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by guru_meditation 4094 days ago
The hardware owes it all to Jay Miner and Ron Nicholson (rhn). Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff:

http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/photo-cv.html

Notice how he was the guy behind the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) for the Mac and the beautifully minimized Apple //c in addition to being one of the key persons in creating the essence of Amiga hardware magic: Denise, Copper and Blitter.

Carl Sassenrath and RJ Mical were super influential on the OS side, making a super lightweight preemptively multitasking OS with small components that messaged each other and the OS abstraction layers that the rest of the personal computing world will not see in the next 10+ years.

3 comments

I don't know if he is still selling them, but: http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/index.html

Dave Haynie, one of Commodores hardware engineers, films the last day at the Commodore plant. And the layoff party afterwards. Hilarious, informative, and sad at the same time.

I thought Wendell Sander did the IWM?

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Five_Different_Ma...

(and lots of other pages.)

I consider Andy Hertzfeld's site a very accurate reference as well as a patchwork of authentic fascinating stories that just draws you in.

However, Ron Nicholson (rhn) is on the Mac case signatures, he also did major work on Apple //, so I find it strange that he is not mentioned anywhere on folklore.org . I think this is something worth researching..

> Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff

Like he'd let a little thing like death stop him! :)

Ha! :) Sorry, meant to write "rhn is still out there", but I dropped I replied to hastily and by the time I figured it out it was too late to edit my post..