to turn around and go through the
cellar in a year or two. But, anyway, so I introduced them together, my friend Larry
Kaplan and my boss Burt Braddick, and together they came up with a business plan, and they
found this guy Dave Morse to be president, from back East. He was vice president of Tonka
toys, in charge of marketing (at Tonka toys). They brought him out here, got him all
situated in a house and everything. They had this business plan, they had the investors,
they got an office, empty office, in Santa Clara. At that time, Larry Kaplan decided to
quit. He got cold feet or something, or maybe things weren't happening fast enough for
him, or maybe he wasn't getting a big enough piece of the action, I don't know why, but he
quit, and left them with no engineer to make things go. Although Larry wasn't really an
engineer, he was a programmer. They talk about programmers being engineers, but I still
distinguish between the two.
It started with the idea of a video games machine and I was working
at Zymos for Burt Braddick, and they wanted me to design the chips, so that Zymos could
build the chips and Amiga could sell the games, and everybody would make money, that was
the idea. But when Larry Kaplan left, they needed some help, so they asked me if I would
take over and be the vice president of engineering of Amiga. And I said "sure",
provided, number one, we get to use the 68000, and number two I get to make it not only a
games machine, but a computer. I had a lot of ideas for a computer, that Dave Morse and
the investors seemed to like, even though they were primarily interested in a video games
machine. As long as we could make it expandable and it didn't cost too much extra, they
were willing to go along with it also being a computer.
OK, so, there we were me and Dave Morse, and an empty office, and a
vague plan to make the best video games machine that was also a computer.
I think that both Dave Morse and I both got our wish. We got the
best video game machine, and we also got the best computer. And I had visions of it being
something that it's not yet, and that is, something that really competed with IBM and took
a bite out of IBM. And I don't think that's the Amiga's fault. I think it's the fact that
it hasn't been too competitive. I think that Commodore was very bad off financially, about
1983, '84, right in there. And C-64 sales were down, and Commodore was having trouble with
the banks, and they didn't really advertise it well enough, and they didn't have the money
for good software support, good support for developers. They not only didn't have the
money, they didn't have the experience and incentive for good software support: they were
more of a games machine mentality, than they were a computer mentality, and they weren't
interested in competing with IBM like I was. So in that sense it's not quite what I had
expected. I had expected that we would be a business machine, as well as a video machine.
Of course at the beginning, when the chips were done, in '84 we had
a lot of companies looking at us, but nobody wanted to invest in a small computer company,
at that time, especially a video games computer company, because video games had gone
"phew", down...
I'm very glad to see that Commodore is working hard on new chips
that are coming in the future. I was concerned about this, because the technology has
gotten much better since we did the first Amiga chipset. We did those with the 5 micron
design rules. And now they've got 1 and 1.5 micron design rules. You can put five times as
much on the same chip area. And I was afraid that Commodore was not pursuing the new chip
design well enough, but I've been reassured by people that they are coming out with a new
Amiga chip set that will make it very competitive.
Track 2 - Computers and
Society
My vision is very negative there, so I don't know if you really want
to hear it...
My general feeling is that computers are doing more harm than good.
I see the IRS is using computers extensively now to catch people on their taxes. And if
you're in the government I suppose that's good. But, you know, when they issued us our
social security cards, they promised they would never be used for purposes of
identification. In fact, my social security card has written on it "Not to be used
for identification". But now, look what happens: pretty soon they will have numbers
tattooed on the forehead. And this is the only reason they can do this, is because of
computers. I see computers bringing closer and closer the day of the "big
brother" concept of... where government can control every aspect of your life because
you are on the computer.
One of the problems with computers is that even the... most of the
people who... they are trying to teach computers to everybody... and most people really
have no need for them. It's a very expensive way to churn money in the society, and to...
People design computers so that other people can play with them... And it looks to me like
most of it is a great big waste.
The whole technology thing, the result has been more and more
crowding... I don't think it has improved the average person's lifestyle that much.
Sure, I do better letters now. I have a word processor and I like my
2000. I play games on it. I do letters on it. I have my spreadsheets on it. But that isn't
necessary, it isn't really necessary. And that's my feeling about computers, it's that
they are not really necessary. Sure, you can design airplanes that go a 100 miles per hour
faster than you could without computers. But so, what?
The only people that are really still doing useful working jobs, I
think, are the farmers, and the doctors, and the people that make clothes, the
necessities, and beyond that, we don't really need it. Every household has more toys, more
electronic gadgets than they really need.
Oh, play the game, learn programming, learn to design computers,
because that's where the future is. I'm not saying it's not real. It's definitely real,
and it's definitely coming, as a big thing. It's going to further separate the classes,
though. Because the people that can't go to school at a level to learn computers are going
to be tomorrow's second class citizens. And it's going to further make the rich richer,
and the poor poorer. It doesn't bring society together - it separates.
I didn't tell you that I started a new job. People might be
interested in the fact that I am now working at a small medical electronics company
designing chips that go into pace-makers and what they call "implantable
defibrillators". A defibrillator shocks the heart into working again if it fails. And
it goes inside the body and it charges a capacitor - a big capacitor - to about 750 Volts,
and if the person's heart stops beating it goes "wamp" and delivers the shock.
So that's why they call it an implantable defibrillator, and I am doing chip design for
that now, and it's very interesting...
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