Jay Miner

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Jay Glenn Miner (May 31, 1932 - June 20, 1994) was a famous integrated circuit designer, known primarily for his work in multimedia chips. He received a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1959.

Jay Miner (1990)

Miner started in the electronics industry with a number of designs in the medical world, including a remote-control pacemaker.

He moved to Atari in the late 1970s. One of his first successes was to combine an entire breadboard of components into a single chip, known as the TIA. The TIA was the display hardware for the Atari 2600, which would go on to sell millions. After working on the TIA he headed up the design of the follow-on chip set that would go on to be the basis of the Atari 8-bit family of home computers, known as ANTIC and CTIA.

In the early 1980s Jay, along with other Atari staffers, had become fed up with management and decamped. They set up another chipset project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga Corporation), where they could have some creative freedom. There, they started to create a new Motorola 68000-based games console, codenamed Lorraine, that could be upgraded to a computer. To raise money for the Lorraine project, Amiga Corp. designed and sold joysticks and game cartridges for popular game consoles such as the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision, as well as an odd input device called the Joyboard, essentially a joystick the player stood on. Atari continued to be interested in the team's efforts throughout this period, and funded them with $500,000 in capital in return for first use of their resulting chipset.

In 1984 Warner Brothers sold Atari to Jack Tramiel, formerly head of Commodore International. As more execs and researchers left Commodore to join Tramiel's new company Atari Corp. after the announcement, Commodore filed lawsuits against four former engineers for theft of trade secrets in late July, intending to bar Jack from releasing his new computer.

The Amiga crew, having continuing serious financial problems, had sought more monetary support from investors that entire Spring. At around the same time that Jack was in negotiations with Atari, Amiga entered in to discussions with Commodore. The discussions ultimately led to Commodore wanting to purchase Amiga outright, which would (from Commodore's viewpoint) cancel any outstanding contracts - including Atari Inc.'s. So instead of Amiga delivering the chipset, Commodore delivered a check of $500,000 to Atari on Amiga's behalf, in effect returning the funds invested into Amiga for completion of the Lorraine chipset. Seeing a chance to gain some leverage Jack immediately used the situation to countersue Commodore through its new (pending) subsidiary, Amiga, which was done on August 13th, 1984. He sought damages and an injunction to bar Amiga (and effectively Commodore) from producing anything with that technology. The suit tried to render Commodore's new acquisition (and the source for its next generation of computers) useless and do to Commodore what they were trying to do to him.

Meanwhile at Commodore the Amiga team, according to former Amiga employees Dave Needles, and Joe Decuir, was sitting in limbo for nearly the entire summer because of the lawsuit. No word on the status of the chipset, the Lorraine computer system or the team's fate was known. Finally in the fall of 1984 Commodore informed the team that the Lorraine project was active again, the chipset to be improved, the OS developed and the hardware design completed. This delay bought Atari several additional months in 1985 to release units to Atari User Groups in June 1985 and to go into full retail sales of the Atari 520ST in September of 1985.

So far as the Atari vs Amiga lawsuit - in March of 1987 the two companies had settled out of court in a closed decision.

Image:Amiga 1000.jpg

The original Amiga (1985)

Jay Miner's signature from the top cover of a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer.

Jay worked at Commodore-Amiga for several years, in Los Gatos (CA). They made good progress at the beginning, but as Commodore management changed, they became marginalised and the original Amiga staff was fired or left out on a one-by-one basis, until the entire Los Gatos office was closed. Miner later worked as a consultant for Commodore until it went bankrupt.

He was known as the 'Padre' (father) of the Amiga among Amiga users.

Jay always took his dog "Mitchy" (a cockapoo) with him wherever he went. While he worked at Atari, Mitchy even had her own ID-badge, and Mitchy's paw print is visible on the inside of the Amiga 1000 top cover, alongside the signatures of the engineers who worked on it.

He lived with faulty kidneys for most of his life, according to his wife, and relied on dialysis. His sister donated one of her own. Four years later, Miner died due to complications from kidney failure at the age of 62, just two months after Commodore declared bankruptcy.