Dave Haynie is the former Commodore International

Commodore International

Commodore is the commonly used name for Commodore Business Machines , the U.S.-based home computer manufacturer and electronics manufacturer headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania, which also housed Commodore's corporate parent company, Commodore International Limited...

 chief engineer on high end and advanced projects. He is still quite vocal in the Amiga community.

Beginnings

Dave was born David Bruce Haynie on May 23, 1961, in Summit, New Jersey

Summit, New Jersey

Summit is a city in Union County, New Jersey, United States. At the 2010 United States Census, the city's population was 21,457. Summit had the 16th-highest per capita income in the state as of the 2000 Census....

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. He moved to Colts Neck, New Jersey, in 1966, where he lived out his childhood with his three younger sisters. A few early Heathkit

Heathkit

Heathkits were products of the Heath Company, Benton Harbor, Michigan. Their products included electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television receivers, amateur radio equipment, electronic ignition conversion modules for early model cars with point style ignitions, and...

 projects, and, at the age of 12, a run-in with his dad's borrowed HP desktop calculator changed his life forever. From 12 years on, he taught himself programming, initially on timeshare

Time-sharing

Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...

 systems from his dad's account at Bell Laboratories. Later on, he wrote programs on his best friend Scott Scherer's Commodore PET

Commodore PET

The Commodore PET was a home/personal computer produced from 1977 by Commodore International...

 2001, the first home computer he had seen up close.

He left for college at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 in 1979. Four years later, he graduated with a double BS in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics.

The Commodore years

He started work at Commodore

Commodore International

Commodore is the commonly used name for Commodore Business Machines , the U.S.-based home computer manufacturer and electronics manufacturer headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania, which also housed Commodore's corporate parent company, Commodore International Limited...

 in 1983 as an engineer under Bil Herd

Bil Herd

Bil Herd was a designer of 8-bit home computers while working for Commodore Business Machines in the early-to-mid 1980s. After first acting as the principal engineer on the Commodore Plus/4, C16/116, C264, and C364 machines, Herd designed the significantly more successful Commodore 128, a dual-CPU,...

. His first project was to help complete the TED

MOS Technology TED

The 7360 Text Editing Device was an integrated circuit made by MOS Technology, Inc. It was a video chip that also contained sound generation hardware, DRAM refresh circuitry, interval timers, and keyboard input handling. It was designed for the Commodore Plus/4 and 16...

 systems comprising Plus/4

Commodore Plus/4

The Commodore Plus/4 was a home computer released by Commodore International in 1984. The "Plus/4" name refers to the four-application ROM resident office suite ; it was billed as "the productivity computer with software built-in"...

, C16

Commodore 16

The Commodore 16 was a home computer made by Commodore with a 6502-compatible 8501 CPU, released in 1984. It was intended to be an entry-level computer to replace the VIC-20 and it often sold for 99 USD...

 and more. After completing the Commodore 128

Commodore 128

The Commodore 128 home/personal computer was the last 8-bit machine commercially released by Commodore Business Machines...

 Bil Herd left the company and Dave Haynie was promoted to chief engineer in the low-end group. After Commodore acquired Amiga

Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

, Dave Haynie ended up primary engineer on the expandable A2000

Amiga 2000

The Amiga 2000, or A2000, is a personal computer released by Commodore in 1986. It is the successor to the Amiga 1000.-Features:Aimed at the high-end market, the original Europe-only model adds a Zorro II backplane, implemented in programmable logic, to the custom Amiga chipset used in the Amiga 1000...

 computer. Later, he joined Bob Welland on the A2620 CPU module, and launched the follow-up A2630 the year thereafter. These were delivered in the A2500/20

Amiga 2500

The Amiga 2500, also known as the A2500, was not a distinct Amiga model, but simply a marketing name for a Commodore Amiga 2000 bundled with a Motorola 68020 or 68030-based accelerator card. The accelerator cards used by the A2500 were also available separately as upgrades for the A2000...

 (1989) and A2500/30

Amiga 2500

The Amiga 2500, also known as the A2500, was not a distinct Amiga model, but simply a marketing name for a Commodore Amiga 2000 bundled with a Motorola 68020 or 68030-based accelerator card. The accelerator cards used by the A2500 were also available separately as upgrades for the A2000...

 (1989).

In 1989 he started designing the Zorro III

Zorro III

Released as the expansion bus of the Commodore Amiga 3000 in 1990, the Zorro III computer bus was used to attach peripheral devices to an Amiga motherboard. Designed by Commodore International lead engineer Dave Haynie, the 32-bit Zorro III replaced the 16-bit Zorro II bus used in the Amiga 2000...

 expansion bus architecture, and in 1990, with Greg Berlin, Hedley Davis, Jeff Boyer, and Scott Hood, created the Amiga 3000

Amiga 3000

The Commodore Amiga 3000, or A3000, was the third major release in the Amiga computer family. Released in June 1990, it features improved processing speed, improved rendering of graphics, and a new revision of the operating system...

.

On completing the A3000 he was transferred to advanced projects, working with Bob Raible on the "AA" system (formerly "Pandora"), Commodore's first full 24-bit color computer technology, which led to the A3000+ prototype, and ultimately to A4000

Amiga 4000

The Commodore Amiga 4000, or A4000, is the successor of the A2000 and A3000 computers. There are two models, the A4000/040 released in October 1992 with a Motorola 68040 CPU, and the A4000/030 released in April 1993 with a Motorola 68EC030....

 and A1200

Amiga 1200

The Amiga 1200, or A1200 , was Commodore International's third-generation Amiga computer, aimed at the home market...

 computers, Commodore's last commercial efforts. He also worked on a system for the Advanced Amiga Architecture chipset, a highly aggressive 64-bit graphic chipset started in 1993. He defined a new system architecture for this, the Acutiator project.

Most of this work, as most of the practical work at Commodore, was terminated by the end of 1993 due to financial problems within Commodore.
Dave Haynie left Commodore in June 1994, over a month after the bankruptcy, for Scala, Inc. He made a two-hour film of the last days of Commodore, from the West Chester Engineer's perspective, released in 1994, called The Deathbed Vigil and other tales of digital angst.

That first startup

Driven in part by the experiences of his friends at Amiga, he joined Scala, Inc. The goal here was to advance some desktop presentation technology for use on other platforms. Dave's ability to switch-hit hardware and software was useful; Scala planned a hardware project, but not initially. He designed Scala's "Class Definition Language" and compiler, some high level tools for the operating system Scala was defining for portable multimedia. But the hardware projects never came around.

In 1995, Haynie did some consulting, along with Andy Finkel, for Amiga Technologies, the company resulting from Escom

Escom

ESCOM, previously Schmitt Computer Systems Ltd., was a German computer company, best known in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands as the successful purchaser of Commodore International in 1995....

's acquisition of the Commodore assets. He and Finkel defined a next generation Amiga platform, based on a $500 PowerPC platform and a whole new version of AmigaOS. However, ESCOM's own financial problems killed this before it went very far.

The set-top revolution

The Amiga Technologies experience, however, wasn't for naught. Some of the managers liked what they saw in Haynie and Finkel. In June 1996 he joined managers Stefan Domeyer and Geerd Ebeling a German startup company initially called PIOS Computer, later renamed to Metabox. Metabox was initially selling Apple Macintosh clones

Clone (computer science)

In computing, a clone is a hardware or software system that is designed to mimic another system. Compatibility with the original system is usually the explicit purpose of cloning hardware or low-level software such as operating systems...

 and attempting to sell Amiga follow-on systems based on the PowerPC

PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...

 processor. An attempt to get a license to AmigaOS

AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000...

 failed. Instead the company sold BeOS

BeOS

BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing...

 to Apple Macintosh clones

Clone (computer science)

In computing, a clone is a hardware or software system that is designed to mimic another system. Compatibility with the original system is usually the explicit purpose of cloning hardware or low-level software such as operating systems...

 and BeBox

BeBox

The BeBox was a short-lived dual processor personal computer, offered by Be Inc. to run the company's own operating system, BeOS. Notable aspects of the system include its CPU configuration, I/O board with "GeekPort", and "Blinkenlights" on the front bezel....

 to the German market. Thanks to a lucky hire of Thomas Rudloff, an Amiga/Macintosh CPU board wizard, Metabox shipped the first commercial Macintosh-compatible system to run at 300 MHz.

After Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...

 shut down Macintosh compatibles, Metabox went in a different direction: the advanced set-top box

Set-top box

A set-top box or set-top unit is an information appliance device that generally contains a tuner and connects to a television set and an external source of signal, turning the signal into content which is then displayed on the television screen or other display device.-History:Before the...

. The first effort, the Metabox 100, simply enabled users to cheaply access Metabox's ISP

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

 service—kind of a German WebTV. The follow-up Metabox 500 was one of the first multimedia

Multimedia

Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...

 STB's around, adding video and high quality audio.

The big plan, however, was for the Metabox 1000, a ground up new design in hardware and software. This system used a smallish 90 MHz Coldfire as the main processor, but allowed all kinds of modular upgrades: for video, for DTV, for encryption. It tuned analog TV, DVB, played DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

, MP3

MP3

MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

, accessed network resources, did fully functional Web browsing and email, etc. In short, one of the first multi-function STBs. The home grown system design was enhanced by an AmigaOS-like operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 designed by Andy Finkel and Carsten Schlote. This system won much praise from Metabox's targets (large cable and satellite companies), but the company started failing. This was due to both the bad financial climate of 2000-2001, rumors of fraud and other monkey business, and German local law which was forcing the company to stop paying the development team (many consultants and non-Germans), while they kept the local people (at their peak, Metabox employed about 260 people). Haynie was quoted as saying, at their peak, his shares were worth about US$5.6million (sales were locked out from the IPO); but by the time he left the company, they owed him US$75,000, which was never repaid.

Fortele

After Metabox, Haynie did a number of consulting

Consultant

A consultant is a professional who provides professional or expert advice in a particular area such as management, accountancy, the environment, entertainment, technology, law , human resources, marketing, emergency management, food production, medicine, finance, life management, economics, public...

 gigs. Some paid well, some didn't pay, and none of it was terribly exciting. In 2002 he got back together with Andy Finkel and two other ex-Commodore

Commodore International

Commodore is the commonly used name for Commodore Business Machines , the U.S.-based home computer manufacturer and electronics manufacturer headquartered in West Chester, Pennsylvania, which also housed Commodore's corporate parent company, Commodore International Limited...

 people, Robert Russell

Robert Russell

-Politics:*Bob Russell , British Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester*Bob Russell , former leader of the Liberal Party of Alberta and municipal councillor in St. Albert, Alberta*Robert B...

and Neil Harris, to form Fortele, Inc. The plan here was whole house media networking. Their approach was to make every audio/video appliance just a node on the network, make the system know the user and learn his habits, etc. But despite the technology working well, the business part failed even before the dog and pony show

Dog and pony show

Dog and pony show is a colloquial term previously used in the United States in the late-19th and early-20th centuries to refer to small traveling circuses that toured through small towns and rural areas...

 had been finished.

Robots and radios

After Fortele, Haynie started working for Nomadio, Inc. Nomadio, Inc. is founded by Bhana Grover and Alex Gizis, both veterans of 1990s Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 startups. Haynie was initially hired on to work on a full robot

Robot

A robot is a mechanical or virtual intelligent agent that can perform tasks automatically or with guidance, typically by remote control. In practice a robot is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or...

 project. However, Nomadio decided it was better to create a radio platform that would control radio control cars or cost effective robots. Nomadio had released the first all-digital controller for high performance radio-controlled

Radio control

Radio control is the use of radio signals to remotely control a device. The term is used frequently to refer to the control of model vehicles from a hand-held radio transmitter...

 cars. At the same time Nomadio began producing hardened version of digital controller for military robots.Dave Haynie was instrumental in producing the Nomadio GC-205 , the radio controller that is used to operate the Bombot and other robots.

Dave Haynie has also an engineering and multimedia company called Frog Pond Media, which has served to indulge his love of digital audio and video studio work, and fill in the gaps between startup companies.

External links

• Wikipedia DE on Metabox
• Long interview with Dave Haynie (Not in english)
• Carsten Schlote's homepage with details on the Metabox 1000 OS 'CaOS' (Old Link)
• Interview (in Norwegian) with Dave Haynie (archive version)
• Frog Pond Media
• Deathbed Vigil DVD
• Nomadio, Inc.
• The Dave Haynie Archives
• "On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" ISBN 0-9738649-0-7