BONUS III: Jim Drew was also a nice guy. I called him when I was in college and told him I was a poor college student and my friends (who were also poor college students) really wanted Emplants. He told me if I got 10 people to order he would sell them to us at a 50% discount. I got 10 people and he sold us 10 plus gave us one for free. What impressed me was I called Utilities Unlimited, asked for Jim, and they just transferred me to him.
Wow! I remember this!
Obviously, I thought very highly of Jay, RJ, Dave, Bill, Carolyn, etc. at CBM. They were an extended family to a lot of Amiga developers. It was nice to be able to pick up the phone and get a hold of someone who actually knew something when you really needed it.
I agree with your comments about Simon Douglas. Although we never spoke, I thought he did an outstanding job with AMAX and never 'borrowed' anything from my Mac emulation (unlike others) when he made a color version. I respected that a lot.
I did a lot of work for Motorola in Arizona, testing their new programmable core CPU. This was in the works after the 68K family was being used primarily for washing machines (yes, really) and after the first PPC chips were released. This was a Xilinx style of chip where we could program the CPU microcode, basically emulating a CPU. The project was too costly for the performance so it was scrapped, but it was quite fun working with these guys on something revolutionary.
