Portal:Amiga/Selected biography

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Selected biography 1

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/1

Image taken at the first Amiga show in Cologne (Köln). Front row from left to right, Matt Dillon and Fred Fish

Fred Fish (November 4, 1952 – April 20, 2007) was a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger and his series of Fish disks of freeware for the Amiga. He was a pioneering spirit pervasive in the Amiga community. The Fish Disks (term coined by Perry Kivolowitz at a Jersey Amiga User Group meeting) became the first national rallying point, a sort of early postal system. Fish would get his disks off around the world in time for regional and local user group meetings who in turn duplicated them for local consumption. Typically, only the cost of materials changed hands. The Fish Disk series ran from 1986 to 1994. In it, one can chart the growing sophistication of Amiga software and see the emergence of many software trends.

The Fish Disks were distributed at computer stores and Commodore Amiga enthusiast clubs. Contributors submitted applications and source code and the best of these each month were assembled and released as a diskette. Since the Internet was not yet in popular usage outside military and university circles, this was a primary way for enthusiasts to share work and ideas. He also initiated the "GeekGadgets" project, a GNU standard environment for AmigaOS and BeOS. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 2

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/2

RJ Mical signing an Amiga 1200 for the 25th anniversary of the Amiga computer, 2011

Robert J. "RJ" Mical (born 26 January) is a pioneer and an influential figure in the video game industry. He created video games at Williams Electronics, helped invent the Amiga computer, co-invented the Atari Lynx and the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer with Dave Needle. He was the central developer of Amiga's Intuition user interface and was well known at early Amiga gatherings. Mical was the Chief Architect of the Fathammer mobile game engine. From 2005 to 2011 he worked as a Senior Manager at Sony on the PlayStation product line. Since 2011 he has been working on software games and inventions with his own company, Arjinx. In 2012 he started working on game technology for Google. According to Mical he created his first electronic game, a tic-tac-toe player, when he was 14. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 3

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/3

Jay Miner in 1990

Jay Glenn Miner (May 31, 1932 – June 20, 1994) was an American integrated circuit designer, known primarily for developing multimedia chips for the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit family and as the "father of the Amiga". He received a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley in 1959.

He moved to Atari in the late 1970s. However, in the early 1980s Jay, along with other Atari staffers, had become fed up with management and decamped. They set up another chipset project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga Corporation), where they could have creative freedom. There, they started to create a new Motorola 68000-based games console, codenamed Lorraine, that could be upgraded to a computer. To raise money for the Lorraine project, Amiga Corp. designed and sold joysticks and game cartridges for popular game consoles such as the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision, as well as an odd input device called the Joyboard, essentially a joystick the player stood on. Atari continued to be interested in the team's efforts throughout this period, and funded them with $500,000 in capital in return for first use of their resulting chipset. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 4

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/4

Carl Sassenrath

Carl Sassenrath (born 1957 in California) is an architect of operating systems and computer languages. He brought multitasking to personal computers in 1985 with the creation of the Amiga Computer operating system kernel, and he is currently the designer of the REBOL computer language as well as the CTO of REBOL Technologies.

In the late 1960s his family relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area to the small town of Eureka, California. From his early childhood Sassenrath was actively involved in electronics, amateur radio, photography, and filmmaking. When he was 13, Sassenrath began working for KEET a PBS public broadcasting television station. A year later he became a cameraman for KVIQ (American Broadcasting Company affiliate then) and worked his way up to being technical director and director for news, commercials, and local programming. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 5

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/5 Daniel J. Barrett (born November 6, 1963) is a writer, software engineer, and musician. He is best known for his technology books, his work with progressive rock band Gentle Giant, and the imaginary computer game BLAZEMONGER.

Barrett has written a number of technical books on computer topics. The most well-known are Linux Pocket Guide and SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide. His books have been translated into Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 6

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/6

Matt Bielby in Bath, 2007.

Matt Bielby is a magazine editor based in the UK. He is best known for launching and editing many successful titles in assorted markets during the 1990s, mostly on the subjects of computer and video games, and film and television. These include .net, Amiga Power, Super Play and PC Gamer.

Bielby was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in 1965, and spent most of his early life in Bradford, West Yorks, where he attended Bradford Grammar School. (Full article...)

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Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/13 François Lionet is a French programmer, best known for having written STOS BASIC on the Atari ST and AMOS BASIC on the Amiga and (along with Constantin Sotiropoulos). He has also written several games on these platforms.

In 1994, he founded Clickteam with Yves Lamoureux, producing the Klik series of games-creation tools, including Multimedia Fusion. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 14

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/14 David Shannon Morse (April 15, 1943 – November 2, 2007) was the cofounder of Amiga. In 1982, he left Tonka Toys (where he was Vice-President of Marketing) and became the Chief Executive Officer at Hi Toro, Inc., which he co-founded and which later that year morphed into Amiga, Inc. which he led through the development of the Lorraine Project (a codename inspired by David's wife Lorraine), ultimately, the Amiga 1000 computer. In the 1980s he was a software manager at Epyx, a video game developer and publisher. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 15

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/15 Jeremy "Jez" San OBE (born 29 March 1966) is an English game programmer and entrepreneur who founded Argonaut Software as a teenager in the 1980s. He is best known for the 1986 Atari ST game Starglider and helping to design the Super FX chip used in Star Fox for the Super NES.

San bought his first computer, a TRS-80, at age twelve. Within a year he taught himself assembly language for several microprocessors.

San founded Argonaut Software in 1982 as a way to get software consulting jobs with large companies. He worked on security systems with British Telecom and Acorn. In 1984, he started developing his first game, Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64, and also co-wrote a book, Quantum Theory, about the Sinclair QL. He became a wizard (admin) at Essex MUD, the world's first multiplayer online role-playing game. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 16

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/16

Petro Tyschtschenko at an Amiga user club meeting in Tampere, Finland, in September 2014

Petro Taras Ostap Tyschtschenko (born 16 April 1943 in Vienna) is an Austrian-born German businessman best known for his work in the European market for the American computer company Commodore International.

Tyschtschenko first came into contact with Commodore in 1982, when he saw a job advertisement in a newspaper. Salomon+Schimmelmann, a German headhunter company, was looking for a new business administrator for Commodore. Tyschtschenko immediately signed up for a job interview, but was not hired. However, he later received a telephone call from Harald Speyer, the director of Commodore's German market, saying he would want to hire Tyschtschenko as a business administrator and wanted him to start as soon as possible. Tyschtschenko immediately resigned from his current job at the company Adressograph-Multigraph and joined Commodore the next day. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 17

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/17 David Whittaker (born 24 April 1957 in Bury, England) is known for numerous video game music which he wrote in most of the 1980s and early 1990s, for many different formats.

He is known for the large quantity of his works. The first games that featured his music were also designed and programmed by him, such as Lazy Jones.While making music, he often programmed music directly, instead of using any music composition tools, using just a "machine code monitor"—and then an 'assembler' system/program—including SuperSoft's and then Commodore's tools. Commodore 64 was the format that he composed for most frequently. He was more impressed with the Amiga's more developed technical sound capabilities, but used a few of the same instrument sounds, in several of his works, for Amiga. Thus, his Amiga music is often easy to recognise. (Full article...)

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Selected biography 18

Portal:Amiga/Selected biography/18

Circa. 2008

Tim Wright (born 31 July 1967), alias CoLD SToRAGE, is a Welsh video game music composer most known for his work in video game soundtracks such as Shadow of the Beast II & III, Agony, Lemmings, Wipeout and Colony Wars.

His first commercial works were created using the Commodore Amiga in the early 1990s and featured in computer games published by Psygnosis / Sony Computer Entertainment Studio Liverpool. (Full article...)

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