Old timer.
My family's first computer was a C=64 in 1984 when I was thirteen. Sometime during the first year we got a 300bps modem and I discovered the local BBS scene and ended up spending so much time on the 64 it became mine (dad bought a C=128) and I started running an after-hours board.
I enjoyed BBS, programming in BASIC and gaming on the little Commie for a few more years, until Dad got an Amiga 500 shortly after they were released. He quickly outgrew it and got an A2000, giving me the A500 as an early graduation present. We joined the local Amiga UG which met at the only store in town that specialized in Amigas and after a few meetings the owner offered me a job.
I wasn't much of a salesperson but working at the store meant I could try out just about any hardware and software after school. My main interest was in animation and CGI, having obsessed over and studied the field for a few years from trade magazines and what information was available at the library. One day a local video producers came in looking for someone that could do some animation for a NOAA weather production and this began my professional career and change of role to video/graphics specialist for the store.
About a year after graduation, while taking R/TV classes at the local jr. college I left the store with my buddy to start Vision Graphics. We didn't have a whole lot of steady clients but we did have a couple TV stations and a legal engineer that did accident recreations and we helped get them up to speed with their own Amigas while also doing some on-air graphics packs.
Somewhere in here I discovered this new thing called The Internet, which, at the time, was mostly about e-mail and usenet groups and years before the Web. I became a regular on comp.sys.amiga.graphics and other related groups as well as the general graphics groups. One of the online friendships I made was a TA in the graphics lab at California Institute of the Arts and in the summer of 1991 he told me they had an opening and I should submit my stuff.
At the time there was about a 2 year waiting period for spots, the school being very small and exclusive (all schools and all disciplines totaled to only about 1000 students). I ended up getting the spot after sending in tapes of my experiments in recreating some of the T1000 effects I'd seen in Terminator 2. They were really anxious to have students that wanted to use all the Amigas and SGIs they had since a majority of the animation students weren't interested in CGI.
I wasn't there long though because studios came by fairly regularly on portfolio reviews and I got recruited out of school to work for Metrolight Studios, co-Oscar winner for Total Recall, by one of my CG animation idols. I got to learn from several of the greats that I used to read about since I was in junior high. And all the while I learned high end technique and software I was keeping up with what was happening with the Amiga.
When I moved out to go to CalArts UPS destroyed my A3000 that I had shipped from Texas to California. I ended up replacing the A3000 with another and then "upgraded" to an A4000 shortly after it was released. I should have just kept the A3000 but, oh well, and in the Summer of '93 I left Metrolight to join a brand new startup called Digital Domain.
Several Amigans would make up those early ranks and, come to find out, the genesis of Digital Domain owes much to the Amiga. While James Cameron and Scott Ross talked about starting their own effects company Stan Winston was already putting a team together based on a short piece of animation that one of his puppeteers had done at home on his Amiga in Lightwave. He called his buddy Cameron up to brag about his new division and Cameron and Scott convinced him to fold it into their plans and, voila, Digital Domain was born.
In 1993 digital disk recorders were very expensive. Abekas and Accoms cost about $60K or so for about a minute of ccir601 (720x480 8bit YUV) playback. This was an incredible bottleneck for the growing number of artists to manage and utilize for testing and recording.
Myself and three other Amigans, one of which was the company's head of video engineering, convinced the company to invest in six (I believe) A4000-based PAR (Personal Animation Recorder) workstations which would be placed on mobile carts around the facility. I ended up writing the SGI-side CSH-based "shooter" script which allowed artists to send sequences of .SGI/.RGB files to one of the Amigas. It communicated with an AREXX script on the Amiga that controlled the PAR software.
This setup constituted the single best playback and review solution in the industry, hands down, for a time, and one of the systems (then two) made their way to the motion-control stages where they replaced single-frame recording to 3/4" tape, revolutionizing the way miniature photography was reviewed and iterated. I don't use that term lightly either. These Amiga-based solutions were better, more convenient, and more accurate than anything in use at any other facility, giving our artists a major advantage by being able to review their work at proper speed (realtime 3:2 pulldown) and without having to wait in line, sometimes for hours, for access to a single, expensive device.
And then Commodore went out of business and all the Amiga 4000s finally died from their constant use and unfortunate reliability. BUT, there in the early days, when we were doing True Lies and Apollo 13 and Interview With the Vampire and Strange Days, the Amiga was an integral part of the company and used in highest of high end work being done in Hollywood. I was really proud to have been a part of making that happen. It was a real shame when Commodore went under before we could even really talk about what was going on.
A year or two later we absorbed the Lightwave group from Amblin, who had already switched to Windows NT, but were all folks who also got their start on the Amiga.
