I first "met" Amos by phone in 1988. I was a post-doc in Dublin and had just published the first version of Clustal for PCs. The phone rang and I answered and was hit by an avalanche of ideas and words and greetings. It was Amos in full flow. He wanted to include Clustal in his recently released sequence analysis package PC Gene and we discussed algorithms and methods and software for about an hour. I had never discussed multiple alignment algorithms with anyone before this and I impressed and thrilled to have this chance to chat about the details that only I seemed to care about up to then.

Later I moved to EMBL, to the Data Library run by Graham Cameron, in 1990. I there discovered the next side to Amos, something that dwarfed PC Gene by a hundred fold: SwissProt. This was a phenomemon of effort, vision, attention to detail and I simply cannot imagine anyone else getting such a thing to not ony work but to take over the world. EMBL were his major partner in distributing SwissProt and had an annotation team to create entries. I met Amos many times there and he would greet me like I was his best friend and would endlessly discuss proteins and algorithms. I later realised that Amos greeted everyone like that. He never tried to hide anything he did. He wanted everyone to use SwissProt and walk away with whatever ideas he gave them, free of obligation.

Several moves later, I ended up back in Dublin. Amos organised a 20th Birthday Party/Conference For SwissProt in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2006. I was invited to speak. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. I was on a speaker list that included everyone that was important to me at that time and it was the single most enjoyable meeting I ever went to. Amos introduced every single speaker individually explaining how each of them had collaborated with him and why he wanted them to speak. The meeting was by the seafront and included bands, music (Ron Appel sang a peace of opera on stage!), incredible food and was bookended with the ISMB conference. The closing stages of the meeting involved Amos on stage thanking EVERYONE!!!! He thanked the speakers, the organisers all of the SwissProt team (individually and by name) and one by one, the people who made the event happen. He thanked the chef! This was Amos in full flow as a collaborator. People mattered deeply to him. His likes will never be seen again.