Building the First Amiga Computer

Jay Miner and his team of engineers were hard at work building the components for the Amiga 1000. Meanwhile, Atari and Commodore were maneuvering against each other and putting Amiga in the middle.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan's Trickling. I'm an executive producer here
at how Stuff Works and love all things tech. And
while my producer Tari chortals on the other side of
the glass laughing at something, I can only guess as

(00:26):
to the reasons why we're going to go back and
pick up on our story about Amiga. Now. I left
off in the last episode about talking about the simulated
hardware of the Amiga chips set with the Motorola sixty
eight thousand processor and the breadboard simulated chips. These enormous

(00:47):
circuits that would represent the teeny tiny chips that would
be on the motherboard in the future Amiga. But what
about the operating system? You really need an operating system
in order to do anything useful with a computer. Developers
would need an application programming interface or a p I
in order to build programs to run on this machine,

(01:08):
and users would need some sort of method to navigate
the computer system. So for Amiga, that task fell to
the team that was led by a man named Bob Parizo,
the chief of software engineering and Perizo had previously worked
on mainframe computers with a company called Tandem, and Tandem

(01:29):
made giant computer machines for the banking industry. That Prizo's
background was in machines that could handle multitasking, and so
he set out to create an operating system that would
take advantage of the hardware that J Miners team was
building over on the other side of Amiga, and he
wanted to be able to run multiple applications simultaneously. This

(01:52):
was in stark contrast with all the other home computers
at the time. They were all designed so that they
would run a single program at anyone given time, generally speaking,
and that if you wanted to launch a second program,
you first would have to shut down the program you
were in, or at least have it go into kind
of a sleep mode. But Pariza wanted a machine that

(02:14):
could truly run multiple applications side by side, so he
hired on several people to join his team, including Robert J.
Mical Or r J, Carl Sassin, rath Dale Luck, and
Dave Needle. All joined the Amiga team over the course
of the next year or so. M r J had

(02:35):
previously worked as a software engineer at Williams Electronics and
worked on video games and Amiga. He would build out
many of the system's basic routines for the OS that
that made it all possible. He was also known for
building a game for the Amiga that made use of
the joyboard peripheral that I mentioned in the last episode.

(02:55):
That was that balance board peripheral that acted kind of
like a joystick. This game was called Zen Meditation, and
the goal was to sit perfectly still the high stress
environment of building a new computer system, and a lot
of folks would kind of give this a world try
and calm down. And when it came time to create
an error message for the Amiga that would show in

(03:18):
the event of a system crash, you know, you would
get that message kind of like the blue screen of
death known in the Windows Circles. Well, for the Amiga,
it was cheekily decided that they would call it the
Guru Meditation error, and that was kind of a nod
to this game that r J had made. Carl Sassin
Wrath had worked as a television cameraman when he was

(03:40):
a teenager and then would go on to get a
degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University
of California at Davis and began working with Hewlett Packard
as a programmer and system designer, including heading up a
project team to develop a mouse driven graphical user interface
or g u I, also known as a gooey. He
became Amiga's manager of operating Systems. Dale Luck got a

(04:03):
degree in computer science from Michigan Technological University and would
join Amiga as the manager of graphics Software, and Dave
Needle worked not just on software but also on chip design,
and all four would go on to do big things
outside of Amiga later on. Carl Sassin Wrath was already
working on ideas for an operating system that could handle

(04:24):
multitasking before he had ever met Prizo. That fell right
in line with what Bob Aarrizo wanted to do with
the Amiga system. So the challenge was figuring out how
to do multitasking without overtaxing the CPU and chip set
and memory capabilities of this machine. They had to build
out a system that would make efficient use of the

(04:45):
resources of the computer would have Assassin Wrath developed an
approach that would later be called a microkernel. This is
the collection of features that are needed at minimum to
implement an operating system that includes stuff like in her
process communications, low level address space management, thread management, that
kind of thing. The concept of the micro colonel actually

(05:07):
pre dates Assassin Wrath's work, but his was a notable
early example. In the home computer space. Herrizo and his
team were determined to incorporate a graphical user interface with
this operating system. This g u I or gooey, and
this is how we access pretty much all consumer computer

(05:27):
systems these days. Files are represented as icons. Clicking on
an icon can execute a file. I know what I'm
saying is all old news to you guys. This is
the stuff you use every single day. But for the
programmers out there, and also for old folks like myself,
we remember the days of command lines. And in a

(05:49):
command line computer system back in the day, the way
you would run a program is you wouldn't type the
word run, typically followed by the file name that you
wanted to execute. You actually had to type all this
stuff in. You had to navigate file trees and systems
using typewritten commands, had to change drives this way, and

(06:11):
it wasn't really complicated to get the basic commands down,
but it acted as a barrier to entry. It was
something that intimidated people because it was rarely intuitive. It
wasn't necessarily hard once you learned the basics, but the
basics themselves seems so foreign, so alien, that a lot
of people felt that that meant computers were for quote

(06:33):
unquote smart people or nerds or something. The g U
Y made interacting with a computer much more easy, much
more intuitive. I mean, we've seen this over and over
again the Mac Os, Windows, all of these different graphic
user interfaces that carry over today into things like smartphone interfaces.
They show that they're much easier to understand than those

(06:55):
command lines, and in nine three they were largely unheard
of outside of specific spheres within the computing community. The
model had actually been in development for years at other places,
such as Xerox's Park facility, but it hadn't really made
its way into consumer computers yet. Meanwhile, r J was

(07:15):
getting to work building out the Application Programming Interface or
a p I. J Minor once said that r J
had done this by locking himself in his office for
three straight weeks and emerged only once to get up
some clarification from Sassain Wrath on something the a p
I that he eventually built was given the name Intuition,

(07:36):
and because it was the product of one person, it
was fairly uniform and straightforward. A lot of other a
p I s are the products of teams that are
working sometimes at different times. Something work might get started
by one team and then finished by another team, and
so sometimes those sort of interfaces can be a little
clunky to work with because different people with different perspectives

(07:59):
were working on it. But Intuition was the product of
one person at Amiga, So as long as you understood
how r J thought, you could figure out how to
build applications for the Amiga. So you had these two teams.
You had the hardware team, you had the software team,
and they were both working very hard to create what
would become the first Amiga computer, and the company planned

(08:20):
to demonstrate something at the Consumer Electronics Show or ce
S in January nur in Las Vegas, Nevada. Now they
knew they were not going to have the full prototype
Amiga computer to show off something that would look like
a production model, they would have to rely on the

(08:41):
simulated chips they had built on bread boards. So these
enormous bread boards that would represent tiny, tiny chips They
knew the operating system was not going to be finished
in time for this demonstration, but the team wanted to
show off their work and the capabilities of their chips
set design, and this would hopefully bring in more investors

(09:02):
and pull in the money they would need to keep
operations going and move towards a production model because their
revenue generating process. You know, they had been making stuff
for the video game industry, the home video game industry,
but that industry had collapsed, so now they were desperately
trying to get work done and get investment money into

(09:24):
the company to keep it going until they had a
consumer ready computer they could put on the market. Money
was already tight. The team didn't have any idea of
how they were going to ship their prototype to the
trade show without endangering it. I mean, you had these
enormous bread boards with thousands of wires connected to them,

(09:44):
and disconnecting any of those wires would make the simulated
chips not work properly. So r J and Dale took
it upon themselves and they booked an extra airline seat
in between them so that they could put the prototype
in an airline seat and make sure that it was
protected in addition, they completely covered this prototype in pillows. Now,

(10:10):
to book a seat, they had to give a passenger name.
This is again this is in the old days when
it was pretty easy to go through an airport, but
you still needed to have a name on a ticket
if you wanted to book a seat. So the name
they gave their passenger this prototype computer was Joe Pillow.

(10:31):
The engineers, perhaps giddy from working so hard for so long,
even drew a face on one of the pillows to
give Joe Pillow a face, and apparently he wore a
tie to Legend has it that Dale and r J
even tried to go so far as to get an
airline meal for Joe, but the flight attendants drew the
line there and said no dice. At c E S,

(10:53):
the Amiga team had a booth with a backstage area
where they kept their prototype, and this would keep the
computer away from prying eyes and allow the team to
control who could actually see it. They would hold demonstrations
in this backstage area. They would approve people, bring them
back there, and then show off this prototype. It was
still working from those simulated chips, and it was enormous.

(11:17):
It was sitting on top of a table, and more
than a few onlookers would actually snoop around to make
sure that the bread boards were in fact acting as
a chip set and that there wasn't some other computer
system hiding out of view that was creating the effects
that they were seeing. Uh, it was not running the
Amiga operating system, because, as I said, the operating system

(11:39):
was not finished at that point. So r J and
Dale had built in some demo software that would run
directly off the chip set to show off what the
computer could do. One of the demos that they built
was a large ball, and the ball had a checkered
pattern on it, and the ball would bounce up and
down on the bottom edge of the screen, and every
time it would appear to hit that bottom edge, it

(12:02):
would produce a booming noise and stereo. And it was
a hasty demonstration, but that checkered ball would become an
iconic symbol and would stand as the symbol for Amiga
going forward. I've got a lot more to say about
the birth of the Amiga, but first let's take a
quick break to thank our sponsor. The demonstrations at that

(12:32):
January c e S where success and the team got
back to work. They had a new goal that they
wanted to meet, because back in those early eighties there
were actually two c e S shows every year. There
was one that would take place in the winter and
one that would play take place in the summer. The
winter ones would take place in Las Vegas, and the

(12:54):
summer ones tended to move around a little bit, but
that second show would happen in June in Chicago, Illinois.
So the Amiga team had set a goal. They wanted
to do more demonstrations of the Amiga, but this time
they wanted to use prototype silicon chips, not the simulated
chips on bread boards. They wanted to actually produce the

(13:16):
silicon chips and create a motherboard where they could run
demonstrations off that show that they had made some progress
and that they would soon be able to move into
fabrication and production stages, though at the time they would
only really be able to do this for a prototype
because again they were running short on funds at this point.
The Chicago ce S show was another success from a

(13:38):
technological standpoint, but Amiga was out of money. They were
not going to be able to stay in operation without
a significant investment, and the CEO of Amiga. Dave Morse,
who had come from Tonka Toys to head up Amiga,
sought out potential investors and partners, including at very established

(13:59):
company's stuff like Sony and Hewitt, Packard and Phillips, as
well as Apple, which was younger but had been doing
quite well. But none of those seemed particularly interested in
investing in Amiga. One company, however, did offer up a
pretty cutthroat deal. It was a five hundred thousand dollar

(14:21):
loan and the company was Atari, the same company that
Amiga co founder j Minor had worked for in the
nineteen seventies, and he had left Atari for another company
before starting Amiga. Well, he left Atari because he had
had disputes about bonuses and the direction of projects. Attari

(14:44):
was the same company that had been rocked by the
video game crash a year earlier. And here was Atari saying, yeah,
we can loan you half a million dollars. But the
deal was a really tough one. According to the agreement,
Amiga would get that half million dollar loan, but it
would have to repay Atari by the end of June,

(15:04):
otherwise Atari would end up owning all of Amiga's technology.
And this was a draconian deal, but at the same time,
there weren't really any other options available, and Morse really
had no other lifeline, so he signed this deal because
it was either this or dissolve. Now it could have

(15:25):
unfolded that Amiga was never able to pay back that
loan and it would have become part of Atari, and
maybe that would have saved Atari, though I doubt it.
But at any rate, it's all a moot point because
another company swooped in and kind of sort of rescued
Amiga from being devoured by Atari, and that company was Commodore.

(15:46):
I've done episodes about Commodore, but here's a quick overview
of its history. Commodore had started off as a typewriter
repair and assembly company back in nineteen fifty four. It
was founded by a guy named i Deck Trammilski, who
changed his name to Jack Tramiel. He immigrated to the
United States after he had been rescued from a Nazi

(16:09):
work camp during World War Two, and he founded the
company Commodore in the nineteen fifty four. In nineteen sixty five,
he secured money from an investor named Irving Gould, and
Irving Gould will play another important part in our Amiga story.
In the nineteen seventies, Commodore would diversify and start making calculators,

(16:31):
largely relying upon chips from another company called Texas Instruments.
But then Texas Instruments began building its own calculators and
started competing with Commodore, and that taught Tramiel a lesson.
He decided they didn't want to depend upon some other
companies products, only to have that company enter into direct

(16:51):
competition with him further down the line, and so Commodore
decided to get into another business and they acquired another
company called Most Technology. Most Technology was the company that
made the Most six five O two chip, and that
chip powered many early computer systems and video game consoles.

(17:11):
Commodore had been one of the early players on the
personal computer scene. They introduced the pet or PET in
nineteen seventy seven, the VIC twenty in nineteen eighty one,
and in nineteen eighty two, Commodore introduced the best selling
computer of all time, the Commodore sixty four. But then

(17:32):
Commodore went into kind of a scorched earth policy against
competitors like Texas Instruments and tried to drive them out
of the industry and become the dominant player. To do that,
one of the big tactics was cutting prices, and they
cut prices on their their products to the point where
the company was eating into its own reserves. And that's

(17:55):
when Gould, the investor and Tremiel the founder budded heads.
Gould wanted his investment protected, Tramuel wanted to be the
dominant force in personal computing. In late nineteen eighty three,
Gould would go to the board of directors and they
decided to force Jack Tramiel to resign from the company

(18:16):
he had founded. But while Tramuel wasn't in charge when
Commodore would approach Amiga, he still plays an incredibly important
part of this story. And this is really where things
get Games of Throne ish arelthough with the players in fold,
maybe I should call this video game of Thrones. So
Jack Tramiel, he gets pushed out of his own company

(18:38):
at the end of nineteen eighty three, and while the
folks over at Amiga, we're still getting ready for their
first prototype debut at C E S the following January.
So at this point Amiga is an independent company and
they're building up for C E S night four, Jack
Tramiel gets kicked out of Commodore. He does not go
into retirement. Instead, he saunters over to Warner Communications. Warner

(19:04):
Communications was the parent company of Atari. Now, this was
in the fallout of the video game crash of nineteen
eighty three, and at that point Warner Communications really was
trying to find a way to dump the personal computer
and video game console division of Attari. The only part

(19:26):
of Atari the company still wanted to hold onto was
Atari's arcade division because it was still making money. But
in the wake of the video game crash, the console
and personal computer arms of Attari felt like an anchor.
So Jack Tramuel comes over to Warner Communications and says,
I'll take that off your hands, and he's able to
take over the company without even making a down payment.

(19:48):
It was one of the biggest craziest deals in tech
history where Jack Tramuel essentially took over control of Atari.
So now Jack Tramuel's in charge of Atari. And you
remember that five hundred thousand dollar loan deal I mentioned
from Atari, the one that would force Amiga's technology to
become Atari property if Amiga failed to pay back that

(20:11):
loan by the end of June that was put together
by Jack Tramiel, formerly of Commodore, and the company that
would rescue Amiga was Commodore, so in a way, Amiga
was put in the middle of a really ugly custody
battle between an entrepreneur and his former company. Originally, Commodore

(20:31):
was going to enter into a licensing agreement with Amiga
to use the company's chip set in return for four
million dollars, but ultimately Commodore executives decided that what made
the most sense was to acquire Amiga outright, and so
Commodore would acquire Amiga for the princely sum of twenty
four million dollars, which obviously allowed Amiga to payback that

(20:55):
five thousand dollar loan, and Amiga would become part of Commodore.
Jack Tramiel must have been pretty steamed to have his
former company come in and rescue Amiga, so under his leadership,
Attari got to work designing a new personal computing system,
one that would compete directly against Commodore's Amiga computer. The

(21:18):
official name for this other computer, the Atari computer, was
the Atari st that. Some people would jokingly refer to
this as the jack Intosh because it seemed to eight
Apple's Macintosh platform, and it was rushed into production by
Jack Tramiel. Ultimately, this feud would be really harmful to
both companies spoiler alert. They spent so much time facing

(21:43):
off against each other that other companies like Apple, IBM
and later Microsoft were able to get a firmer foothold
in the personal computer marketplace. They fought a fierce battle
against each other while a larger war was going on.
But I am getting ahead of myself, so we'll rejoin
that discussion later on. At first, Commodore was pretty darn

(22:04):
awesome to the Amiga team. The group got the resources
they needed to keep developing their first computer system, and
while there was an initial fear that Commodore was going
to require the Amiga group to pick up stakes in
California and moved to Westchester, Pennsylvania, which is where Commodore
headquarters were, those fears were initially quelled. The team did move,

(22:25):
but they moved into larger offices about ten miles away
from where they had been working, so it wasn't that
big of a change, and it meant that they were
no longer in a very cramped working space. Amiga was
able to get more equipment and able to hire on
more engineers to get back at it, and things were
looking up. But nothing lasts forever. I'll tell you more

(22:47):
when we get back after this quick break to thank
our sponsor. As the hardware had been taking shape, so
was the operating system. The microkernel named Exact served as
the core for this OS. The g u I or

(23:07):
Graphical User Interface was coming together, but the OS would
still need a way to handle the file system and
some of the other tasks that neither EXACT nor the
g u I would touch on. There are some things
that the OS needed to do that neither of these
components could do now. At first, the solution to this
was going to be creating code called the Commodore Amiga

(23:29):
Operating System or c a O S CHAOS. That might
have been a little prophetic. Carl Sassin Wrath wrote up
the design specifications for CHAOS. What CHAOS was supposed to
be able to do. This would include some advanced operating
system task management capabilities, like the ability to take the

(23:51):
resources that were used by one application and then free
those resources up if that application should crash. Since the
Amiga was being built as a mole t tasking machine.
That was a really important feature because without it, computer
resources could get locked up in a crashed application while
other applications are still working, and eventually that means you

(24:11):
would run out of computer memory or processing power if
you couldn't get to those, and you would have to
do a hard reboot of your system in order to
free them all up. Again. Design was falling behind, and
so the team chose to outsource some elements of Chaos
to third party developers. But despite pulling long hours and

(24:31):
despite putting outsourced work in there, it became evident that
there was no way the team was going to get
everything done and be ready to launch the Amiga on time.
And while Commodore was being really helpful, that was not
going to fly. The Commodore did expect results. So in addition,
the third party that was working on parts of Chaos,

(24:52):
they found out that Amiga had been bought out by Commodore,
and suddenly this third party was demanding a whole lot
more money of that outsourced work, which is kind of
like if you won the lottery and then all of
your friends and family started hitting you up for cash
because they know you've got deep pockets. That was what
felt like was going on with this third party. Commodor

(25:13):
tried to negotiate with them, but it all fell apart
and it became pretty clear the Chaos just had fallen
into some sort of orderless state of being, if only
there were a word for that. Anyway, the team would
pivot and seek out a new solution for their operating system,
and they chose to use an existing operating system as

(25:36):
their foundation. It was one that had been developed at
the University of Cambridge for the PDP eleven computer system.
It was called trip Os. It was developed by a
guy named Dr Tim King, and he created a new
company called MetaComCo specifically to work with Amiga. He took
the code of trip Os and then began to adapt

(25:58):
it so that would work on Amiga's chip sets and capabilities,
and this new code was called Amiga Doss. Amiga Doss
could do basic operating system functions, but it was not
going to do everything that the design spec for Chaos
had called for. It had no resource tracking, which meant
that if an application crashed, the resources being used for

(26:21):
that application when it was working might get locked up.
So that was a bummer. One other battle that was
taking place before the computer would launch would revolve around
computer memory. J Minor had really wanted this Amiga computer
to ship with five kilobytes of RAM because he knew
that the operating system the graphical user interface would both

(26:43):
require a decent amount of memory just to work on
their own before you ever launched an application. But he
wanted developers to be able to make good programs for
this computer system. However, RAM was kind of expensive, and
adding that much RAM would dry up the price of
the system, and Commodore was worried that that would price

(27:04):
the computer out of the market. Commodore wanted to ship
the computer with two fifty six kilobytes of RAM. They
fought over this. Eventually they made a compromise. J Minor
essentially threatened to walk away from the company, and the
compromise was that the computer would ship with two d
fifty six kilobytes of RAM as a standard, but it
would also feature an expansion slot or expansion cage as

(27:27):
it was called, where it would be very easy to
plug in additional RAM. Finally, the pieces were in place,
The chip set and motherboard were finalized, the operating system
was finished. The team then began to design the case.
They even added their signatures to this design so that
their signatures would all be on the inside of the

(27:47):
Amiga computer case. This was something that a lot of
early personal computer manufacturers did, where they had the designers
signed their work, but it was all on the inside
of the case, where you would not see it unless
you opened up the computer. Every single team member at Amiga,
including those who joined after Commodore had purchased were part
of this. Plus j miners Dog, which was a cockapoo

(28:10):
named Mitchie, had a signature in their pop print. Oh
and one other valuable team member had a signature in
this Joe Pillow. Joe Pillows signature is inside the original Amiga.
Dave Morse, who was the CEO of Amiga he was
now kind of the the head of Commodore Amiga, even
had a little bit of input on this case designed.

(28:32):
The Amiga computer, which was now called the Amiga one thousand,
would have a raised section on the bottom of the
machine that would allow the user to kind of slide
the keyboard in, so it's kind of nestles underneath the
computer case a little bit, and that way you could
move the keyboard out of the way whenever you're not
using the computer. And it was now time to unveil

(28:54):
the Amigo one thousand to the world, and so Commodore
decided to make it a big media event. The company
rented out the Lincoln Center in New York City and
every Commodore employee in attendance got to wear a tuxedo.
They were given tuxedos by Commodore. They hired out a
full orchestra to provide music before and during the event,

(29:15):
and Bob Parizo was chosen to present on behalf of Amiga.
He was joined on stage by a computer operator who
was working on an Amigo one thousand. Cameras would show
both Bob Barrizo up on stage as well as the
screen of the Amigo one thousand, and that would be
projected onto large screens behind the stage so that people

(29:37):
in the audience could see what was happening in real time. Pariso,
by the way, came out as an incredible presenter. The
presentation is actually available on YouTube if you want to
watch it. I did watch it. It's pretty entertaining. The
computer capabilities are obviously primitive by today's standards, but you
have to think back in terms of nine five. They

(29:57):
were revolutionary back then. Parizzo and the operators showed how
the Amiga could handle graphics including animation, how it could
display more colors than other computers on the market, how
the graphical user interface worked, how the computer could multitask,
how you can use the same sets of data in
a spreadsheet to generate multiple graphs and charts and different

(30:19):
formats at the same time in different windows, how the
sound system on the computer would work, and more. To
make sure that the business crowd was appeased and would
have something to talk about, he also showed off how
the Amigo one thousand could run an IBM PC emulator.
They used a program called Amiga Transformer, and the operator
showed that using that program you could then put in

(30:42):
a PC doss disk into the system, boot into PC doss,
then you could load in any software meant for the
IBM PC and run it. And they showed off Lotus one,
two three, which was developed for the IBM PC, And
the argument here was you can use this device to
run all your IBM business stuff, but it also does

(31:03):
all this incredible sound and and visual stuff that the
IBM PC can't do. The presentation also involved an appearance
by two celebrities. One was Deborah Harry, who was the
lead singer of an awesome musical group called Blondie. My
fellow children of the eighties know what I'm talking about.
Blondie was a super cool music group. Go check them

(31:25):
out if you haven't heard of him. And the other
celebrity was the pop artist Andy Warhol, known for his
counterculture take on iconography. Now. During this demonstration, a camera
took a photo of Deborah Harry and a digitizer converted
the photo into a monochromatic image on the Amiga screen,
and Andy Warhol used tools in a program called pro

(31:48):
Paint to add color. Pro Paint was in prototype form,
so it's amazing, but the whole thing worked, and that
was a big shock to the programmers who had been
struggling with pro Paint because as it was frequently crashing
in the weeks leading up to this demonstration, so I'm
sure everyone backstage was hoping against hope that it would

(32:11):
stay stable, and it did. The Amigo one thousand left
a great impression. Lewis Wallace, who wrote about tech, said
that it took the best qualities of the Macintosh. It
took the processing power of an IBM computer, and it
drastically cut the price tag, which seemed fairly accurate. A
Macintosh would set you back about two thousand four dollars,

(32:35):
and the Macintosh had one kilobytes of memory. The Amigo
one thousand had two versions. It had a two hundred
fifty six kilobyte version that was priced at one thousand,
two hundred dollars, and even if you got the full
five d twelve kilobyte version that was one thousand four dollars,
that was still a grand cheaper than Apple's Macintosh and

(32:57):
had way more memory and had way more capabilities. But
while the reaction to the Amiga was positive, the computer
wasn't yet available for purchase, and there were other things
going on at Commodore that would complicate matters for both
the parent company and for Amiga. But we're gonna save
that for the next episode, and that next episode we'll

(33:18):
talk about changes at Commodore that caused issues with Amiga.
We'll talk about how Jack tramiel Over at Atari kept
on the fight against Commodore and Amiga, and talk about
some of the cool stuff that actually was developed with
the Amiga systems and what happened. So join me for

(33:38):
that so we can continue this story in the meantime.
If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of
tech Stuff, whether it's a company, technology, person in tech,
some other technologically adjacent topic that would be appropriate for
the show, send me an email let me know what
your suggestion is. The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff
works dot com. You can drop me a line on

(34:00):
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(34:21):
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