October 8, 2018 • 34 mins
TechStuff listener Matt wanted to know more about the Amiga line of computers. We take a look at how an engineer from Atari took a big leap in order to achieve his goal of building the best home computer of the early 1980s.
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Episode Transcript
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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 Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
tech stuff. Listener Matt asked if I might do an
episode or two, or maybe three or four about the
(00:25):
Amiga series of personal computers, and Amiga has a pretty
fascinating history with lots of ups and significant downs, And
I've definitely touched on Amiga a few times and episodes
about the early PC era, as well as the episodes
I've done about Commodore because Commodore acquired Amiga. But this
(00:47):
computer line deserves its own set of episodes because it's
it's not just fascinating from a technology standpoint, but it
plays into a lot of other things that were happening
in tech in the eighties that are also really important
and interesting all on their own. So the story is
likely going to take a few episodes to tell because
(01:08):
of how complex it is and how much the Amiga's
story plays into these other stories of other companies and
big events that were happening in the personal computer and
video game industries. But I think That's part of what
makes this hall fascinating because it gives you an opportunity
to understand some of those other topics from a new
angle within the context of Amiga. So I know it's
(01:30):
going to be at least three episodes because I've got
two to go right now. Probably gonna be four, we'll see. Also,
if you really want a true deep dive into the
history of Amiga, because this is peanuts compared to what
some folks have done, and if you want to know
more about all the people involved with Amiga, I have
(01:51):
a recommendation for you. There's a website called ours Technico.
It's one of my favorite websites, especially for technology, and
over it Ours Technica, a software developer named Jeremy Reymer
has written what I considered to be the definitive history
of Amiga. It's so far a twelve part article series,
(02:12):
and the very first article published on August first, two
thousand seven. The most recent part of this series published
on March twenty nine, two thousand eighteen. So it's a
series of articles that have spanned more than a decade now.
When I pulled this twelve part series over into notes
so that I could print it, out. It was about
(02:34):
seventy five pages and the word count was around forty
two five words. So while I'm going to be talking
about Amiga for several episodes and you still want more,
that's where you need to go. There's also a couple
of spinoff articles I did not include in my notes,
but they are related to Amiga. So if you're really fascinated,
(02:57):
that's the place to go, I would say. So the
Amiga it was one of the lines of computers that
emerged in the early nineteen eighties, back before things had
really shaken out, so that they were essentially a face
off between Apple and IBM, and then later on various
IBMBC clone manufacturers, and then later still Microsoft, so it
(03:19):
was always Apple versus IBM, then IBM clones, and then
Microsoft in particular. But back in those days, there were
a lot of different competing computers that were on the market,
and I've talked about those in previous shows. There was
the TRASH eighty or the TRS eighty from Radio Shack
Slash Tandy. There was the t I ninety nine Slash
(03:42):
four from Texas Instruments. There was the various computers from Commodore,
including the Commodore sixty four, which was the best selling
PC of all time, and those were all in that
same space that were there when Apple had its Apple
to come out, and before even the IBM personal computer
had shown up. J Minor is often credited as being
(04:06):
the father of Amiga. J Minor was born in Prescott, Arizona,
on May thirty one, nineteen thirty two, and as a
kid he became interested in electronics. He enrolled in San
Diego State College, and while he was in college, there
was an enormous event that happened. North Korea invaded South Korea,
precipitating the Korean War that happened on June twenty, nineteen fifty.
(04:30):
So J. Minor would then go and enlist in the
Coast Guard and he continued studying electronics. Once he was
discharged from the Coast Guard, he moved back to California
with his wife. He had had met a woman and
married her in nineteen fifty two, and then he enrolled
at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned
(04:50):
a degree in electrical engineering in nineteen fifty eight, with
an area of focus in designing generators and servo motors.
Kind of interesting but his first gig, according to an
interview that he gave to the magazine Amiga User International
back in was to develop a computer control console with
(05:11):
a video display. Even though his expertise, at least a
scholarly expertise, was in generators and servo motors, so he
had to go back to teaching himself. He started to
read from books and learn logic design and how to
lay out transistor circuits. But he said the nice thing
was that in those days it wasn't too complicated to
(05:33):
learn from a book. You could still actually buy books
and become self taught and be able to work in
that space. Miners resume after college included several companies, including
fledgling ones that were sort of a sign of the
future for California and technology and kind of a a
foreshadowing of the birth of Silicon Valley. And j. Minor
(05:56):
found he really liked designing electronics. He wasn't as interest
it in other parts of engineering, and so he never
really felt tied down to any one employer if there
was another interesting opportunity to do design work on the horizon,
so he kind of hopped run company to company. In
nineteen seventy four, one of Miner's friends, a guy named
Harold Lee, convinced Minor to come and check out the
(06:19):
company that Harold Lee was working for. He was an
engineer for a little company called Atari. Now, Atari is
gonna end up being a very important part of the
Amiga story. Nolan Bushnell had founded Atari in nineteen seventy
two after he had designed an early arcade game called
Computer Space. The company at that time was known for
(06:40):
building arcade games like Pong and Space Race. Minor would
design components for many of Atari's early arcade games, and
then he became the lead chip designer of a new
project in nineteen seventy five, and that project's goal was
to create a reprogrammable gaming machine. Now, up to this point,
(07:01):
all the gaming machines were custom built for a specific game.
The circuitry of the machine was the game. But in
the phase of competition, Atari wanted to create a gaming
machine that could accept some form of media, which would
turn out to be cartridges, and run that media interchangeably
so that you could switch out between games using the
(07:23):
same hardware. This project would evolve into the video computer
system the VCS, also known as the Atari twenty hundred
one of the challenging aspects of building out this kind
of computer was keeping the costs low enough to make
it a marketable consumer device, which meant finding the right
(07:43):
processor to act as the CPU for the machine. It
needed to be powerful enough to do the job, but
not so expensive as to drive the price of the
final product out of the market range, and ultimately Atari
settled on the most technology six five O two chip.
And to be fair, I say CPU CPU is being
(08:05):
very generous for these video game consoles, but it was
serving that purpose. Now. The six two chip was not
particularly powerful, it's an eight bit processor, but Miner's design
got the most out of its capabilities and made the
VCS a viable product. Not just viable, it became the
runaway success of the late nineteen seventies. The at E
(08:29):
vcs would debut in nineteen and by the next year
it was already they must have item on everyone's list.
J Minor would move on to design new products for
at riis uh line, and this time they were was
focusing on personal computers, which were also emerging at this time.
In nine there are only a few personal computers that
(08:53):
were available on the market outside of the kits that
you could purchase to put to your own computer together.
So Apple had been founded in nineteen and had introduced
the Apple two in nine at Radio Shack Slash Tandy
had the TRS eighty and seventy seven, Commodore had the
PET or PET did not yet have the Commodore sixty
(09:15):
four that would come later. Digital Research had created the
CP slash M Operating Systems style UH interface, which Bill
Gates would later leverage when his company would create MS DOSS.
But no one knew where the industry was going yet.
It was slowly transitioning from the realm of hobbyists and
(09:37):
bleeding edge adopters to mainstream consumers. J Minor would use
the six five O two chip as the main microprocessor
for a pair of computers from Matari. They were the
four hundred and the eight hundred, and as you might guess,
the eight hundred was a more powerful computer than the
four hundred. The Atari computers could display a maximum of
(09:57):
forty colors on a screen simultaneously, which today obviously is nothing,
but back then it left the nearest competitor, which would
have been Apple at that time, in the dust. J
Minor designed chips to handle sound and graphics as well,
something that would foreshadow a future era of expansion cards.
They were meant to do the same thing that one
(10:19):
really take effect until the nineties. In Nolan Bush Now
sold his company to Warner Communications. Ray Cassar, the new
CEO of Atari, would clash with the company's programmers in
a big way. The programmers wanted to share in the
success of their work. They wanted royalties, but ray Cassar refused,
(10:41):
and in addition, Atari chose to write off the costs
of developing the four hundred and the eight hundred systems
up front, so all the costs of developing went right
into the budget at the front of it, instead of
being distributed across the lifetime of the four hundred and
the eight hundred. That meant that on the books, it
(11:02):
looked like the company had not met its profit goals
and because of that, it was not going to trigger
bonus payments. Programmers were not going to get paid bonuses
because at least on paper, Atari was just barely eking
out of profit, when in reality you could argue that
it's because they frontloaded all of the development costs. At
(11:22):
the very beginning of the year, some of the programmers
felt that they were being cheated, that they were being abused,
and people began to leave Atari. One of those programmers
was a guy named Larry Kaplan, and he will also
become very important in the Amiga story in just a moment.
But upon the four hundred and eight hundred release, Atari
(11:43):
did something a little weird. The computers, which were capable
of playing pretty neat games for that era, were not
marketed as multi purpose machines that could do gaming because
Atari did not want to cannibalize their console sales, and
so the four hundred and eight hundred were keted as
serious machines meant for serious stuff like business and academics.
(12:05):
Despite limiting the marketing reach for the product, the computer
models sold pretty well. And here's a fun fact. The
Atari four D PC would serve as the innards for
ataris fifty two hundred console, the successor to the A twenty. Sure,
but the software written for the two platforms was not
really compatible. All right, I've got more to say about
(12:26):
the era that would launch the Amiga, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. After the
four hundred and the eight hundred, j Minor wanted to
move forward and really had his eye on a different microprocessor,
(12:47):
and this one was from Motorola, not most technologies. It
was the sixty eight thousand, So the six five oh
two was an eight bit micro processor, but the sixty
eight thousand was a sixteen slash thirty two bit Mike
grow processor, meaning it could handle much more complicated processes
than the six five oh two, and it was being
used in micro computers and would become the chip that
(13:08):
would power Apple's Macintosh in the mid nineteen eighties. So
J Miner pitched a computer system to Atari management that
would rely on the sixty eight thousand chip. It would
be the most advanced computer, especially in terms of graphics
and sound systems. It would be able to play incredible games,
but Attari management shut him down. In addition, Attari was
(13:32):
starting to do the same thing to engineers that it
had done to programmers previously, meaning the company was refusing
to pay out bonuses, and J. Minor did not want
to keep doing the same thing, that is, designing systems
for the six five oh two, and he was frustrated
his voice wasn't being heard. He felt that the company
wasn't valuing his work. He didn't like the fact that
he wasn't gonna get paid his bonus, so he decided
(13:54):
to put on his walk and shoes and he left
the company. So after he left Atari, j Minor joined
another company called z Mast. This company made special microprocessor
chips for specific types of products, and the specific type
of product that Minor worked on were pacemakers. So he
worked with z Mast for three years and in nineteen
(14:16):
eight two he got a call from Larry Caplan and
that was that Atari programmer I had mentioned earlier who
had left Atari in a huff in nineteen seventy nine.
After Atari, Larry Caplan had gone on to join a
brand new company called Activision. In fact, he joined so
early that typically we call him a co founder of Activision,
(14:38):
although Encyclopedia Britannica actually says that he was not a
true co founder but joined shortly after the founding of
the company. But he helped define that company. And I'll
have to do a full episode or maybe a short
series of episodes about Activision someday, because that company has
continued to be incredibly important in the video game world.
(14:59):
But the original incarnation of Activision was meant to be
a place where developers would get recognition for their work,
including getting credited on game boxes and receiving royalties as
a result of good sales for their titles. And these
are good things, but Larry Kaplan got disenchanted with this
(15:20):
company in nineteen eighty two. He wanted to go into
developing some hardware, but Activision did not the other exact
Activision did not want to go in that direction. They
wanted to focus solely on developing game titles, and so
Kaplan would leave the company that he had joined in
nineteen seventy nine, and he reached out to J. Minor
(15:40):
to see if Minor knew of anyone who might help
him get funding to get a new business off the ground.
So J Minor takes Larry Caplan's call and he introduces
Kaplan to his own boss, Bert Braddock over at Z
Mast and together these three began to put together a
plan for Larry Caplan's new business venture. They got an
(16:01):
office in Santa Clara, California. They hired away a vice
president over at Tonka Toys to be the CEO of
this new company, and the plan was that J. Minor
would design chips for the hardware. Z Mask would take
the designs and build those chips, and Larry Kaplan would
design games to run on that hardware, and this is
(16:24):
the business they would form. They have some sort of
video game console or computer business and they would all
work and make money from it. They were originally called
this venture High Toro uh or really it was just
High Toro, I guess, because they thought it sounded kind
of like a high tech company, and also it sort
of paid tribute to being a company born out of Texas.
(16:45):
But this process was going to take some time putting
all this business together, and while they were working on it,
Larry Kaplan, the guy who was asking for this in
the first place, started to get cold feet. He might
have worried that maybe the base was getting way too
competitive in creating hardware for the video game world. Maybe
(17:06):
he was worried about the prospects of this business being
able to hold its own. But for whatever reason, in
late nine two he bailed on the whole plan. Not
only that, but he decided to return to Atari, the
company he had quit three years earlier, and apparently Nolan
Bushnell had presented a very attractive offer. So Larry Kaplan
(17:27):
was out, and that left j Minor and z Mast
holding the ball. So Minor was asked to serve as
the chief engineer for High Toro, and he agreed to
do it under two important conditions. The first was that
he wanted to create a video game machine around the
sixty eight thousand Motorola chip, and the second was that
(17:49):
the video game machine should also be a computer, not
just a video game console. Now, this was in late
nine two, and the landscape was very different from what
it would be in just one year. In late video
game consoles were seen as money printing devices. There was
just a ton of cash in video games. Companies were
(18:12):
rolling in it, and everyone at the time was convinced
that the party was never going to stop. So investors
were willing to get behind something like a video game console.
But personal computers, on the other hand, were still seen
as a luxury product that very few people owned. Investors
were less keen to get behind those products, so the
(18:33):
company decided. High Toro decided that the wisest decision was
to hitch High Toro first as a video game console company,
that the product they were making was a video game console,
and then just kind of hide or ignore all the
computer elements when it came to trying to get investors.
(18:54):
J Minor had one standard that he personally wanted to
meet with this new machine. He wanted make a personal
computer that would be capable of running a really good
flight simulator on it. He had a friend named al
Pound at a company called Singer Link who had shown
Minor military grade flight simulators, and Minor thought these things
were amazing, So he wanted to create a machine that
(19:16):
could run something like that on your desktop without having
to have the multimillion dollar equipment to do it. Now,
that meant that Minor needed to build out a computer
that could be both a stripped down video game machine
and expandable into a high performance computer. Now. J. Minor
was a bit frustrated that they weren't just taking the
kid gloves off and going toe to toe with IBM,
(19:40):
because IBM was just at this point trying to get
established in the home computer space. They had dominated in business,
but we're just starting to get into home computers, and
Minor thought we actually have the opportunity here to take
the lead. However, the general thought was that video games
(20:00):
were where the money was, and that was better to
focus on that part of the market and to let
the computer stuff come later. J Minor would eventually say
that was probably the right decision for the time, just
because it would have been very difficult to get the
financing the investment for going after IBM, but he still
said he was sad that they were never able to
(20:21):
jump on that because the IBM PC when it came out,
it was monochromatic, it was crazy expensive, it had limitations
on memory. These were all areas that miners saw as
opportunities for them to take over, but it was just
not meant to be from an investment standpoint. So they
decided to divide operations for High Toro into two big categories,
(20:43):
and J Minor would head one side, which would be
the chip designers and engineers the hardware experts, and they
began working on prototypes for chips to go in this
future computer, and they didn't have a way to fabricate
chips to test their designs in a way that was
economically feasible, so instead they first would sketch their designs
(21:04):
out on white boards, and then they would move to
build prototypes on bread boards more and that in a
little bit. The other side of the operations was a
video game centric part of the business. The company would
make peripherals for existing systems from other companies, namely the AT,
and they would make video games for those systems as well,
(21:24):
and this served a couple of purposes. For one thing,
it brought in some revenue while the other side was
still working on getting the internal components together for their
future video game system, Slash Computer for another, and almost
acted like a front for the business. C. J. Minor
was really worried that if other companies had heard that
(21:44):
he was working on a new personal computer design, they
might try to do some industrial espionage snoop in and
find out what was going on, and once they figured
out what J. Minor was trying to do, they might
try to rush their own projects through their own existing
companies and try to beat the fledgling company to market.
So one of the products that they made at this
(22:06):
time was something called the Joyboard, which looked kind of
like a foot rest, and it was actually a balance
board and a control system, so players would stand on
this thing and they would lean in order to control
a video games like leaning to the Left and make
your character go to the left. And they actually made
a few games like skiing games and stuff that would
(22:26):
use this control system shortly after becoming a company to
really big things would change everything. I'll explain more in
a second, but first let's take another quick break to
thank our sponsor. The first thing that changed was that
(22:51):
the company Hi Toro had to swap out its name
because there already was a Japanese lawnmower company called Hi Toro,
and they didn't want to be confused with it, so
they got the brainstorming a new name for this company.
Minor reportedly suggested they use Amiga, which is the feminine
version of the Spanish word for friend, amigo. So he
(23:13):
supposedly suggested this, but also did not actually like the suggestion.
It was one of those things the kind of said
but what didn't really have a whole lot of feeling behind.
But no one could come up with anything better, so
they stuck with it. They made a few games for
the A under this company name, and they made some
(23:33):
peripherals for the video game industry, but that only worked
for a short time. And the reason I say this
is because in just a few months after the company
had been coming together in the first place, the bottom
fell out of the home video game market. This was
the infamous video game crash of nine eight three, and
(23:56):
I've done full episodes about this, so I'm just they
have a super short overview here to explain what happened
leading up to There were a ton of companies. They
were all in the home video game space. You had
console companies, you had in television, you had Atari, you
had Colleco and others that were all creating video game consoles.
(24:19):
You had tons of third party game developers of varying
degrees of skill and business sense making games for these systems.
And then you had executives who behaved as if video
games were always going to be a gravy train, and
in some cases they were making truly astoundingly dumb decisions,
(24:39):
such as making more copies of a game than there
were consoles out on the market. If you have five
hundred thousand consoles out on the market and you make
a million copies of a game, that's five thousand extra
copies that don't go anywhere. So this all came to
a head in three and eventually the market lapsed in
(25:00):
on itself. It could not sustain this sort of activity.
The video game crash had an enormous effect on the
company that was just about to become a Mega. It
was making that transition from Hi Toro to Amiga. Video
game companies were folding left and right. Companies like Atari,
which had been really cash rich just a couple of
(25:24):
years earlier, now found themselves over extended and in possession
of massive inventory that they could not move, and Amiga's
business of selling to that industry was pretty much wiped out. Moreover,
investors were now terrified at the thought of backing a
video game console, so in J Minor was told, we
(25:47):
have to market this as a video game console first
and ignore the fact that it's a computer, because otherwise
no one's going to put money behind it. The same
investors who were gung ho on supporting a video game console,
now we're terrified. So they asked, hey, do you think
maybe you could take this thing you're designing and instead
of making it a video game console, could you upgrade
(26:09):
it so it's a personal computer. Well, that's what J.
Minor hadn't mind all along, and in fact what he
had been working on, so it suited him just fine.
It validated his arguments, and the team continued to focus
on building out the chips that would go into the
first Amiga computer. Dave Morse, who was the CEO of
the company, decided that the chips all needed to have
(26:31):
code names, which would protect the company's intellectual property. Anyone
overhearing the employees talking about these chips would just hear
the code names and not instead of whatever the chips
actually were. So he decided that all the chips should
be given women's names. So the three major chips in
the Amiga chips set were called Agnes, Denise, and Paula.
(26:56):
The computer's code name was Lorraine, so you had a
rain the computer with Agnes, de Nice and Paula as
the chips. The design team held frequent meetings and everyone
was free to pitch ideas at those meetings, arguing for
features they felt should be included in the chips set.
To reach a consensus, the team instituted an unusual practice
(27:17):
involving toy baseball bats made of foam, so if you
pitched an idea and people didn't like it, they bat
you over the head with the bats. They just hit
you with these foam baseball bats. It was harmless, but
according to j Minor, it was a humiliating experience. Minor
had read about and taken a course in a special
(27:38):
type of co processor called a blitter, also known as
a blitter circuit. A blitter, which is b L I
T T e R, can manipulate and move data inside
a computer's memory quickly without having to text the CPU,
so it works in parallel with the CPU. It can
copy data from one block of memory, can move it
(27:59):
to where it needs to be, and the CPU can
just continue its own operations without having to expend any
resources to do this. And this blitter would allow the
Amiga to handle much more advanced graphics without overtaxing the
CPU compared to other computers on the market. Minor also
ended up working on a design for what was called
(28:20):
a hold and Modify mode or HAM mode h a M.
This was a way to kind of trick the system
into showing more colors on screen than it was technically
capable of doing, just based on the amount of memory
in the machine. So the memory served as a limitation,
a limiting factor. You couldn't show too many colors because
(28:41):
the amount of information you needed to represent the colors, hue,
its brightness, it's you know, it's opaqueness, all of those things.
Those values would take up memory space, and memory was expensive,
so to keep costs down and maximize efficiency, Minor and
his team started to work on this design, and HAM
(29:02):
mode would allow programmers to designate a line of pixels
as a single color and then make changes to just
one of the three properties that define that color, as
in hue, saturation, or luminosity. In this mode, the Amiga
computer would be able to display four thousand, nineties six colors,
which was light years ahead of the competition. They also
(29:25):
designed what they called the Copper chip. This chip had
three different instructions on it, all in order to exert
direct control of the computer's display, and the chip could
also access any part of the other display chips. It
would allow the Amiga to have multiple windows open side
by side at once, even when each window had contents
displaying at different resolutions, which is pretty phenomenal. The chip
(29:48):
code named AGNES, would contain the blitter and copper chips
and was in charge of handling direct access to the
computer's memory. Denise was a display chip that would produce sprites,
and a sp it is a two dimensional object that
hardware makers can use to create a composite of the
sprite along with the background. It allows the sprite to
move across the background without the need to having to
(30:11):
with redraw everything every time the sprite moves. Paula's job
was as a dedicated sound generation chip. It would control
four channels of audio, two on the left stereo channel,
two on the right stereo channel. That would give the
Amiga much greater sound reproduction capability than competing computers in
the early nineties. So this design phase slowly moved from
(30:34):
white boards to bread boards. So now it's time to
talk about bread boards what that means, and kind of
wrap up this episode. A bread board is a base
for building circuits and electronics. Uh It was also known
as or It is also known as a plug board
because it's a board into which you can plug chips
and wires. Today's bread boards are really super nice. You
(30:55):
don't have to solder connections between components. You just plug
everything in and the bread board itself has a little
layer of metal on the underside that allows connections, so
you don't have to actually solder everything together. But back
in the day you did have to do soldering. The
reason why that's really important is that today, because you
(31:16):
don't have to solder everything, you can reuse breadboards. You
just unplugged stuff and you plug new stuff in, so
you can very rapidly test out different circuit layouts, different designs.
Breadboard circuits are much much larger than the finalized type
of circuits that make their way into electronics. It's sort
(31:36):
of the macro scale of what you would eventually plan
to produce. So these chips that Miners team was developing, UH,
when manufactured, they would all fit to plug into the
motherboard for the first Amiga computer, But at this time
on breadboard form, they were huge, and by huge, i'm
talking about chips that would measure several feet along one side.
(31:59):
Each chip would have eight bread boards connected together to
simulate what the final chip would do. So Agnes was
eight bread boards, Denise was eight bread boards, Paula was
eight bread boards. Each bread board would hold three hundred
m s I logic chips. So for all three of
(32:20):
the simulated chips for Agnes, for Denise, for Paula, collectively
you had seven thousand, two hundred separate logic chips for
these simulated chips, and they all had to be wired together.
All those bread boards had to be wired together, all
those components had to be wired properly. So there were
a ridiculous number of wires connecting everything and each of
(32:43):
those simulated chips, and as you can imagine, that made
connecting and moving the bread boards really difficult to do
because one wrong move and you would introduce a system
crashing bug by knocking loose another connection. Then you'd have
to track down which connect was loose and reconnected properly.
The team hooked up their simulated chip set to a
(33:05):
sixty eight thousand processor and then they fired it up
and it worked. But that was just the hardware side.
In our next episode, we'll pick up by talking about
the software that was in development to run on this
first Amiga computer, and we'll also look at how the
company nearly got swept up by Atari after finding itself
in financial trouble, and we'll learn the crazy Game of
(33:28):
Thrones like story involving the company Commodore as well, and
it really does get pretty crazy in the meantime, If
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Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or have
on as a guest host, let me know. Send me
an email the address for the show is tech Stuff
(33:48):
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(34:09):
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thousands of other topics because at how stuff works dot com.
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 Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
tech stuff. Listener Matt asked if I might do an
episode or two, or maybe three or four about the
(00:25):
Amiga series of personal computers, and Amiga has a pretty
fascinating history with lots of ups and significant downs, And
I've definitely touched on Amiga a few times and episodes
about the early PC era, as well as the episodes
I've done about Commodore because Commodore acquired Amiga. But this
(00:47):
computer line deserves its own set of episodes because it's
it's not just fascinating from a technology standpoint, but it
plays into a lot of other things that were happening
in tech in the eighties that are also really important
and interesting all on their own. So the story is
likely going to take a few episodes to tell because
(01:08):
of how complex it is and how much the Amiga's
story plays into these other stories of other companies and
big events that were happening in the personal computer and
video game industries. But I think That's part of what
makes this hall fascinating because it gives you an opportunity
to understand some of those other topics from a new
angle within the context of Amiga. So I know it's
(01:30):
going to be at least three episodes because I've got
two to go right now. Probably gonna be four, we'll see. Also,
if you really want a true deep dive into the
history of Amiga, because this is peanuts compared to what
some folks have done, and if you want to know
more about all the people involved with Amiga, I have
(01:51):
a recommendation for you. There's a website called ours Technico.
It's one of my favorite websites, especially for technology, and
over it Ours Technica, a software developer named Jeremy Reymer
has written what I considered to be the definitive history
of Amiga. It's so far a twelve part article series,
(02:12):
and the very first article published on August first, two
thousand seven. The most recent part of this series published
on March twenty nine, two thousand eighteen. So it's a
series of articles that have spanned more than a decade now.
When I pulled this twelve part series over into notes
so that I could print it, out. It was about
(02:34):
seventy five pages and the word count was around forty
two five words. So while I'm going to be talking
about Amiga for several episodes and you still want more,
that's where you need to go. There's also a couple
of spinoff articles I did not include in my notes,
but they are related to Amiga. So if you're really fascinated,
(02:57):
that's the place to go, I would say. So the
Amiga it was one of the lines of computers that
emerged in the early nineteen eighties, back before things had
really shaken out, so that they were essentially a face
off between Apple and IBM, and then later on various
IBMBC clone manufacturers, and then later still Microsoft, so it
(03:19):
was always Apple versus IBM, then IBM clones, and then
Microsoft in particular. But back in those days, there were
a lot of different competing computers that were on the market,
and I've talked about those in previous shows. There was
the TRASH eighty or the TRS eighty from Radio Shack
Slash Tandy. There was the t I ninety nine Slash
(03:42):
four from Texas Instruments. There was the various computers from Commodore,
including the Commodore sixty four, which was the best selling
PC of all time, and those were all in that
same space that were there when Apple had its Apple
to come out, and before even the IBM personal computer
had shown up. J Minor is often credited as being
(04:06):
the father of Amiga. J Minor was born in Prescott, Arizona,
on May thirty one, nineteen thirty two, and as a
kid he became interested in electronics. He enrolled in San
Diego State College, and while he was in college, there
was an enormous event that happened. North Korea invaded South Korea,
precipitating the Korean War that happened on June twenty, nineteen fifty.
(04:30):
So J. Minor would then go and enlist in the
Coast Guard and he continued studying electronics. Once he was
discharged from the Coast Guard, he moved back to California
with his wife. He had had met a woman and
married her in nineteen fifty two, and then he enrolled
at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned
(04:50):
a degree in electrical engineering in nineteen fifty eight, with
an area of focus in designing generators and servo motors.
Kind of interesting but his first gig, according to an
interview that he gave to the magazine Amiga User International
back in was to develop a computer control console with
(05:11):
a video display. Even though his expertise, at least a
scholarly expertise, was in generators and servo motors, so he
had to go back to teaching himself. He started to
read from books and learn logic design and how to
lay out transistor circuits. But he said the nice thing
was that in those days it wasn't too complicated to
(05:33):
learn from a book. You could still actually buy books
and become self taught and be able to work in
that space. Miners resume after college included several companies, including
fledgling ones that were sort of a sign of the
future for California and technology and kind of a a
foreshadowing of the birth of Silicon Valley. And j. Minor
(05:56):
found he really liked designing electronics. He wasn't as interest
it in other parts of engineering, and so he never
really felt tied down to any one employer if there
was another interesting opportunity to do design work on the horizon,
so he kind of hopped run company to company. In
nineteen seventy four, one of Miner's friends, a guy named
Harold Lee, convinced Minor to come and check out the
(06:19):
company that Harold Lee was working for. He was an
engineer for a little company called Atari. Now, Atari is
gonna end up being a very important part of the
Amiga story. Nolan Bushnell had founded Atari in nineteen seventy
two after he had designed an early arcade game called
Computer Space. The company at that time was known for
(06:40):
building arcade games like Pong and Space Race. Minor would
design components for many of Atari's early arcade games, and
then he became the lead chip designer of a new
project in nineteen seventy five, and that project's goal was
to create a reprogrammable gaming machine. Now, up to this point,
(07:01):
all the gaming machines were custom built for a specific game.
The circuitry of the machine was the game. But in
the phase of competition, Atari wanted to create a gaming
machine that could accept some form of media, which would
turn out to be cartridges, and run that media interchangeably
so that you could switch out between games using the
(07:23):
same hardware. This project would evolve into the video computer
system the VCS, also known as the Atari twenty hundred
one of the challenging aspects of building out this kind
of computer was keeping the costs low enough to make
it a marketable consumer device, which meant finding the right
(07:43):
processor to act as the CPU for the machine. It
needed to be powerful enough to do the job, but
not so expensive as to drive the price of the
final product out of the market range, and ultimately Atari
settled on the most technology six five O two chip.
And to be fair, I say CPU CPU is being
(08:05):
very generous for these video game consoles, but it was
serving that purpose. Now. The six two chip was not
particularly powerful, it's an eight bit processor, but Miner's design
got the most out of its capabilities and made the
VCS a viable product. Not just viable, it became the
runaway success of the late nineteen seventies. The at E
(08:29):
vcs would debut in nineteen and by the next year
it was already they must have item on everyone's list.
J Minor would move on to design new products for
at riis uh line, and this time they were was
focusing on personal computers, which were also emerging at this time.
In nine there are only a few personal computers that
(08:53):
were available on the market outside of the kits that
you could purchase to put to your own computer together.
So Apple had been founded in nineteen and had introduced
the Apple two in nine at Radio Shack Slash Tandy
had the TRS eighty and seventy seven, Commodore had the
PET or PET did not yet have the Commodore sixty
(09:15):
four that would come later. Digital Research had created the
CP slash M Operating Systems style UH interface, which Bill
Gates would later leverage when his company would create MS DOSS.
But no one knew where the industry was going yet.
It was slowly transitioning from the realm of hobbyists and
(09:37):
bleeding edge adopters to mainstream consumers. J Minor would use
the six five O two chip as the main microprocessor
for a pair of computers from Matari. They were the
four hundred and the eight hundred, and as you might guess,
the eight hundred was a more powerful computer than the
four hundred. The Atari computers could display a maximum of
(09:57):
forty colors on a screen simultaneously, which today obviously is nothing,
but back then it left the nearest competitor, which would
have been Apple at that time, in the dust. J
Minor designed chips to handle sound and graphics as well,
something that would foreshadow a future era of expansion cards.
They were meant to do the same thing that one
(10:19):
really take effect until the nineties. In Nolan Bush Now
sold his company to Warner Communications. Ray Cassar, the new
CEO of Atari, would clash with the company's programmers in
a big way. The programmers wanted to share in the
success of their work. They wanted royalties, but ray Cassar refused,
(10:41):
and in addition, Atari chose to write off the costs
of developing the four hundred and the eight hundred systems
up front, so all the costs of developing went right
into the budget at the front of it, instead of
being distributed across the lifetime of the four hundred and
the eight hundred. That meant that on the books, it
(11:02):
looked like the company had not met its profit goals
and because of that, it was not going to trigger
bonus payments. Programmers were not going to get paid bonuses
because at least on paper, Atari was just barely eking
out of profit, when in reality you could argue that
it's because they frontloaded all of the development costs. At
(11:22):
the very beginning of the year, some of the programmers
felt that they were being cheated, that they were being abused,
and people began to leave Atari. One of those programmers
was a guy named Larry Kaplan, and he will also
become very important in the Amiga story in just a moment.
But upon the four hundred and eight hundred release, Atari
(11:43):
did something a little weird. The computers, which were capable
of playing pretty neat games for that era, were not
marketed as multi purpose machines that could do gaming because
Atari did not want to cannibalize their console sales, and
so the four hundred and eight hundred were keted as
serious machines meant for serious stuff like business and academics.
(12:05):
Despite limiting the marketing reach for the product, the computer
models sold pretty well. And here's a fun fact. The
Atari four D PC would serve as the innards for
ataris fifty two hundred console, the successor to the A twenty. Sure,
but the software written for the two platforms was not
really compatible. All right, I've got more to say about
(12:26):
the era that would launch the Amiga, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. After the
four hundred and the eight hundred, j Minor wanted to
move forward and really had his eye on a different microprocessor,
(12:47):
and this one was from Motorola, not most technologies. It
was the sixty eight thousand, So the six five oh
two was an eight bit micro processor, but the sixty
eight thousand was a sixteen slash thirty two bit Mike
grow processor, meaning it could handle much more complicated processes
than the six five oh two, and it was being
used in micro computers and would become the chip that
(13:08):
would power Apple's Macintosh in the mid nineteen eighties. So
J Miner pitched a computer system to Atari management that
would rely on the sixty eight thousand chip. It would
be the most advanced computer, especially in terms of graphics
and sound systems. It would be able to play incredible games,
but Attari management shut him down. In addition, Attari was
(13:32):
starting to do the same thing to engineers that it
had done to programmers previously, meaning the company was refusing
to pay out bonuses, and J. Minor did not want
to keep doing the same thing, that is, designing systems
for the six five oh two, and he was frustrated
his voice wasn't being heard. He felt that the company
wasn't valuing his work. He didn't like the fact that
he wasn't gonna get paid his bonus, so he decided
(13:54):
to put on his walk and shoes and he left
the company. So after he left Atari, j Minor joined
another company called z Mast. This company made special microprocessor
chips for specific types of products, and the specific type
of product that Minor worked on were pacemakers. So he
worked with z Mast for three years and in nineteen
(14:16):
eight two he got a call from Larry Caplan and
that was that Atari programmer I had mentioned earlier who
had left Atari in a huff in nineteen seventy nine.
After Atari, Larry Caplan had gone on to join a
brand new company called Activision. In fact, he joined so
early that typically we call him a co founder of Activision,
(14:38):
although Encyclopedia Britannica actually says that he was not a
true co founder but joined shortly after the founding of
the company. But he helped define that company. And I'll
have to do a full episode or maybe a short
series of episodes about Activision someday, because that company has
continued to be incredibly important in the video game world.
(14:59):
But the original incarnation of Activision was meant to be
a place where developers would get recognition for their work,
including getting credited on game boxes and receiving royalties as
a result of good sales for their titles. And these
are good things, but Larry Kaplan got disenchanted with this
(15:20):
company in nineteen eighty two. He wanted to go into
developing some hardware, but Activision did not the other exact
Activision did not want to go in that direction. They
wanted to focus solely on developing game titles, and so
Kaplan would leave the company that he had joined in
nineteen seventy nine, and he reached out to J. Minor
(15:40):
to see if Minor knew of anyone who might help
him get funding to get a new business off the ground.
So J Minor takes Larry Caplan's call and he introduces
Kaplan to his own boss, Bert Braddock over at Z
Mast and together these three began to put together a
plan for Larry Caplan's new business venture. They got an
(16:01):
office in Santa Clara, California. They hired away a vice
president over at Tonka Toys to be the CEO of
this new company, and the plan was that J. Minor
would design chips for the hardware. Z Mask would take
the designs and build those chips, and Larry Kaplan would
design games to run on that hardware, and this is
(16:24):
the business they would form. They have some sort of
video game console or computer business and they would all
work and make money from it. They were originally called
this venture High Toro uh or really it was just
High Toro, I guess, because they thought it sounded kind
of like a high tech company, and also it sort
of paid tribute to being a company born out of Texas.
(16:45):
But this process was going to take some time putting
all this business together, and while they were working on it,
Larry Kaplan, the guy who was asking for this in
the first place, started to get cold feet. He might
have worried that maybe the base was getting way too
competitive in creating hardware for the video game world. Maybe
(17:06):
he was worried about the prospects of this business being
able to hold its own. But for whatever reason, in
late nine two he bailed on the whole plan. Not
only that, but he decided to return to Atari, the
company he had quit three years earlier, and apparently Nolan
Bushnell had presented a very attractive offer. So Larry Kaplan
(17:27):
was out, and that left j Minor and z Mast
holding the ball. So Minor was asked to serve as
the chief engineer for High Toro, and he agreed to
do it under two important conditions. The first was that
he wanted to create a video game machine around the
sixty eight thousand Motorola chip, and the second was that
(17:49):
the video game machine should also be a computer, not
just a video game console. Now, this was in late
nine two, and the landscape was very different from what
it would be in just one year. In late video
game consoles were seen as money printing devices. There was
just a ton of cash in video games. Companies were
(18:12):
rolling in it, and everyone at the time was convinced
that the party was never going to stop. So investors
were willing to get behind something like a video game console.
But personal computers, on the other hand, were still seen
as a luxury product that very few people owned. Investors
were less keen to get behind those products, so the
(18:33):
company decided. High Toro decided that the wisest decision was
to hitch High Toro first as a video game console company,
that the product they were making was a video game console,
and then just kind of hide or ignore all the
computer elements when it came to trying to get investors.
(18:54):
J Minor had one standard that he personally wanted to
meet with this new machine. He wanted make a personal
computer that would be capable of running a really good
flight simulator on it. He had a friend named al
Pound at a company called Singer Link who had shown
Minor military grade flight simulators, and Minor thought these things
were amazing, So he wanted to create a machine that
(19:16):
could run something like that on your desktop without having
to have the multimillion dollar equipment to do it. Now,
that meant that Minor needed to build out a computer
that could be both a stripped down video game machine
and expandable into a high performance computer. Now. J. Minor
was a bit frustrated that they weren't just taking the
kid gloves off and going toe to toe with IBM,
(19:40):
because IBM was just at this point trying to get
established in the home computer space. They had dominated in business,
but we're just starting to get into home computers, and
Minor thought we actually have the opportunity here to take
the lead. However, the general thought was that video games
(20:00):
were where the money was, and that was better to
focus on that part of the market and to let
the computer stuff come later. J Minor would eventually say
that was probably the right decision for the time, just
because it would have been very difficult to get the
financing the investment for going after IBM, but he still
said he was sad that they were never able to
(20:21):
jump on that because the IBM PC when it came out,
it was monochromatic, it was crazy expensive, it had limitations
on memory. These were all areas that miners saw as
opportunities for them to take over, but it was just
not meant to be from an investment standpoint. So they
decided to divide operations for High Toro into two big categories,
(20:43):
and J Minor would head one side, which would be
the chip designers and engineers the hardware experts, and they
began working on prototypes for chips to go in this
future computer, and they didn't have a way to fabricate
chips to test their designs in a way that was
economically feasible, so instead they first would sketch their designs
(21:04):
out on white boards, and then they would move to
build prototypes on bread boards more and that in a
little bit. The other side of the operations was a
video game centric part of the business. The company would
make peripherals for existing systems from other companies, namely the AT,
and they would make video games for those systems as well,
(21:24):
and this served a couple of purposes. For one thing,
it brought in some revenue while the other side was
still working on getting the internal components together for their
future video game system, Slash Computer for another, and almost
acted like a front for the business. C. J. Minor
was really worried that if other companies had heard that
(21:44):
he was working on a new personal computer design, they
might try to do some industrial espionage snoop in and
find out what was going on, and once they figured
out what J. Minor was trying to do, they might
try to rush their own projects through their own existing
companies and try to beat the fledgling company to market.
So one of the products that they made at this
(22:06):
time was something called the Joyboard, which looked kind of
like a foot rest, and it was actually a balance
board and a control system, so players would stand on
this thing and they would lean in order to control
a video games like leaning to the Left and make
your character go to the left. And they actually made
a few games like skiing games and stuff that would
(22:26):
use this control system shortly after becoming a company to
really big things would change everything. I'll explain more in
a second, but first let's take another quick break to
thank our sponsor. The first thing that changed was that
(22:51):
the company Hi Toro had to swap out its name
because there already was a Japanese lawnmower company called Hi Toro,
and they didn't want to be confused with it, so
they got the brainstorming a new name for this company.
Minor reportedly suggested they use Amiga, which is the feminine
version of the Spanish word for friend, amigo. So he
(23:13):
supposedly suggested this, but also did not actually like the suggestion.
It was one of those things the kind of said
but what didn't really have a whole lot of feeling behind.
But no one could come up with anything better, so
they stuck with it. They made a few games for
the A under this company name, and they made some
(23:33):
peripherals for the video game industry, but that only worked
for a short time. And the reason I say this
is because in just a few months after the company
had been coming together in the first place, the bottom
fell out of the home video game market. This was
the infamous video game crash of nine eight three, and
(23:56):
I've done full episodes about this, so I'm just they
have a super short overview here to explain what happened
leading up to There were a ton of companies. They
were all in the home video game space. You had
console companies, you had in television, you had Atari, you
had Colleco and others that were all creating video game consoles.
(24:19):
You had tons of third party game developers of varying
degrees of skill and business sense making games for these systems.
And then you had executives who behaved as if video
games were always going to be a gravy train, and
in some cases they were making truly astoundingly dumb decisions,
(24:39):
such as making more copies of a game than there
were consoles out on the market. If you have five
hundred thousand consoles out on the market and you make
a million copies of a game, that's five thousand extra
copies that don't go anywhere. So this all came to
a head in three and eventually the market lapsed in
(25:00):
on itself. It could not sustain this sort of activity.
The video game crash had an enormous effect on the
company that was just about to become a Mega. It
was making that transition from Hi Toro to Amiga. Video
game companies were folding left and right. Companies like Atari,
which had been really cash rich just a couple of
(25:24):
years earlier, now found themselves over extended and in possession
of massive inventory that they could not move, and Amiga's
business of selling to that industry was pretty much wiped out. Moreover,
investors were now terrified at the thought of backing a
video game console, so in J Minor was told, we
(25:47):
have to market this as a video game console first
and ignore the fact that it's a computer, because otherwise
no one's going to put money behind it. The same
investors who were gung ho on supporting a video game console,
now we're terrified. So they asked, hey, do you think
maybe you could take this thing you're designing and instead
of making it a video game console, could you upgrade
(26:09):
it so it's a personal computer. Well, that's what J.
Minor hadn't mind all along, and in fact what he
had been working on, so it suited him just fine.
It validated his arguments, and the team continued to focus
on building out the chips that would go into the
first Amiga computer. Dave Morse, who was the CEO of
the company, decided that the chips all needed to have
(26:31):
code names, which would protect the company's intellectual property. Anyone
overhearing the employees talking about these chips would just hear
the code names and not instead of whatever the chips
actually were. So he decided that all the chips should
be given women's names. So the three major chips in
the Amiga chips set were called Agnes, Denise, and Paula.
(26:56):
The computer's code name was Lorraine, so you had a
rain the computer with Agnes, de Nice and Paula as
the chips. The design team held frequent meetings and everyone
was free to pitch ideas at those meetings, arguing for
features they felt should be included in the chips set.
To reach a consensus, the team instituted an unusual practice
(27:17):
involving toy baseball bats made of foam, so if you
pitched an idea and people didn't like it, they bat
you over the head with the bats. They just hit
you with these foam baseball bats. It was harmless, but
according to j Minor, it was a humiliating experience. Minor
had read about and taken a course in a special
(27:38):
type of co processor called a blitter, also known as
a blitter circuit. A blitter, which is b L I
T T e R, can manipulate and move data inside
a computer's memory quickly without having to text the CPU,
so it works in parallel with the CPU. It can
copy data from one block of memory, can move it
(27:59):
to where it needs to be, and the CPU can
just continue its own operations without having to expend any
resources to do this. And this blitter would allow the
Amiga to handle much more advanced graphics without overtaxing the
CPU compared to other computers on the market. Minor also
ended up working on a design for what was called
(28:20):
a hold and Modify mode or HAM mode h a M.
This was a way to kind of trick the system
into showing more colors on screen than it was technically
capable of doing, just based on the amount of memory
in the machine. So the memory served as a limitation,
a limiting factor. You couldn't show too many colors because
(28:41):
the amount of information you needed to represent the colors, hue,
its brightness, it's you know, it's opaqueness, all of those things.
Those values would take up memory space, and memory was expensive,
so to keep costs down and maximize efficiency, Minor and
his team started to work on this design, and HAM
(29:02):
mode would allow programmers to designate a line of pixels
as a single color and then make changes to just
one of the three properties that define that color, as
in hue, saturation, or luminosity. In this mode, the Amiga
computer would be able to display four thousand, nineties six colors,
which was light years ahead of the competition. They also
(29:25):
designed what they called the Copper chip. This chip had
three different instructions on it, all in order to exert
direct control of the computer's display, and the chip could
also access any part of the other display chips. It
would allow the Amiga to have multiple windows open side
by side at once, even when each window had contents
displaying at different resolutions, which is pretty phenomenal. The chip
(29:48):
code named AGNES, would contain the blitter and copper chips
and was in charge of handling direct access to the
computer's memory. Denise was a display chip that would produce sprites,
and a sp it is a two dimensional object that
hardware makers can use to create a composite of the
sprite along with the background. It allows the sprite to
move across the background without the need to having to
(30:11):
with redraw everything every time the sprite moves. Paula's job
was as a dedicated sound generation chip. It would control
four channels of audio, two on the left stereo channel,
two on the right stereo channel. That would give the
Amiga much greater sound reproduction capability than competing computers in
the early nineties. So this design phase slowly moved from
(30:34):
white boards to bread boards. So now it's time to
talk about bread boards what that means, and kind of
wrap up this episode. A bread board is a base
for building circuits and electronics. Uh It was also known
as or It is also known as a plug board
because it's a board into which you can plug chips
and wires. Today's bread boards are really super nice. You
(30:55):
don't have to solder connections between components. You just plug
everything in and the bread board itself has a little
layer of metal on the underside that allows connections, so
you don't have to actually solder everything together. But back
in the day you did have to do soldering. The
reason why that's really important is that today, because you
(31:16):
don't have to solder everything, you can reuse breadboards. You
just unplugged stuff and you plug new stuff in, so
you can very rapidly test out different circuit layouts, different designs.
Breadboard circuits are much much larger than the finalized type
of circuits that make their way into electronics. It's sort
(31:36):
of the macro scale of what you would eventually plan
to produce. So these chips that Miners team was developing, UH,
when manufactured, they would all fit to plug into the
motherboard for the first Amiga computer, But at this time
on breadboard form, they were huge, and by huge, i'm
talking about chips that would measure several feet along one side.
(31:59):
Each chip would have eight bread boards connected together to
simulate what the final chip would do. So Agnes was
eight bread boards, Denise was eight bread boards, Paula was
eight bread boards. Each bread board would hold three hundred
m s I logic chips. So for all three of
(32:20):
the simulated chips for Agnes, for Denise, for Paula, collectively
you had seven thousand, two hundred separate logic chips for
these simulated chips, and they all had to be wired together.
All those bread boards had to be wired together, all
those components had to be wired properly. So there were
a ridiculous number of wires connecting everything and each of
(32:43):
those simulated chips, and as you can imagine, that made
connecting and moving the bread boards really difficult to do
because one wrong move and you would introduce a system
crashing bug by knocking loose another connection. Then you'd have
to track down which connect was loose and reconnected properly.
The team hooked up their simulated chip set to a
(33:05):
sixty eight thousand processor and then they fired it up
and it worked. But that was just the hardware side.
In our next episode, we'll pick up by talking about
the software that was in development to run on this
first Amiga computer, and we'll also look at how the
company nearly got swept up by Atari after finding itself
in financial trouble, and we'll learn the crazy Game of
(33:28):
Thrones like story involving the company Commodore as well, and
it really does get pretty crazy in the meantime, If
you have any suggestions for future episodes of Tech Stuff,
whether it's a company, a technology, a person in tech.
Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or have
on as a guest host, let me know. Send me
an email the address for the show is tech Stuff
(33:48):
at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a
line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle with both of
those is tech Stuff h s W. Maybe you are
getting a little chilly, you know, as the weather starting
to cool down, you could probably use an extra shirt.
I got a suggestion, go to t public dot com
slash tech Stuff. We've got designs that look great on
(34:09):
shirts and you should probably buy one. Also, every purchase
goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it.
Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk
to you again really soon for more on this and
thousands of other topics because at how stuff works dot com.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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