If we talk about video games market many will surely come to mind companies like Nintendo, Microsoft with its X-box, Sony PS3, or maybe SEGA, Capcom, LucasArts, Blizzard, or any other major company. However, probably very few people think of Atari. But this was not always so.
Although Atari did not invent the game, it was the first company to make money with them. This was by far the largest company dedicated to video games from the 70's and first half of the 80 with legendary games like Pong, Breakout, Centipede, and so many others. Your game console, the Atari VCS 2600, was the favorite toy of all children (and not so young) of the first generation of video games, generating billions of $ for Atari.
One of the designers who worked on the VCS (acronym for Video Computer System) was Jay Miner. Miner was an engineer born in 1932 who was hired by Harold Lee on Atari. Like many other engineers, his passion was to design new electronic devices increasingly advanced and sophisticated. Jay's work was to design chips for the console, and the success of this work was that Atari will charge in 1978 to develop a more ambitious project: a personal computer. 
After several months of work, Atari released the Atari 400 (pictured), a computer with amazing graphics and sound capabilities for the moment, and soon after introduced the Atari 800, a version a little more evolved and a professional keyboard Atari 400. After the departure of these two computers on the market, Atari Jay Miner wanted to continue to develop computers within the company, and Miner would have been happy if Atari had followed his instincts instead of showing the more conservative side of the business.
At that time (1979), Motorola was working on a new microprocessor, the Motorola 68000, far more advanced and sophisticated than any other time microprocessor, either Intel or MOS Technology (remember, owned by Commodore .) Although the processor was still far from complete and could work on the design new computers, and Jay Miner (pictured, though some years later) began designing a computer with capabilities unthinkable at the time home computers. However, there was a problem. As advanced computer design involved using a lot of chips and components that would make this damn expensive (consider, for example, the Apple Lisa and its $ 10,000 price). Unfortunately for Miner, Atari executives did not know or did not trust the so-called Moore's Law (the number of transistors doubles every 18 months, reducing by half the money it costs to do so. In short, what is now a in 3 years will be stupidity normal, costing even less than normal now.)
Therefore, in early 1982 Jay Miner left Atari taking the ideas of computer dreamed it, starting to work on a small chip maker called Zimast .
Shortly after mid-1982, Larry Kaplan, one of the very first programmers of the Atari VCS, Jay Miner called to offer a business opportunity. Larry Kaplan, following his departure from Atari, the company was founded Activision (Activision Blizzard, along with Electronic Arts, are currently the two largest building companies in the world game.) The business opportunity was given by Larry Kaplan of founding a company to create a new game system, so that Jay Miner Zimast Kaplan produced the hardware and software and Activision, and all won tons of money. The venture would be financed by private capital, namely $ 7 million out of a consortium formed by a businessman in the oil and three dentists with no experience or knowledge of the world in which they got to that kind of money seemed an appropriate price enter into a business that already moved in 1982 billion $.
Finally, the company was founded Hi-Toro, whose name was chosen because a side sounded a high-tech company and another gave him a touch Texas, where he was the consortium that financed the entire business. Leading the project was Larry Kaplan was hired as vice president David Morse.
But months after Kaplan left the project, so to be without a leader was offered the job to Jay Miner, who accepted only under two conditions: that the final product will use the Motorola 68000 processor that could operate also as a computer.
And then the bubble burst of video games. And create the ultimate gaming machine a project no longer seemed so appealing. In fact, everything that had sounded like videogame longer sound appealing. So the Hi-Toro investors, worried about the turn of events, anxious to Jay Miner asked if he could turn the project into a fully functional computer and forget some of the gaming machine. Music to the ears of Miner.
However, there was a problem, although not with the computer, and there was already a company called Hi-Toro, a Japanese manufacturer of mowing machines. So it was necessary to find a new name. Miner wanted a name that sounded friendly and sexy at the same time, similar to how Apple could be a nice name and pleasing to the ear. Finally, although it seemed Jay horrible at the time, the company name changed to Amiga, mainly because nobody thought any better and also because the Amiga name was on the phone before Apple and Atari.
Following the recruitment of several engineers both for hardware and software, work began on the development of the computer. Since what was intended to do something spectacular compared to the competition at that time, were careful to prevent industrial espionage. Nobody knew what he did or what made the Amiga company, so they wanted. However, to avoid attention, planned to establish developing some small unimportant enough not to take many resources from the firm but attractive enough to generate good income, so he launched several products, both hardware and software for the console VCS with the Amiga brand (you can see the Amiga Joyboard in the accompanying photo.) Another measure anti spy was to give women's names to different parts of the computer. The project itself is called Lorraine , as the name of the wife of Dave Morse (remember, the vice president hired by Kaplan).
One thing I was surprised to discover is that the Lorraine was designed by committee. Since the number of engineers working on the project was rather limited, in meetings that were attended by all and everyone could comment and give ideas, coming up to the various compromises between efficiency, speed or final cost for all. Yes, Jay Miner was head of the project, but decisions were made in a group where everyone could contribute their opinions and vision.
Unlike what were the computers of the era, the Amiga each task (sound, graphics ...) was controlled in a decentralized manner, much like you would a modern console. This feature made the Amiga had outstanding performance in their personal computer equivalent range. Besides, other features novel that brought the Amiga was sharing IRQs, I / O or memory mapped real preemptive multitasking (think that Microsoft did not have it until Windows NT, and Apple to Mac OS X, and the latter was released in 2001).
The difference between multi-tasking Windows 3.0 or Mac OS 8 (the first Macintosh did not have any multi-tasking) and the Amiga is that the former are called cooperative multitasking, ie, there may be multiple applications running on the computer but they are the ones who have control of the computer and, therefore, are the ones who decide when to let the other run. A so-called cooperative, it is not the operating system who time distributed applications but they are when they decide when to stop running to the other. In this way, if you have an application that locks the system does not choice but to restart, because the application never passes the bar to the other. However, the preemptive multitasking operating system, and not the applications, decide when an application is running and for how long. In this way, if a program crashes just kill the program and ready, do not hang the entire system.
Returning to Lorraine, to understand the titanic effort of the development of Amiga, consider the example of how it designed the Apple II or IBM PC. In these cases, engineers are "limited" to catch the chips that were in the market and place the best possible way. However, the engineers designed Amiga several of these chips from the start. Not that I made for Steve Wozniak on Apple II or what was done by IBM engineers did not have merit or were easy, it's just that the chips they used were already designed and manufactured, they had to make them from scratch and therefore is a job that was saved.
Amiga And as they were not flush with money made the old way, none of powerful workstations with that design but with paper, pen, platelets, logic gates, cables and lots of patience. In the attached picture you can see a prototype of the Amiga Lorraine or the design of three of its major chips (and to complete the picture, we think that the goal was to bring to market a computer for about $ 2,000). respect to software, Jay Miner was aware of its limitations in this area, so Bob Pariseau hired to work with the software. Jay did not want an operating system like MS-DOS, CP / M or Appled. Bob had no experience in software development for microcomputers since he came to work with large mainframes used in banking, where the preemptive multitasking was normal and did not see any reason why a Personal Computer would not have to have these advances. Another decision of the software development group was to create a graphical interface, an important decision when you consider that we still speak in 1983/1984 and very very few computers still had a windowing environment.
Finally, the Lorraine was mature enough to be displayed for the CES 1984. The goal of the project, designing a personal computer several years ahead of what was in the market was achieved. Now all that remained was to find a way out to the market. It needed a partner able to bring to fruition the Lorraine. Would you be able to find girlfriend at CES?
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