Joe Decuir
Joe Decuir is an IEEE fellow engineer. He graduated from Berkeley in 1974, receiving a degree in electrical engineering and computer science.
In 1975 he bought one of the very first 6502 chips at Wescon '75. Upon being interviewed at Atari later that year, he was already familiar with the architecture of the processor and how to program it. They had a Tank! arcade machine in the lobby which Joe played so well, he was hired immediately.
He left Atari in June, 1979. It was during this time Joe learned of the Minitel terminals being used in France and decided to work in the telecommunications field.
After leaving Atari, he joined Standard Technologies and worked on telecom projects including a telephone answering device for the IBM PC.
In the Fall of '82 he was contacted by Jay Miner and became badge #3 at Amiga, then called Hi-Toro. He revisited the block diagram for a 16-bit "entertainment computer", drawn back when he worked at Atari. Joe was one of the architects of the whiteboard drawing of the Amiga Lorraine system hardware. He also drew up much of the early schematics for Agnus and timing diagrams.
However by the following year, it became expensive to keep him at Amiga. He was paid through April and eventually stopped showing up altogether.
In 1984 he started a consulting company, Teledesign. One of their early projects was for Atari designing a parallel/serial card for their 1090 XL Expansion System. Joe and Teledesign also worked on the unreleased AnswerMate telephone answering device for the Amiga 1000. Teledesign was later sold to Everex, who he would stay on with designing modems.
He joined Microsoft in 1992.
References
- Joseph Decuir - IEEE Xplore
- Decuir, Joseph Three generations of animation machines - IEEE Potentials - Vol. 41 Issue 2 - 2022
- Decuir, Joseph Three generations of animation machines: Atari and Amiga Filmed at Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest - 3/23/2019
- Stilphen, Scott Joe Decuir Digital Press
