Dave Haynie - The Commodore Years

The Commodore Years

He started work at Commodore in 1983 as an engineer under Bil Herd. His first project was to help complete the TED systems comprising Plus/4, C16 and more. After completing the Commodore 128 Bil Herd left the company and Dave Haynie was promoted to chief engineer in the low-end group. After Commodore acquired Amiga, Dave Haynie ended up primary engineer on the expandable A2000 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 (1989) and A2500/30 (1989).

In 1989 he started designing the Zorro III expansion bus architecture, and in 1990, with Greg Berlin, Hedley Davis, Jeff Boyer, and Scott Hood, created the Amiga 3000.

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 and A1200 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.