amiga-news.de - Dave Haynie: CTO of Merlancia Industries

12.Jul.2001
Merlancia Industries

Dave Haynie: CTO of Merlancia Industries
Dave Haynie is the new CTO of Merlancia Industries. Dave Haynie might be well known by any Amiga user, cause he's a kind of living legend. The following is a brief summary of his career so far:

Dave Haynie studied electronic engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University. After his studies four month of employment at General Electric he was hired by Commodore in September 1983 to support their "TED" project, which was started by Jack Tramiel. Later the C116 emerged from the "TED" project. While his times at Commodore Haynie decisively worked on many projects, like several 8 bit machines (e.g. C128), the Amigas A500, A2000, A2500, A3000, and A4000, Zorro-III, and he took part in the development of the AA and AAA chipsets, etc..

All in all he spent 11½ years at Commodore. 'Beside' of that he wrote about 50 articles for Amiga magazines of those times; Amiga Sentry, .Info, Amiga Transactor, Amazing Computing, Amiga World, etc.. Furthermore he wrote some developer tools and the FFS tool "DiskSalv".

Some of his 'stations' at Commodore:

1983: Commodore "TED" project, low-cost VIC-20 replacement.
1984: Commodore 128 project, the sequel to the venerable Commodore 64..
1986: Amiga 2000-B - slot-based Amiga. He designed the gate-array (Buster) and a "coprocessor interface" for the CPU slot.
1988: Amiga 2620/2630: 68020/30 CPU cards for the Amiga 2000.
1989: Amiga 3000: First fully 32-bit Amiga architecture. As a co-creator of the system, he designed the basic system architecture, the Zorro III expansion bus standard, and the "Buster" bus control gate array which implemented Zorro III.
1991: Amiga 3000+": initially a product oriented design, this coupled the new Amiga "AA" system/graphics chipset, an AT&T DSP3210 media coprocessor, 16-bit audio and modem CODECs, etc. Management changes canceled the project, though some of its "DNA" lived on the Amiga 4000 and 1200. He also developed basic modular "Acutiator" architecture for next-generation Amiga systems.
1992: Developed 32-bit SCSI controller for Amiga 4000, architecture for stand-alone DSP add-in cards, and prototype of "AAA" motherboard, for Commodore's 4th generation, 64-bit Amiga graphics system. System works, but by 1993, there's no money left to fix the four full-custom ASICs.
1994: Developed plug-in graphics subsystem for the Amiga. Commodore declares bankruptcy, this is never built.

Haynie created a 2-hours video about the last day at Commodore and the goodbye-party, known by the name of "The Deathbed Vigil and Other Tales of Digital Angst". This video for example is as a bonus content of the "Amiga Forever" CD by Cloanto.

After his times at Commodore Dave Haynie worked for the Scala Inc. company for a short time, where about 80% of the former Commodore engineers met, again. In November 1995 Amiga Technologies contracted him to consult for the PowerAmiga project. He developed a concept, but due to Escom's financial problems this project got canceled.

After that, in May 1996, Haynie was contracted by the PIOS Computer AG, where he was in charge of the hardware. Shortly before founded by Stefan Domeyer PIOS engaged also other former Amiga Int. or Commodore employees, among them such clinking names like Dr. Peter Kittel and Andy Finkel. PIOS formed up to become a successful distributor of PowerPC hardware and to make the PowerAmiga dream reality - the term of "PiosONE" was born.

Later from the PIOS Computer AG the Met@box AG emerged, a group of meanwhile six companies with among other things Settop boxes as part of their product line. Me@box made application for insolvency in May 2001.

More stations on Haynie's way:

1999 - Fleecy Moss started the KOSH project to develop a new open source operating system for the Amiga - Dave Haynie is responsible for the hardware. systems and audio.
1999 - The "Phoenix Platform Consortium" to define the Amiga's future was founded - beside of Dave Haynie also Carl Sassenrath, RJ Mical, Wolf Dietrich (Phase 5), and Dan Dodge (QNX) were part of it.
2001 - In July Dave Haynie became CTO of Merlancia Industries.

He contributed information for the "The International Technology And. Computing Historical Association" ITACHA, who collect 'artefacts' from technic and computer industry and make these information available online. Unfortunately at this time there is only one page about the "C65" available.

Also a really rich source for Amiga devotees are the "The Dave Haynie Archives".

Last but not least it might be to mention that he became known and dear to many of the Amiga community as a an unweary, all-time helpful co-worker/partner/friend. (ps) (Translation: mj)

[News message: 12. Jul. 2001, 20:43] [Comments: 0]
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