Dave Needle

Dave Lewis Needle was an electronics engineer whose skills and insistent approach made the Amiga computer see the light of day. He was born in New York City, NY on December 17, 1947. Prior to joining Amiga in 1983, he already had 14 years of experience under his belt. He received a B.E.E. from the City College of New York in 1969. That same year, he would design computer test equipment for the Navy, working on their VAST system.

In 1978, he began working at Tandem Computers, designing terminals. One of which he became the system architect for. Four years later, he started a consulting company, Software & Hardware Innovative Technologies (S.H.I.T.) along with Stan Shepard and Robert Ewell. They worked on several arcade games with Dave also designing his own, such as Change Lanes for Taito America and a Star Trek game for Midway. [1]

Upon interviewing at Amiga with Dave Morse, his attitude was seen as too arrogant and was dismissed by Morse, basically telling him to "Go away." While at Amiga's offices, Dave Needle saw the whiteboard with the architecture for the Lorraine computer. He had to work at this company, however possible. Dave called the next day and apologized to Dave Morse, who then gave him a second interview. He was hired.

When he started at Amiga, he was a janitor cleaning floors and organizing parts in the hardware lab. He started pitching design ideas to Glenn Keller who soon realized Dave was an engineer. He then began converting Glenn's silicon designs into PALs and wire-wrap boards.

After the departure of Joe Decuir, Dave began finishing the design for Agnus chip. He had never designed a chip before but Jay Miner showed him how. He later became the Amiga system architect and would eventually take over mechanical engineering. By 1984, he was designing the motherboards and doing FCC emissions control. When Dave became busy with other tasks, he realized someone else should take care of FCC compliance. For that purpose, he would hire Joe Fernandez, who he would use for future ventures until he retired. [2]

Not long after Commodore purchased Amiga in August '84, development systems were being sent out. These were the black boxes with the "chimney port" and a board for the gameport. By 1985, Commodore were considering cutting features from the computer for production, doing away with an expansion port and having less RAM onboard. Dave Needle came to the rescue by removing the costly "chimney" expansion and replacing it with an edge connector on the right side of the machine. He also designed an optional RAM expansion, or RAMEX which would connect to the front center of the computer. When it came closer to the computer's launch, it became apparent that the operating system wasn't stable enough to put in ROM. So Dave designed a special 256K write-protect memory board to load the OS into. This was likely an evolution of the write-protect RAM boards developers used with the black box. [4]

In 1986, a developer called Commodore but instead of being connected to a secretary, the call reached Dave's office. Upon answering the call, he realized the developer was being kept in the dark about specifications. The developer had designed a peripheral for the laserdisc interface, which was dropped in favor of a genlock. However Commodore did not inform him of this change. He knew of Commodore's plan to shut down Los Gatos. But this incident was the last straw. Dave Needle quit Commodore-Amiga and later that year, C= Amiga Los Gatos was no more. An Amiga wake was held, whose commemorative T-shirts showed the Commodore "chicken lips" logo deflating the Boing ball. Dave and RJ Mical would go on to work at Epyx. [2]

References

1. Resume - Dave Lewis Needle. Unpublished, 1986
2. Weddington, Zach, director. Viva Amiga: Further Into the Machine – Dave Needle Full Interview. Rock Steady Media, 2017
3. Caufield, Nicola and Anthony, directors. From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years]. Rebellion, 2015
4. Conroy, Chris and Crotty, Janice, directors. History of the Amiga. TechMedia Video, 1992