The ball that bounced before the computer

In January 1984 the Amiga was not yet a computer. It was called Lorraine, and it was a jumble of breadboards built from off-the-shelf parts, the size of a kitchen table, joined by a tangle of wires often held on with crocodile clips. It had no keyboard: programs were written on a Sage IV, a 68000 workstation, and sent to Lorraine over a cable. That is how the team carried it, with great care, to the Winter CES in Las Vegas, which opened on 4 January ^[1].

The Amiga was not on show to everyone. The demonstrations ran in a private corner of the stand, only for journalists and invited industry people. The one that impressed most, Jimmy Maher recounts, was written by R. J. Mical and Dale Luck at the show itself, in an all-nighter fuelled by "a six pack of warm beer": a huge red-and-white chequered ball that bounced up and down ^[1].

The stereo boom escaped the closed stand and sent the whole hall looking for the source of the noise.

The trick is that almost nothing was drawn in real time. The ball is drawn just once, at start-up, and the rotation is a colour-cycling illusion: the palette colours keep swapping places and the squares seem to spin. The movement comes from changing the scroll offsets of the bitplanes, in hardware, using almost no processor time. There are three planes for the ball, one for the grid and one for the shadow, 32 colours in low resolution ^[3].

In June 1984, at the Summer CES in Chicago, Lorraine's chips had been turned into silicon and the Boing came back improved: the ball now also bounced from side to side and gained recorded booms that moved from one speaker to the other. The stereo sound of the Paula chip escaped the closed stand and made visitors in the hall look around for the source of the noise ^[2].

The story goes that the "boom" was recorded with Bob Pariseau, the head of software ^[2], hitting an aluminium garage door with a foam baseball bat while an Apple II sampled the sound from inside ^[4]. It is one of the most repeated Amiga stories, but we have not found it in a primary source: it stays a story that is told.

The ball stuck. It became the unofficial symbol of the Amiga ^[1] and, according to Jimmy Maher, Commodore's salespeople had a favourite routine: start the Boing, pull the screen halfway down and type in a word processor on the other half, with the ball bouncing and booming alongside. In 1985, seeing a personal computer do two things at once like that was astonishing ^[1]. It's said that the original team wanted the Boing Ball as the official logo, but Commodore preferred the multicoloured double tick ^[5].