Anyone meet Jay Miner?

[JimDrew]

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.

[Art]

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

Nothing as significant, but myself and two other mates with A500s went out
and got ourselves a 68010 CPU each $12AU each.
They are pin for pin compatible and dropped straight into our A500s.
It was rated 10 or 12Mhz, which we didn't gain from because we didn't alter
the hardware clock, but it wasn't all in vein (apparently) because it did
introduce some on chip cache or something like that.. or so I was told.
I don't think the 68010 went into any stock Amiga, but we did spread
the word, and someone did temporarily overclock ALL chips on the board,
and it worked.

[danbeaver]

Jay spoke at an AmiExpo I attended in Chicago; he said he set out to design a computer that would be the best flight simulator ever.  The week prior he had flown a fighter (?Microsoft's) to 40,000 feet, started an outer loop and half way into it changed it to a 707 passenger plane. He said, "What a ride!"  There was genuine pleasure in his eyes.  Jay passed away from complications from his long standing problems with diabetes.  I think he took great joy in designing chips for people to experience fun.