Perry Kivolowitz

This biography also serves as first-hand insight into certain aspects of the history of the Commodore Amiga

Perry Kivolowitz is a computer scientist, inventor, author, father and business person. In 1985 after leaving ABD (All But Dissertation) graduate school, Dan Esenther and I founded ASDG, Inc. (Advanced Systems Design Group) to build hardware for the Commodore Amiga. A third partner was involved with the founding but left soon after. ASDG's first products were a 512KB memory board (expandable to 2MB) and an enclosure to put it in (Mini Rack).

I also co-founded JAUG (Jersey Amiga User Group) with Eric Lavitsky. JAUG was the second Amiga user group to be founded in the world, predated only by FAUG (naturally enough, First Amiga User Group). JAUG met at the New Brunswick, New Jersey campus of Rutgers. A major highlight of each JAUG meeting was the presentation of the latest Fish Disk (a term coined by myself) from Fred Fish. I had several contributions on the early Fish Disks including Disk 1, 6, 18, 31, 58 (the famous RRD - Recoverable Ram Disk), 59, 85, 241, and 540.

When the operation of ASDG became a full time job, I moved to Madison WI where Dan Esenther was based. The company released a 2MB board (expandable to 8MB). At this time, hard disk drives were almost entirely unavailable. Mass storage was the Amiga's floppy disk (880K) and RAM:, the Amiga's ram-based disk drive. The contents of RAM: would not survive a system crash or system reboot which occurred quite frequently. After hearing a rumor of a competitor working on a recoverable ram disk (one which would survive a crash or reboot), I developed the first recoverable ram disk during a marathon 48 hour week-end programming session. At this time there was only the vaguest documentation about device drivers available and much of the coding was trial and error. The keys to creating the first RRD, written in C, were three things. Finding the signature of the ram disk in memory after reboot, verifying its contents were not corrupted via check sum, and allocating memory backwards - from the top of memory downwards. The RRD rumored to be coming out from another company which prompted my effort, never materialized. I made the RRD shareware on Fish Disk 58. On Disk 241, I released an enhanced RRD. Later, a very talented German fellow (NAME???) rewrote the RRD entirely, enhancing it greatly.

In the early days of the Amiga forums important to the growth of the machine and its culture included the WELL, BIX (from Byte), CompuServe and Usenet. The WELL and BIX had a particularly strong following among the Amiga's early in-crowd. Later, the Portal forum run by Harv Laser became important. I participated in all these forums and transcripts of interviews of me by moderators of these groups can still be found on the web.

The creation of ASDG came about from the following thought (after looking at software written by others for the Macintosh in 1984): "I can do this at least as well as those guys." I have no doubt that this kind of thought has been the germinal spark for many businesses. I resisted starting a business based upon the Macintosh as it was a black and white single tasking system and was, by far, more primitive than the Commodore Amiga which was due to come out in a few month's time. Having a Unix background, the multitasking capabilities of the Amiga was a tremendous appeal. Also, the Amiga was appealing because of its newness. No one in the marketplace would have the advantage of much prior experience with it. And with Commodore behind it, how could anything go wrong?

More to come.

External Links

• A web site maintained by Perry Kivolowitz