Signatures, a paw and a pillow

Open an Amiga 1000 and you find a surprise on the inside of the lid: dozens of signatures in relief. The team that designed the machine signed the mould used to cast the top half of the plastic case, so the names appear on every unit made. The most prominent signature is Jay Miner's ^[1].

The idea was not new. The original Macintosh team had done the same in the case of the Mac 128K, in 1984 ^[2]. And one engineer is on both: Ron Nicholson, who was on the original Macintosh team from 1980 to 1982 and then a founder and director of engineering at Amiga, has his name in the moulds of both computers ^[3]. The pre-production units for developers, codenamed Velvet, did not yet carry the signatures ^[2].

When a circuit could go either way, Jay Miner looked at his dog and let her decide.

Next to Miner's name is a paw print: that of Mitchy, his dog ^{[1] [2]}. Mitchy went to the office with him, had her own name plate by the desk and, Jeremy Reimer recounts, even helped with the chip design: when a circuit could be wired in two equally good ways, Miner would look at the dog and let her reaction decide ^[4].

Among the signatures there is another odd name: Joe Pillow. The best-known version, which still circulates (and is on Wikipedia itself), says Joe Pillow was the name on the ticket for the extra seat bought to fly the Lorraine prototype to the January 1984 CES ^[2].

In 2025, Dale Luck told a different story. Joe Pillow never went to CES and never had a ticket. He was born in February 1984, on a flight from New Orleans to San José, as Luck and R. J. Mical were returning from SoftCon, where they had gone to recruit developers. To keep the empty seat between them, they put a backpack on it, dressed it in a jacket and stuck an airline pillow with a face drawn on it on top ^[5].

According to Luck, a flight attendant pulled its head off, a lady across the aisle offered her own pillow so Joe could come back, and the dummy ended the flight "reading" papers on the tray table and sleeping against his shoulder. A month later a letter from a passenger arrived at the Amiga office, with photographs ^[5]. Joe Pillow became famous enough to join Mitchy's paw among the signatures in the case ^[2].