Atari 1400XL

[JokerCPoC]

It seems to me that Atari went backwards a few too many times. The VCS was getting long in the tooth; technology moves fast and it was already several years old. The 5200 was a decent follow - up, but with joystick issues and non - VCS compatibility (out of the box, no extra $), it was doomed.

 

So they're working on the 7800, right? Getting near something decent and modern. But then canned it (only to release it far too late), after giving up the market to Nintendo. Speaking of Nintendo, Atari had the opportunity to BE the name on that system, too... they were offered the distribution to the NES (nee Famicom) and passed it up!

 

Okay, they were too busy making a go of the XL lineup, trying to be a computer company, perhaps. Again, no. Eight bit was on the way out, people knew it. They made the kind of poor decisions as outlined above. Just no way to compete against C=64 by that time.

 

They decided to concentrate on the 16 bit side, but they had the Amiga chipset in hand and let that go. Well, at least they made the ST line well. So the ST was selling across the pond and in the music industry (including Donny Osmond!), they could have continued to capitalize on that. So they made the Falcon, good start. Then did they immediately place it in a Box & External Keyboard professional edition for power users / DTP? No. But surely they made a portable version to continue the MIDI and music scene market share... Well, sadly, no.

 

At a time when they could have concentrated on the computer side, they dropped all that to concentrate on a video game machine again! Aaargh! I love the Jaguar, okay, but it was the wrong decision.

 

Businesses can survive a couple bad moves. But constant bad moves, they can not. The market (especially technology) will eat them up.

 

<>< RedBeard

 

P.S. Just to show that the bad decisions weren't all used up, even the disk drive manufacturer they were sold too was lame, some third rate nonsense. Oy.

Sure Atari could have owned the game market, But back then Nintendo thought of having a US partner handle the US business as they knew the lay of the land, If they knew that the Amiga was going to be a computer owned by Commodore and that they had nothing else, Then they would have gone for It, It boils down to bad timing on both Nintendoes and Ataris part. Or chalk It up to fate.

 

Actually on the Amiga chipset and Curt will back Me up on this, Atari loaned money to Amiga inc to develop the chipset, then Amiga got a better offer by Commodore, Amiga paid the loan to Atari off and then became a part of Commodore.

 

Jack fired most of the R&D that He got when He bought Atari from Warner Brothers back then, He also didn't believe in any sort of advertising, Made the computers so that they were limited in expansion abilities, They did try and fix that in the last Falcon prototype, But By then the PC was taking business from them, I can't remember when Commodore imploded, But except for Apple and It's MAC, the PC ran over both Atari and Commodore and the PC was the competition that was ignored at their joint peril and well what can I say jack went and drove Atari into the ground. We are what remains, the center could not hold and is gone.

[JokerCPoC]

they were offered the distribution to the NES (nee Famicom) and passed it up!

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Atari never ever should have released the NES even if it had the opportunity.

 

The 2600 and the 8-bit/5200 had established an aesthetic for themselves in their sound and video. The Atari 7800, although not created by Miner's team, is close enough in architecture to those machines to feel "Atari". The NES, on the other hand, has a different pixel aspect ratio, different palette system, different sprite system, totally different sounding audio, and different controller pinouts. Meanwhile, the guts of the system were hardly more powerful than anything else of that era. It was the huge ROM sizes and the mapper hardware in the carts that made the NES look more powerful than it was, and only years after Atari evaluated it.

 

Internally within Atari HQ, the idea of a company oozing with cash and R&D projects left and right (most of which to become vaporware of course) stooping so low as to take a foreign console and slap their name on it must have been a tough sell, and rightfully so. Had Atari taken this and put its label on it and released it, there would be a considerable backlash because it was so unfamiliar and be transparent to the consumer as a cheap-shot desperation move.

 

Not a great analogy, but it would be kind of like how Mattel bombed on the Aquarius. The Aquarius did suck anyway, but at the same time it was a completely different architecture from the Intellivision and was unlikely to appeal to their existing userbase, unlike the Coleco Adam which was a superset of the Colecovision. The Adam also failed, but not so much because Colecovision fans rejected it as too different.

 

You could say Atari needed a shot of creativity, but that was mostly is a SOFTWARE problem, not a hardware problem. And we all know what happened to Atari's best programmers. Out the door just like their hardware designers.

 

Nintendo's success is predicated on the void left by Atari Inc. collapsing. So the resulting battle between the 7800 (as birthed reluctantly by Atari Corp.) and the NES was never an even fight. Not even close.

 

(BTW, I'm also one of those who is not a great fan of the Atari ST because of its lack of architectural connection to earlier systems. I'm aware I'm probably on the minority on that one.)

The ST needed an ability early on to access more ram as simms and an mmu, the video could have been on an isa or a pci card, Beyond that and faster cpus, It wasn't bad computer, Just not as competitive with the PC which was slowly taking Ataris share of the market while Atari did nothing to stop It.

[eric_ruck]

The original ST's design was absolutely brilliant on account of its simplicity, off the shelf parts and move toward compatibility with mainstream standards, such as FAT 3.5" floppies that could be exchanged with PCs. For something like 12 or 18 months I think the ST was beating the pants off the Amiga and Mac and being competitive to the PC, where it could easily best the standard XT/AT box for a fraction of the price.

 

Initially I was disappointed with my ST when I got it precisely because it wasn't flashy like an Amiga, or even like the 1200XL it replaced. To make things worse, I couldn't make a decent go at writing games in ST BASIC because, well, it stunk on ice. And the serious development software for it costs several times what I paid for my Atari Assembler Editor cartridge, which I was using right up until I got the ST. That was when I was as senior in high school.

 

When I got to college I realized what I had, with a decent free word processor, that while you type spell checker, and that shareware, superior terminal emulator whose name escapes me. Superior in every way to the Macs and PCs everyone else had. Add a Spectre GCR so I could earn money in my spare time writing Mac programs and the ST was perfect, at the time.

 

But then they did the cheap Atari thing and sat on their ass while they gave up the technical lead to PCs and Amiga, and the software lead to Mac.

 

Eric

 

PS: If I don't come back with pictures of the 1400XL in the next few weeks, I probably forgot. Somebody send me a PM. My basement is a bit of a wreck since we're trying to rearrange it to make a playroom for my kids. The good news is that it also means I get a formal room for my video game collection. The bad news is that I don't get the wine cellar I was sure I was going to put in when I moved here 11 years ago. Damn kids.

[RedBeard]

...drove Atari into the ground. We are what remains, the center could not hold and is gone.

 

Yeah. Sadly, I guess we are what remains of the once - great.

 

You know, I saw on youtube a video of the 25th anniversary of the C=64. There was a panel discussion and such, it was okay, not too exciting. Anyhow, Jack Tramiel was one of the panelists. During one part they were talking about Atari and Jack said something like "Oh, my purpose with Atari was to destroy it. As you can see, I did a fine job."

 

We wonders, My Precious and I, if there's a measure of truth in that statement. I can't imagine a businessman purposefully ruining his own company; doesn't make sense. But it would explain a few of the bad decisions.

 

<>< RedBeard

 

P.S. I'm still a fan of the ST line. I own a 520 ST and Mega STE. Some day I'd like to add a Falcon and Stacy.

[carmel_andrews]

Redbeard...How much of the youtube vid was edited...Perhaps you could edit the clip that mentioned Atari (in the context of tramiel running it into the ground) and post it up as a permanent 'sticky' on atariage

 

At least we now know the truth is out...Tramiel's finally come clean after all these years

 

I wonder how much more the 1400/50 series was to manufacture/produce compared to a stock xl (like 600/800 series)

[atarifan49]

If this floppy disk interface hooked to PC style drives, it might have been worthwhile, but Atari probably would make it so you can use their stuff and soldered everything to the motherboard.

 

Actually your assumption is incorrect. Even though the circuitry was hardwired on the 1450XLD TONG board and as a daughter board on the 1450XL the drives used were the same kind that you could hook up to a PC (at the time), an ATR-8000 interface, Percom drives Atari 8bit drives, or other computers like the TRS-80. It was a true parallel disk drive setup using the Wester Digital 2797 floppy controller which gave the system a true double density format capability. The drives were connected to the board using a 34 pin edge connector cable that was standard at the time for connecting floppy drives at the time. The only problem I did see with this drive setup was when you try and use it with Spartados. The parallel bus would get initialized during booting of the computer and the handler for the parallel disk drive is installed. But when Spartados takes over it loads its own drive handler which doesn't support parallel disk drives. So you were limited to using just Atari written DOS's. The ATR8000 and Percom didn't have this problem since they were SIO based.

[RedBeard]

Regarding Jack Tramiel admitting to ruining Atari /|\ at the C=64 anniversary:

 

The video is about 90 minutes long. The comment was an off - the - cuff joke. Everyone laughed. (At least I THOUGHT it was a joke.) They were discussing who / what was going on at the time (leaving Commodore, joining the rival, doing business against your former company...) it was a short part. That's about it.

 

The whole thing was rather boring to tell the truth. This was only good for a little memory trip and it wasn't as interesting as some of the chat around here. That's for sure. The Q&A session at the end was laughable and lame.

 

<>< RedBeard

 

P.S. Now the video of an acutal XEROX / PARC machine running and how it worked! Now that was interesting!