Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!polya!ali
From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Interesting bit of history from Jay Miner...
Message-ID: <3996@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 17 Sep 88 17:15:44 GMT
Reply-To: aozer@NeXT.com (Ali T. Ozer)
Organization: NeXT, Inc
Lines: 21

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Jay Miner, the designer of the Amiga chipset, was the speaker at
September BADGE, held on the 17th. He took questions from the audience
and told many fascinating stories about the Amiga's past and present. 
A wonderful man!

Anyway, having heard the rumor that he was against putting the HAM mode
on the chips, I asked him how the HAM mode came about. Well, it turns out
that in the original design, the color registers held HSV values instead
of RGB values. Thus, while in the HAM mode, you could take a pixel, and
alter one of the three parameters, hue, saturation, or value, to get the
next pixel. And, that makes a lot of sense! Well, more so that taking a 
pixel and altering it's R, G, or B component... When the color register
design changed from storing HSV values to RGB values, Jay wanted to take
the HAM stuff out, but it remained anyway, and thus we got the 
not-so-highly-intuitive HAM mode. Of course, good thing we did. Jay himself
also admitted that he was fascinated and amazed by all the HAM stuff out
there; he never thought it'd be used...

Ali Ozer, aozer@NeXT.com
NeXT Developer Support