Jay Miner

Jay ' Glenn ' Miner ( born May 31, 1932 in Prescott, Arizona, † 20 June 1994 in Mountain View, California ) was a chip designer and is considered among others as the father of the Amiga home computer.

Life

After completing his studies in electrical engineering in 1958 at the University of California at Berkeley Miner worked for various companies where he developed digital voltmeter and electronic calculators and others. Mid-1970s, Miner went to Atari. There he was ( Video Computer System ) is involved in the development of the VCS. Later, he developed the central components of the Atari 400 and Atari 800 series ( ANTIC and GTIA ).

After Miner left Atari and in the meantime developed chips for pacemakers, he founded the company in 1982 along with other HiToro, which was later renamed Amiga. Especially for camouflage, the company developed joysticks and other hardware for computer and video games, but was secretly working on a new computer platform. While the donors wanted a video game console, was Miners target the development of a complete computer. Among Miners lead the special chips ( " custom chips " ) were developed, which was then awarded unmatched graphics and sound options the later Amiga computers. Even after the purchase of Amiga by Commodore International Miner worked on further "his" computer.

1989 Miner left due to health problems and disagreements with the management Commodore. 1990 had to be planted him a kidney to his sister. The last project he developed a defibrillator. Jay Miner died in 1994 of kidney failure.