Ron Nicholson

Ron Nicholson was badge #11 and Director of Hardware Engineering at the original Amiga company on Scott Boulevard. Early on he helped draw up the Lorraine system architecture on the whiteboard. When it came time to make the first silicon, he was responsible for determining how much circuitry would fit on each 48-pin chip. He contributed to designs for the custom chips including the blitter and DMA circuits for the Agnus chip. He previously worked at Apple designing chips for the original Macintosh computer.

While at Apple working on the Macintosh, he was assigned with the task of designing a custom CMOS clock chip. Steve Jobs got him in touch Jay Miner at ZyMos, calling him "the best chip designer I know". Steve wanted the Macintosh to have a monochrome display with no option for color, a decision which Ron and fellow engineer Dan Kottke weren't too keen on. Ron left Apple and wanted to work at Amiga once he heard they were designing a color game machine.

Before working at Apple, he was at BTI Computer and met future Amiga employees Dave Dean, Mark Shieu and Bob Pariseau.