Lorraine

Lorraine was the original name for the Amiga computer, named after Dave Morse's wife. The system's basic architecture came together in about 6 to 12 weeks as it was drawn on a whiteboard in the original Santa Clara offices.

Ron Nicholson designed the initial wire wrap motherboards. The first one was wired by Ron himself, starting in April 1983. It had a 68000 and no sockets for the custom chips, as the stacks didn't exist yet.

The second and third boards were conceived together, the were codenamed 'War' and 'Peace'. The wire wrap PCBs were made by Twin Industries. Each had the 68000, 3 sockets for the custom chips and other logic for the system. However, Peace was the first board they got working. By December 1983, War as up and running. The full systems for each board were known as Respect and Satisfaction.

Wire wrap boards were also made for each of the custom chips before silicon was available. The wiring was done by embroiderers who were contracted to assemble a set of boards for each chip, using a schematic as a reference. The boards were then brought back to Amiga and were debugged by Dave Needle to verify that each connection was wired correctly. Additional debugging was done using a panel with switches and LEDs dubbed the switch and light box, which was built by Glenn Keller. This connected to Lorraine using the serial port and several probes.