Jay Miner

Jay Miner (May 31, 1932 - June 20, 1994), was a chip designer, best known for his work on multimedia chips. He graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Berkeley in 1959.

Jay Miner (1990).

He began by making designs for the medical world, including a remote-controlled pacemaker, but moved to Atari in the late 1970s.

Once at Atari he managed to combine an entire board of components onto a single chip, known as the TIA. The TIA was the display hardware for the Atari 2600, which would go on to sell millions of units. After his work at the TIA, he went on to design its successors, which would be the basis for the Atari 8-bit series of home computers, known as the ANTIC and the CTIA.

In the early 1980s, Jay and other Atari employees got fed up with the company's management and left. They created a new chipset project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed Amiga), where they would have creative freedom. There they created a new video game console based on the 68000, codenamed Lorraine, which would eventually be converted into a complete computer. To raise funding for the Lorraine project, the Amiga designed and sold joysticks and game cartridges for popular consoles like the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision as well as other exotic input devices like the joyboard (which was basically a joystick in the shape of a mat on which the player got on).

In 1984, Warner Brothers got tired of Atari and sold the company to the only interested investor, Jack Tramiel, a former head of Commodore.

Tramiel invested $500,000 in the Lorraine project, hoping to use the results in the next line of 32-bit machines that would replace Atari's line of home computers. When the Amiga was about to run out of money, Commodore absorbed the entire Amiga staff and the Lorraine project, just before Tramiel could control the company. He sued Amiga for that $500,000 which was never returned, even though Commodore provided them with a million dollars to pay off the debts.

Jay worked at Commodore-Amiga for several years at the Los Gatos, California facility. The beginnings were bright, but as Commodore's management changed, they gradually became more and more marginalized until the original Amiga staff had been laid off one by one and the Los Gatos office was closed. Jay later worked as a consultant for Commodore until the company went bankrupt.

The original Amiga (1985).

Jay Miner's signature on a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer.

He was known as the Father of the Amiga among Amiga users.

Jay always brought her dog "Mitchy" everywhere. While working at Atari, Mitchy even had his own ID card, and Mitchy's fingerprint is visible on the inside of early Amiga 1000 cases alongside the signatures of the engineers who worked on development.

He suffered from kidney failure for most of his life, according to his wife, and was dependent on dialysis. His sister donated one of his kidneys to her, and four years later Miner died of complications following kidney failure at age 62, two months after Commodore's bankruptcy.