If yes, care to share any insightful stories?
Yes, I met Jay Miner at a party thrown by Commodore in Chicago (we had cake and everything!) and I was in my late teens.
I then would talk to him a lot on his BBS via chat and email.
Jay was a very generous and kind person. He also had time to talk and share information no matter what you asked. Looking back, my questions probably seemed pretty naive (but I was only 17) compared to what he knew.
I saw Jay at a couple of other Amiga shows in Chicago but he looked ill. I remember he looked better after his sister gave him a kidney but I think he always had health issues. He was a very nice guy though. RIP Jay.
BONUS: My friends and I were trying to move a beta kickstart from $200000 to another address because we didn't have memory at $200000. (I can explain if anyone cares) Anyway, we called Rob Peck in California for help. We got his answering machine but explained what we were trying to do. He called back, was incredibly nice, and talked to us for a long time. This was when LD was still pretty pricey during the day.
I didn't know Rob had cancer and when he died suddenly it really surprised me. He was also a very nice guy. RIP Rob.
BONUS II: Simon Douglas who wrote AMAX was a super nice guy as well. I met him at an Amiga show in New York. He was very generous with his knowledge about the mac and emulation. Simon spoke at length about programming AMAX on the Amiga and how dumb he thought MagicSac programmers were.
They said that Mac emulation on the Amiga was near impossible and he was so ticked off by their comments he had it running in a weekend. The disk drive portion took much longer but basic Mac emulation worked great.
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.
BONUS IV: Motorola was also a very nice company. In college, one of their reps came in a did a talk. The students spoke about programming on the 68000 and how we wanted to program on the 030 but none of us could afford the accelerator boards + 030/882. They sent us like 60 030s and 882s as engineering samples. We each received the technical books for the entire 68k line of CPUs. We were able to buy accelerators without the cpu/fpu much cheaper and just plug in our chips. No kidding.
-P
