CompuServe Messages

I don't think I ever wrote much about Jay, but Mike Todd did an interview with him (I was sitting in at the time, but didn't take notes) and wrote it up in the UK version of the TRANSACTOR. That must have been around 1989 or so. Jay was a huge man–very tall and big-boned. He was friendly to everyone, and made no fuss about himself. He was kind and gentle. I only met him personally on two or three occasions. Once, he was asked to speak at an Amiga show in Houston, and he asked my husband and me to come down and spend some time with him that weekend. (This was during the time he was online here nearly every night.) We went, and spent a great part of the weekend in his company…along with people who were sponsoring the show, of course. We shared several meals, spent some time talking in the lobby of his hotel, and on Sunday, one of the show sponsors – once in charge of all the TV activity at NASA near Houston) took the three of us on a tour of the NASA facilities. It was a great weekend, and we came away feeling that we knew Jay pretty well. Another time, he came to speak at a show in the Dallas area, and I was one of the people working on that show. It was during that weekend that Mike Todd interviewed Jay. There are others in this forum who knew Jay much better than I did. I chatted with him online, and visited with him those two weekends, but not much more. I didn't find him to be eccentric. I thought him to be just a very nice, friendly, warm-hearted man. He liked to talk of his family, of his little dogs, of his sister who had donated a kidney and thus enabled him to live a number of years longer. The sister later died of cancer, which brought him much grief. He talked of his boat and the good times he had on it, and he was always willing to tell about the development of the Amiga. But I really think Jay was at least as proud of some other chips he developed. Before doing the Amiga…and after leaving the Amiga…he had a job developing chips to go in pacemakers. Some of the most interesting of our conversations involved his plans for those chips and the things he felt he could do to improve pacemakers. He received considerable satisfaction from that work. I don't know if I have the article that Mike wrote, and I'm not even certain that Mike still has a copy. I'll ask him, though. There were several articles written by people who interviewed Jay, and they appeared in quite a few magazines in the 'olden days.' —Betty