The Tramiels

[Maury Markowitz]

If you really wanted to "save" Atari, you'd need to take a time machine back to late 1981, and fix the 1200XL and the 5200 before they launched in '82.

 

Bingo. That was the point where I think things went south on them. This machine was a marketing disaster, and _right_ at the worst possible time. Had it done even a little better they would have had time to move production overseas without killing the entire line while that happened.

 

By the time the Tramiels arrived I don't think Atari was Atari any more. More like the bloated pig that Microsoft is today, or Apple was in the 90s - developer heavy, lurching from project to project, developing lots of things people don't actually want because they said they did in a poll.

 

The sad thing is the ST. Having owned and used one for a long time, I can say without hesitation that it was least favorite computer. There was no "design" behind it, just a bunch of off-the-shelf bits shoveled together into a box as cheap as possible. Not that that's a bad thing, but it was no Atari.

[Maury Markowitz]

As for Gil and Apple, wasn't the iMac started under Gil's reign yet Jobs receives all the credit for it?

 

True in fact, but not in spirit. What became the iMac was one of many products being cooked up at Apple, all of which were canceled because they were "too weird". Some of these would make it out in limited numbers, only to be killed off weeks later. As a result, the company appeared to be skitzo, and everyone avoided it like the plague.

 

So would GIl have released it? No way. Consider:

 

Scully was all about making the Mac go "high right" and selling to business

Spindler was all about selling the company off

Amelio was all about shedding people and getting profitable

 

None of these guys would have done the iMac.

[DracIsBack]

Alternately, they needed to get the 7800 out the door ASAP and not dither around for over a year haggling with Warners who was gonna pay for the damn thing. Penny wise and pound foolish - it cost them the lucrative console market.

 

Once again, hindsight is 20-20. On one hand, you could argue that it cost the lucrative console market that emerged later on from one that was DEAD in 1984. On the other, you might argue that Atari might not have made it to 1986 to even try competing in that market.

[carmel_andrews]

Someone mentioned that Atari outlasted commodore

 

if your referring to commodore as a Hardware manufacturer, that isn't quite correct (Atari pulled out of h/w making before commodore were liquidated)

[DracIsBack]

if your referring to commodore as a Hardware manufacturer, that isn't quite correct (Atari pulled out of h/w making before commodore were liquidated)

 

Commodore went bankrupt in spring of 1994. Atari didn't abandon the Jaguar until early 1996.

 

Here's an article from "back in the day"

 

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/30/business/company-news-commodore-international-going-out-of-business.html

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lYFEAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WbUMAAAAIBAJ&dq=commodore%20international%20liquidation&pg=3763%2C141668

[+wood_jl]

This issue could be settled quickly by:

 

1) Declaring Atari management (whichever company) complete, impotent imbeciles.

 

2) Declaring some know-it-alls in this thread to be complete, absolute genius.

 

3) Admitting that Atari management should have called you (even if you were 14 years old at the time) and placed you in charge, immediately.

 

What's left to argue about?

[Lynxpro]

Wasn't going to happen.

The contract was dead before Atari Inc was even split (a bit of a fudge on Atari's side since they shouldn't have accepted Amiga's check).

 

 

Agreed. But what I wrote and postulated on was the two companies sharing the platform instead of spending a ton of money battling each other in the courts over it. Even in 1987ish when the two companies finally settled their legal cases, they should've agreed to combine the platforms together. After all, IBM and Apple later decided to try something similar with Taligent, not that that came to much fruition. My point is had the ST and Amiga become a single platform, the combined user base would have been sufficient to keep it going and we might have a viable 3rd platform today in competition with Windows and Mac OS X. [and no, I'm not considering Linux]. The rivalry between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould made that impossible and the computer industry today is poorer because of it.

 

 

A much more interesting premise is if Atari had moved on with its own advanced computer designs (several of which were more impressive than the Amiga) and sued Amiga for breech of contract on top of that.

 

The plan had been to have the Amiga based console out in late '84, a minimal computer (128k) in '85, and an unlimited full computer in '86, but after that fell through, the in-house options would have been the obvious alternative. (a shame the Amiga runaround delayed a definitive push for the in-house 16-bit designs)

That very well may have happened after the fact had Morgan's plans continued. (Atari Inc may have already been looking into the Rainbow design as a game console and lower-cost next generation computer, but that all fell apart in the wake of the mess created by Warner's management of the split)

A proper transition to Atari Corp may have pushed Tramiel to favor a derivative of one of Atari Inc's existing (fully prototyped) 16-bit designs as well as the UNIX based OS and "Snowcap" GUI they'd been developing.

 

 

What I don't get is why the former Atari Inc. Advanced Technologies Group engineers didn't spill the beans about Atari Inc. having designed far more powerful computers than the ST or the Amiga just a couple of years after those two platforms debuted. I can remember in the March 87 issue of Antic Magazine Atari Corp. staff were denying the ST or any other advanced computer had been developed at Atari Inc. The Atari press were wide open back then to explore such a story yet John Palevich apparently didn't say a word.

 

I also don't understand why none of the ATG employees who later worked at DRI didn't mention to Atari Corp. that they had knowledge of the more advanced computers and would help redesign them for a price. Maybe they feared getting hauled off to jail over taking Atari Inc. stuff home with them during the TTL/Atari Corp. reorg; otherwise I can't see why they didn't and preferred working for DRI for salary on GEM... It's just weird to me.

 

 

And I don't understand why Jack Tramiel & Co. sued Sight & Sound a few years later after selling off the AMY chip to them. It makes no sense to me. Why did they not re-acquire the chip and use it in the STe? Sigh.

 

 

 

This issue could be settled quickly by:

 

 

3) Admitting that Atari management should have called you (even if you were 14 years old at the time) and placed you in charge, immediately.

 

What's left to argue about?

 

 

I was 12 at the time, thank you very much. And at least I had enough common sense to understand how angry Joe Consumer was going to be when JC purchased the Atari 7800 expecting all the cool new "Atari" arcade games to be ported to it, only to discover they were appearing on the NES instead.

 

 

Oh yeah, I was also the guy in March 1993 at our user's group public computer festival who pointed out to Mike Fulton - of Atari Corp. - that the unreleased-at-the-time STe/Falcon/Panther controllers - the ones that became the standard Jaguar controllers - needed to have 6 fire buttons on them to properly play the popular arcade games like Street Fighter 2. His reaction was "the controller already has enough buttons!" and kept on playing Road Riot 4WD. Of course, I was right and was vindicated when the Pro Controllers were later released...the controllers that should have been released from the very start.

Edited February 8, 2011 by Lynxpro

[svenski]

Agreed. But what I wrote and postulated on was the two companies sharing the platform instead of spending a ton of money battling each other in the courts over it. Even in 1987ish when the two companies finally settled their legal cases, they should've agreed to combine the platforms together. After all, IBM and Apple later decided to try something similar with Taligent, not that that came to much fruition. My point is had the ST and Amiga become a single platform, the combined user base would have been sufficient to keep it going and we might have a viable 3rd platform today in competition with Windows and Mac OS X. [and no, I'm not considering Linux]. The rivalry between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould made that impossible and the computer industry today is poorer because of it.

 

The joys of a capitalist society and freedom of choice and I'm presuming that when you say "sharing the platform" you mean both companies, sitting down, holding hands, sharing a smoke and deciding between them which one (the ST or the Amiga or a combination of bits from both) they were going to go with? That sort of thing doesn't seem to fly these days as governments think of it as anti-competitive.

 

As Kitty mentioned already Jack's primary concern at the time was the Japanese. He believed that the Japanese would take over the computer market and he considered that to be the biggest threat, not Commodore. Obviously he would have been pissed about how things ended up between him and Commodore - it was his baby after all but he didn't camp outside Commodore HQ and puncture Commodore management's car tires every day.

 

If anything Atari (especially under Warner) were damned too inventive and way ahead of the time. Yes they made mistakes but they still gave us some great product and without that product we wouldn't be all wasting our time (including me) debating all this.

[sunspot42]

Nintendo had a LOT of advantages though:

They did have some good funding by '86, they had established software support, they had a very strong position in Japan and had locked up most Japanese arcade licenses, etc, etc.

 

Atari Inc (or Atari Corp with a proper transition) would have been in a far more favorable position, but that's not how things played out.

 

Atari had plenty of advantages over Nintendo too, though. A much better-established brand, for starters. A huge library of arcade games. An existing (if troubled) distribution network. Millions of users.

 

If Atari had spent its money either fixing (and rebadging) the 5200 or getting the 7800 out the door instead of developing, manufacturing and marketing the STs and XEs, they'd have been far more competitive with Nintendo. Indeed, a resurgent Atari might have scared Nintendo out of the US market entirely.

 

 

Stop it with the 5200 stuff, the 5200 had already been dropped by the time the Tramiels were on the scene, so that was a non issue.

 

So? Un-drop it. Better yet, release the redesigned 5200 under a new name and advertise it as 5200-compatible. Kills two birds with one stone - gets away from the failure of the 5200 and its clunky hardware, yet maintains compatibility with the existing 5200 game library and some of the better peripherals (like the trackball and the 2600 module) while moving forward. And essentially keeps their computer and console architectures unified, since the 5200 is practically identical to the 8-bit computers.

 

 

In hindsight, that might have made more sense than the 7800 due to it also facilitating fewer distinct platforms and an established architecture for programmers to work with -and also promote support for the full A8 line as well. (one issue would be continued lack of lockout, but given the lack of 3rd party support the 7800 got, unlicensed 3rd party games would be more of a blessing than a curse )

 

They could have implemented lockout anyhow on the new-and-improved not-5200. Just code it to only recognize existing 5200 titles or anything with the right key.

 

 

Hmm, actually it may have been a good idea to keep console and computer designs fairly parallel, though probably more separate than above.

 

I've thought that for 20 years. The 5200 should have been a monster success for Atari. Pity about the crap pack in and the even crapper sticks!

 

 

So they could start with an STe based system (with tweaks to cut out all unnecessary hardware as well as boosting some capabilities to make it more favorable as a console -dual playfields and an FM synth chip probably would have done it, albeit the STe itself could have used such a boost)

 

Problem is, by that point Nintendo was well-established, with a cheap 8-bit console, with developers locked in and with all the floor space in a slew of retailers. Atari needed something on the market by Christmas 1985 - the STs came way too late (unless they'd concentrated on making a 68000 based videogame system first, and then turned it into a computer later, although I don't think the market would have supported a $400 videogame system at that point).

 

 

Alternately, they needed to get the 7800 out the door ASAP and not dither around for over a year haggling with Warners who was gonna pay for the damn thing. Penny wise and pound foolish - it cost them the lucrative console market.

No, that was important too: Atari Corp had pretty much zero money to spare, so it WAS a big issue, plus the 7800 fumble was only one of the main problems Warner caused by the sloppy transition.

Those problems (many more than the 7800 deal) took months to smooth over before normal operations could resume completely.

 

You could just as easily argue that Warner was foolish for not backing down and paying GCC themselves.

 

You could, but ultimately it hurt Atari Corp more than it hurt Warner (who survived the implosion of Atari Corp quite nicely, thank you very much).

 

As for Atari Corp having "pretty much zero money to spare", they spent a pretty penny developing the STs (which took, what, a year and several million dollars) and XEs (money down the drain as far as I can tell - they'd have been better off just cost-reducing the 800XL and 1050 drive some more and slapping a new motherboard with 128K in the XL). That money would have been far, far better spent relaunching a redesigned 5200 (a very inexpensive proposition compared to the STs) or getting the 7800 to market.

 

Heck, if you were gonna blow cash redesigning the 8-bits, why not revert to using the 1200XL's case, or stuff a drive in the thing and rip-off the very successful Apple //c? The XEs never made any sense to me, design-wise. For the money they spent developing them, they could have come up with something that would have been a lot more successful.

 

And don't get me started on the portable (luggable) XE, or the 65XE (was it really worth it to support TWO separate models of an obsolete computer?), which Tramiel's Atari also dumped money into designing and, in the case of the 65XE, producing.

[sunspot42]

The sad thing is the ST. Having owned and used one for a long time, I can say without hesitation that it was least favorite computer. There was no "design" behind it, just a bunch of off-the-shelf bits shoveled together into a box as cheap as possible. Not that that's a bad thing, but it was no Atari.

 

I liked my ST, and even though it was a bucket of parts, I think it had tons of potential. But it was also clear by around '88 that the machine had been a failure in the marketplace - Atari essentially stopped development on it to concentrate on consoles (XE GS, Panther, Jaguar), workstations (TT, Abaq), handhelds (Lynx), PCs - all of which also flopped. Atari wasn't moving enough STs (given their low margins) to be terribly profitable, and Apple and the Macs were walking off with the "not IBM compatible" marketplace. Yeah, the STs were big in Europe for a couple of years (except for France, where the Macs did incredibly well), but that's kind of like one of those bands that's "big in Japan". Nice, but not enough to launch you into the big leagues. Atari had I think $400 million in sales their best year, but a big chunk of that came from games and the XEs, and their overall profits were pretty woeful ($50 million, IIRC) because their margins (especially on the STs) were so thin. That's why they turned their attentions to higher-margin businesses (workstations) and higher-margin cheap products (consoles, XEs) by the end of the decade.

 

With the margins Atari was operating on, they needed to sell millions of STs a year, not a million units a year, for it to be viable. According to Wikipedia, they sold about 4-5 million STs total over the lifetime of the platform. Compare to the C64, which sold between 12.5 and 17 million units. Heck, even the C128 sold 4 million units, and it's considered something of a flop.

 

I was pissed off at the time that Atari was neglecting the STs, but in hindsight I understand why. I'd expected a machine like the Mega STe - only with better graphics - to come out a year or so after the Mega STs did in '86, not 4 years later!

[SpaceDice2010]

IMHO, the Atari ST was a horrible computer.

[sunspot42]

Albeit, even with strong management/support of the ST or Amiga, PC clones would arrive in force sooner or later and dominate the US well before that (the fact that Amstrad dropped their lower-end PC line in '88 delayed that a good deal too), but establishing a licensed standard with either machine could have changed the game considerably for Atari or CBM. (better expandability and more timely evolution to both systems would also have been critical issues aside from marketing and business management)

 

I can't see licensing being of any assistance at all to Atari. They'd moved so few units and the platform was so closed I can't imagine anyone would have been interested. By comparison the PC was a free for all, with high margins and high demand, and open to pretty much anybody who wanted in.

 

It's possible somebody would have been interested in licensing the Amiga, since its custom chipset was pretty cool. On the other hand, it also would have been more difficult to expand than the ST or the PC, and Commodore's margins were already pretty low, so again, what would be the point?

 

Apple tried licensing the Macintosh many years later and it was a disaster that (among other brain-dead moves) nearly bankrupted the company.

 

 

A much more interesting premise is if Atari had moved on with its own advanced computer designs (several of which were more impressive than the Amiga) and sued Amiga for breech of contract on top of that.

 

According to an engineer who was there under Warner and remained to work on coding GEM/TOS, those "advanced designs" were extremely rough prototypes that in no way, shape or form were ready to be commercialized. It would have taken years and millions of dollars to pump those systems out the door, and they would have been very expensive. From what I can tell, Atari was fooling around with designing its own Lisa, not its own Macintosh, before Tramiel came onboard and pulled the plug.

 

You can read about the birth of the ST here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995 and also here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1000&cpage=1 and about how the ST almost had real UNIX in 1987 here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1355 His blogs and the comments are fascinating, I think.

 

 

A proper transition to Atari Corp may have pushed Tramiel to favor a derivative of one of Atari Inc's existing (fully prototyped) 16-bit designs as well as the UNIX based OS and "Snowcap" GUI they'd been developing.

 

According to Landon Dyer in the comments on one of his blog posts up above, that wasn't the case. Those other systems were nowhere near ready for prime time, and they would have been expensive. I know one of them featured dual 68000's, which alone would have placed it in the $1,500 and up category right out of the box. Those Apollo boxes used a similar setup and they were EXPENSIVE.

 

 

Is Tramiel's Atari still around? What about Nintendo? Somebody made a pretty huge mistake, and clearly it wasn't Nintendo.

 

No, that's a totally different context. It's all been explained above though: there were mistakes, but mainly made by Warner or again after Jack left. (the Sam Tramiel years)

 

I disagree. I think the Tramiels made a big mistake trying to launch a 68000 based Macintosh clone on a shoestring budget without a definite hardware advantage over the Mac. They came to market about two years later with an inferior product at razor thin margins, one they couldn't really afford to promote well and one they weren't making enough money off of to effectively improve.

 

And they were up against Apple, which enjoyed incredible margins and about 4 times their sales, and IBM and the clones, which were a colossus. They got squashed.

 

Once they lost access to the Amiga chipset it was game over in the computer space, at least using the Mac clone strategy. They should have shifted gears and concentrated on the consoles, perhaps using hardware developed for their next-generation console to launch a comeback in the computer market.

 

 

The Tramiels would obviously agree with this statement, since they eventually dumped the computers entirely to concentrate all of their efforts on the console business (about 5 years too late to make any impact).

 

 

That was a mistake too and probably due mostly to Sam Tramiel's weak management.

 

There's absolutely no reason Atari should have pushed computered: Warner hadn't pushed them hard enough, but Atari Corp managed exceptional success with the ST in the late 80s (especially in Europe) which brought the company out of debt and made it onto the fortune 500 list. (with help from the millions of 2600s and 7800s sold in the late 80s under Michael Katz' tactful management under a tight budget)

 

That ship sailed long before JT stepped down. The pullback began in '87 or so, with the Abaq, Portfolio, XE GS, PC compatibles and other side projects. Atari was clearly looking outside of the ST for a profitable product that would make them a real player in the computer market, because the STs weren't cutting it. Yeah, they were big sellers in Europe for awhile, but the margins were bad and the sales weren't enough to make Atari a major player. By 1990 or so the Amiga overtook them and never looked back (and even that wasn't enough to save Commodore from going bankrupt - both had been long surpassed by the Mac and, especially, the clones).

 

 

Europe had real potential for them in the mainstream for years to come -and consoles had great potential in both markets with the right marketing -remember Atari had maintained a significant lead over Sega in US market share up to '89 at least, and they had a lot more funding to work with by that point -and Europe lacked the Nontendo blockade)

 

Europe had no potential. PCs were plummeting in price and sported capabilities that made the STs - and soon the Amigas - look obsolete. And they had the advantage of being compatible with an enormous software library and scads of expansion hardware. Yeah, you might be able to pick up an ST for $700 or whatever with monitor, but by the time you added a hard drive and an external modem to bring it up to the capabilities of a basic PC you were already looking at $1,200+, and you still didn't have the high-res color graphics a PC could produce by '90-'91.

 

And then Windows 3.0 and 3.1 rolled along, pretty much rendering the ST and Amigas totally obsolete.

 

 

The ST never had more than a couple percent market share. It was insignificant. Financially it was even more insignificant, because most of the units Atari did sell, they sold cheap and at low margins. By the end of the '80s Apple was moving more units of their Macintosh, and at far higher prices (and higher margins). And Apple's market share was puny compared to that of the clones.

 

It was the dominant 16-bit computer of the 80s in Europe, with the Amiga only coming into its own at the very end of the decade. (had Atari managed things better, they could have stayed on top too -then again, CBM could have been managed far better as well)

 

The PC was the dominant 16-bit computer of the '80s in Europe. Atari only pushed 4-5 million units of the ST worldwide during its entire history. PCs were selling more units than that a quarter by the end of the decade. The ST barely merits a footnote in the annals of computing. Atari's best year in the '80s saw them with around $500 million in revenue and $50 million in profits I believe, much of it from games and the 8-bits. In contrast, Apple hit $5 billion of revenue by 1989, and $450 million in profit. Apple's profits exceeded Atari's revenues.

 

PC clone makers like Compaq were experiencing similar or even greater growth by that point. Compaq made $112 million in its first year, 1984, and by 1986 was hauling in $503 million a year. They hit $1.2 billion by 1988, the fastest company ever to reach that mark.

 

 

Where are you getting your figures from?

 

Wikipedia. Copies of various financial statements out on the Internet. Articles dredged up by Google. An archived history of Compaq written in 2002. The numbers are all out there, if you do a little digging.

 

 

Yes, and that also shows that Apple missed a lot of major opportunities:

The Apple II had potential for being a dominant mass market standard but they:

-didn't push for a cost reduced model for the low/mid-range market with a tighter profit margin (in spite of the simplistic design having incredible potential for such -it could have been more like the Spectrum in Europe except with a huge head start and much greater respect in the higher-end market)

-didn't have timely evolution of the system (2 MHz models and the higher-res graphics should have come sooner, let alone a more comprehensive update to the audio and video systems like a proper 16 color bitmap mode of reasonable resolutions and at least some form of hardware sound generation or a bare DAC along with programmable interval timer(s) to aid with CPU driven audio -perhaps upgrade that to DMA sound later on like the Mac)

 

Totally agree with you here. Apple got distracted by the ///, then by the Lisa, then the Mac. They were idiots for not concentrating on the // and focusing their upgrades on their existing platform. But then, Commodore and Atari made the exact same mistake. The difference was, Apple's margins were high enough to see them through their stupidity - Commodore and Atari didn't have that luxury.

 

But yeah, ideally Apple should have commissioned (or designed for itself) a 16-bit variant of the 6502, something with roughly the performance of a 68000 that could run 6502 code, and built something like the Mac's OS on top of that. Then they'd have had this killer new GUI-based platform that was also backward compatible with all of their old software. Given how well the GS did when it came out - it outsold the Mac for 2-3 years, IIRC - I think such a beast would have been an enormous hit. A bunch of folks who migrated to the PC around that time would almost have certainly stuck with Apple and the Mac instead.

 

As for sound though, their agreements with Apple Records prohibited them from having anything to do with music. Apart from the GS - which they got in trouble for - no Apple ever shipped with hardware music synthesis capabilities (just D/A converters).

 

 

Yes, and that could have been their definitive niche in the US market as well: music. (something to cling to even after PCs have flooded the market)

 

That would have been a very tiny niche.

[sunspot42]

This issue could be settled quickly by:

 

1) Declaring Atari management (whichever company) complete, impotent imbeciles.

 

2) Declaring some know-it-alls in this thread to be complete, absolute genius.

 

3) Admitting that Atari management should have called you (even if you were 14 years old at the time) and placed you in charge, immediately.

 

What's left to argue about?

 

Ray Kassar, is that you?

 

Poor dear.

[Retro Rogue]

According to an engineer who was there under Warner and remained to work on coding GEM/TOS, those "advanced designs" were extremely rough prototypes that in no way, shape or form were ready to be commercialized. It would have taken years and millions of dollars to pump those systems out the door, and they would have been very expensive. From what I can tell, Atari was fooling around with designing its own Lisa, not its own Macintosh, before Tramiel came onboard and pulled the plug.

 

You can read about the birth of the ST here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995 and also here: http://www.dadhacker...?p=1000&cpage=1 and about how the ST almost had real UNIX in 1987 here: http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1355 His blogs and the comments are fascinating, I think.

 

While Landon certainly has insight in to what he was directly involved in, his view does not represent the full spectrum of what was going on at the time leading up to the takeover. They were certainly not working on their own Lisa, though they were working on a number of advanced 68000 projects. Likewise his opinion that "Both of these were Atari Corporate Research projects, and were never going to be a product" is incorrect. Curt's released some of the details, and we spent an extensive amount of time tracking down the ex-project members of Gaza, Mickey, Rainbow, etc. That also includes plans, internal engineering logs and emails, etc.

 

BTW, regarding Landon's tale about him getting on the PA system at Coin - that was Leonard Tramiel walking in to the building when that happened. He thought it was funny, and actually was the one that wound up hiring him.

 

 

According to Landon Dyer in the comments on one of his blog posts up above, that wasn't the case. Those other systems were nowhere near ready for prime time, and they would have been expensive. I know one of them featured dual 68000's, which alone would have placed it in the $1,500 and up category right out of the box. Those Apollo boxes used a similar setup and they were EXPENSIVE.

 

The dual 68000's were for high end business machines, a market they were beginning to move in to. And you are incorrect about that not being the case, several projects were ready to go to production only to be killed by Warner. One Warner executive saying "That's not really for games is it?" as justification for one axe coming down.

 

 

I disagree. I think the Tramiels made a big mistake trying to launch a 68000 based Macintosh clone on a shoestring budget without a definite hardware advantage over the Mac. They came to market about two years later with an inferior product at razor thin margins, one they couldn't really afford to promote well and one they weren't making enough money off of to effectively improve.

 

Yet their "inferior product at razor thin margins" (which started shipping a year a half after the Mac was introduced in January '84), managed to help bring Atari Corp. out of very serious debt they had inherited and in to the black within another year.

 

Once they lost access to the Amiga chipset it was game over in the computer space, at least using the Mac clone strategy. They should have shifted gears and concentrated on the consoles, perhaps using hardware developed for their next-generation console to launch a comeback in the computer market.

 

Who is they? There was never any planned access to the Amiga chip set for the ST, that was Atari Inc. that had the deal (and actually the deal was with Warner and executed through Atari Inc.). They first discovered about it (and actually it was Leonard who did) in late July, negotiated for Warner to have it sign over to them in early August and then launched their counter-suit at Commodore (via Amiga) in mid August. Out of that came speculation that Jack had counted on the Amiga for the ST. The ST (called RBP at the time) was already planned out before the purchase, with wire wrapping starting the beginning of August. It would have started sooner, but Commodore had an injunction on Shiraz and two other engineers doing any work on it over the entire month of July.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[carmel_andrews]

if your referring to commodore as a Hardware manufacturer, that isn't quite correct (Atari pulled out of h/w making before commodore were liquidated)

 

Commodore went bankrupt in spring of 1994. Atari didn't abandon the Jaguar until early 1996.

 

Here's an article from "back in the day"

 

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/30/business/company-news-commodore-international-going-out-of-business.html

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lYFEAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WbUMAAAAIBAJ&dq=commodore%20international%20liquidation&pg=3763%2C141668

 

 

 

 

 

 

IBM manufactured the Jaguar, not Atari...thought that was common knowledge (Atari only marketed the games system, since it had already closed down/stopped hardware manufacturing)

[+wood_jl]

The sad thing is the ST. Having owned and used one for a long time, I can say without hesitation that it was least favorite computer. There was no "design" behind it, just a bunch of off-the-shelf bits shoveled together into a box as cheap as possible. Not that that's a bad thing, but it was no Atari.

 

That's an emotional/philosophical analysis. That observation reminds me of - in the automotive magazines - when some writer has to crap on the GM V8 engines, because they have "antiquated pushrods." Never mind that they work well and have advantages; they're not "hi-tech" so they're objected to. Same thing for the live rear axle in the Mustang GT; it's not hi-tech either, never mind the fact that it's an excellent-handling car. Likewise, nevermind that the ST's parts worked together well, for the price. I don't think it was "sad" at all. "What constitutes an Atari" is exactly the pointless emotional/philosophical thing I am referencing; there's no end to that kind of speculation, so there's no point in discussing it. If it says "Atari" and is sold by Atari, it's an Atari.

 

IMHO, the Atari ST was a horrible computer.

 

What a valuable opinion it is. It was a "Color Mac for 1/3 the price." It certainly wasn't everybody's favorite, but it need not be, save for an opinion based on false dichotomy where something is absolutely fabulous *OR* absolutely horrible - and recognizably dismissed as such. They were a good value, got the job done, and are remarkably reliable even today, at over 25 years of age. That makes them horrible computers, eh? Hence the value of such high opinion. Although I can't think of a "horrible" computer at the moment, I would say it would likely have to be overpriced and unreliable, for starters.

Edited February 8, 2011 by wood_jl

[kool kitty89]

IMHO, the Atari ST was a horrible computer.

Then what does that make the Macintosh or PC?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you really wanted to "save" Atari, you'd need to take a time machine back to late 1981, and fix the 1200XL and the 5200 before they launched in '82.

 

Bingo. That was the point where I think things went south on them. This machine was a marketing disaster, and _right_ at the worst possible time. Had it done even a little better they would have had time to move production overseas without killing the entire line while that happened.

 

By the time the Tramiels arrived I don't think Atari was Atari any more. More like the bloated pig that Microsoft is today, or Apple was in the 90s - developer heavy, lurching from project to project, developing lots of things people don't actually want because they said they did in a poll.

 

The sad thing is the ST. Having owned and used one for a long time, I can say without hesitation that it was least favorite computer. There was no "design" behind it, just a bunch of off-the-shelf bits shoveled together into a box as cheap as possible. Not that that's a bad thing, but it was no Atari.

Nope, way off base.

 

The 5200 was behind s lot of other problems that were much worse: it was a symptom more than anything else. (just like the ET fiasco)

 

Atari/Warner management was a mess, the distribution system was the main cause of the crash (led to an inflated market and the so-called glut), and Atari themselves became rather bloated on top of that (in large part because of that inflation).

 

And no, it was FAR from too late, but indeed, 1982 was the time to act if catastrophe was to be averted entirely. After that, things were still far from irreparable, and while James Morgan suffered some snags early on after he became president (replacing Kassar in late Summer of '83), by early/mid 1984 he was making tremendous progress in reorganizing Atari into a lean and clean company that would be able to come back from its mounting debt and become a major player once again.

 

However, the sloppiness of Warner's split ruined that and left TTL/Atari Corp with a chaotic mess to clean up that had been created by the split. (ie NOT the same mess that Morgan had already been working on correcting since late '83 -that mess had been on the verge of being cleaned up, but Warner made a new one with their sloppy management of the transition of assets to Atari Corp -among other things it put Atari Corp and Atari Games at odds with eachother and put the 7800/GCC deal in conflict)

 

 

 

But again, the 5200 was one among many (some much bigger) problems at Atari Inc and one of the various symptoms that finally made those problems obvious to the public.

 

 

Hell, the 5200's lack of compatibility wouldn't have been that bad of an ideas if it meant a cleaner, sleeker, more efficient design, and indeed, the cuts made from the A8 design should have allowed some pretty decent cost reduction and consolidation, but that didn't happen. (overbuild, oversized case making a machine larger and heavier than the A400's 4+ board design with bulky aluminum castings and a motherboard larger than the 1200XL when it should have been smaller than the 600 prototype -the controllers were also an odd mix of cut corners and missed cost reduction, etc, etc)

Sticking with the 3200 would have made plenty of sense though, even at the expense of a delayed release. (it had been in development since 1980 at least, but apparently management was worried that it wouldn't be ready soon enough and it was dropped in favor of the accelerated 5200 design -though they probably could have pushed a quick-fix 3200 via TIA+GTIA rather than STIA and still managed to make it significantly cheaper than the 5200 -basically a 7800 with ANTIC+GTIA instead of MARIA)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alternately, they needed to get the 7800 out the door ASAP and not dither around for over a year haggling with Warners who was gonna pay for the damn thing. Penny wise and pound foolish - it cost them the lucrative console market.

 

Once again, hindsight is 20-20. On one hand, you could argue that it cost the lucrative console market that emerged later on from one that was DEAD in 1984. On the other, you might argue that Atari might not have made it to 1986 to even try competing in that market.

Well, not really dead, but weakened, and Tramiel had every intention of pushing video games (out of necessity if nothing else), but the mess created by Warner's management of the split really hindered that and also killed a lot of Morgan's plans. (Morgan's ongoing developments could have been adjusted to match Tramiel's if not already meshing reasonably well, but the mess prevented any such transition -let alone the potential to drop the RGB/ST in the preliminary design phase and jump on one of Atari Inc's fully prototyped 16-bit chipsets)

 

Atari Corp was put in a bad situation with that mess from the split and also had next to no funds to allocate for anything else, so "just paying GCC" was not an attractive prospect.

Again, you could even argue that that conflict could have favored dropping the 7800 altogether in favor of a number of alternatives. (pushing the 600 as a game console or a direct derivative of that like an XLGS -maybe slap in a membrane keyboard to cut cost since it was going to primarily be a game system -though the more changes made, the more R&D overhead to deal with)

That or they could have stuck with the 5200 and corrected its flaws. (again, it had potential to be a pretty low-cost system, much more than the modest tweak of the 5100/Jr, and the controllers could have been addressed as well -short of the revised spring loaded POT module, they could/should have offered plain "digital" versions using pull-up resistors to provide 8 analog directions in leu of pots -that would be both cheaper and more reliable and would work better for all games save those intended for precision analog specifically -some of those would have been better with paddles but a few would be best with the full analog sticks -by 1984, the POT module would probably have been the way to go though)

 

However, the 5200 was really off the table by that point due to the formal discontinuation by Atari Inc in May of 1984, so they'd have had a hard time doing a 180 on that.

Also, the 7800 had already started to be hyped, produced in limited quantities (with some 5,000 completed units stockpiled components for more) with a small test market and press release about the same time as CES iirc, so a lot of incentive to continue with the 7800 plans as well. (ie lots of trade-offs with any of the options, though the XLGS -or plain 600XL- option could have been a bit foolproof: being directly compatible with the computer line which was continually supported, and could displace the 7800 if that fell through or be kept in parallel with the 7800 as the entry level "game computer" as such)

 

The mess of the split would have convoluted any possibilities for the time, but in hindsight, pushing a stop-game game computer (ie a modified 600XL with cheap membrane/cheap keyboard and console pricing, or just a plain 600XL with a gaming bundle -maybe switch to the cheap keyboard later).

 

That would have been even more foolproof in the wake of the crash with dedicated video game consoles becoming less attractive for retailers for a time (more so in some regions than others) and would bolster support for A8 games as well -and a ton of stockpiled hardware+components and software for the computer line. (plus, in spite of the chaos and loss of most/all of the console game programmers, most of the computer programming staff had been retained at Atari Corp, so they had more resources there -though funding would still be tight in general)

And "doing the 5200 right" the the XEGS may not have been a bad idea, but doing so in 1987 vs '84/85 was made it more of a bad idea.

 

Hell, but 1987, the 65XE was approaching the 7800's price point, so a 16k machine (let alone with an even low cost form factor -but perhaps more convenient front mounted joyports and top mounted cart slot) might have matched the 7800's price by that point.

 

 

Of course, you could also argue the 5200 itself could have been scrapped in favor of the 600 back in '82, or an even more cost-cut version of the 600 (like retaining the cheap 400 keyboard or similar -preferably in addition to a "full" 600 model on top of the cheaper game-console version), again more like the XEGS but far earlier. (the 5200 could have been cheaper still, but that didn't happen, and a cheap console-oriented computer could have cut into the computer price war as well, but possibly held up favorably against the competition) They could have even removed the keyboard entirely, retained only the function keys needed by most cart games, and added a keyboard port like the XEGS. (perhaps stripping out BASIC in that case)

 

The 3200 would have been nice, but if they were going for a more direct hack of the A8, why not make it fully compatible? (especially since the 5200 lacked lockout anyway) Hell, they'd be replacing the 400 in its originally intended "console with a keyboard" role (more or less), but actually being cheap enough to compete as a game console in the lower-end price bracket. (possibly even undercutting the colecovision -in-house chipset mixed with lower cost licensed/3rd party components and only 16k DRAM without any added SRAM and a single, unified bus -more so if they pushed for using 2 16kx4-bit DRAM chips vs 8 16kx1-bit DRAM chips -8kB density vs 2 kB)

 

Or like with Tramiel later on, they could have used the lower-end "computer game system" as a stop-gap until the 3200 was ready (with the computer-console also doing dual-duty as a major competitor in the highly competitive low-end computer market), but doing so for engineering delays rather than the conflicting contract with Warner/GCC in Tramiel's case.

 

 

In all of those examples, CGIA would have come into play as well. (except CGIA seemed to get lost in the transition to Atari Corp unfortunately)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wasn't going to happen.

The contract was dead before Atari Inc was even split (a bit of a fudge on Atari's side since they shouldn't have accepted Amiga's check).

Agreed. But what I wrote and postulated on was the two companies sharing the platform instead of spending a ton of money battling each other in the courts over it. Even in 1987ish when the two companies finally settled their legal cases, they should've agreed to combine the platforms together. After all, IBM and Apple later decided to try something similar with Taligent, not that that came to much fruition. My point is had the ST and Amiga become a single platform, the combined user base would have been sufficient to keep it going and we might have a viable 3rd platform today in competition with Windows and Mac OS X. [and no, I'm not considering Linux]. The rivalry between Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould made that impossible and the computer industry today is poorer because of it.

What you're suggesting could also be considered collusion, and may have resulted in anti-trust suits or other legal action.

 

Again, the lack of cooperation was a totally separate issue from the weaker management/marketing at CBM (unless you're suggesting that Jack at Atari Corp would have an influence at CBM again), and also has nothing to do with the lack of licensing the chipsets to expand the platforms as market-wide standards. (or other mistakes/missed opportunities from limiting expansion -especially on the ST, to slow/poor evolutionary design, to Sam Tramiel's weak management from '89 onward, etc)

 

What I don't get is why the former Atari Inc. Advanced Technologies Group engineers didn't spill the beans about Atari Inc. having designed far more powerful computers than the ST or the Amiga just a couple of years after those two platforms debuted. I can remember in the March 87 issue of Antic Magazine Atari Corp. staff were denying the ST or any other advanced computer had been developed at Atari Inc. The Atari press were wide open back then to explore such a story yet John Palevich apparently didn't say a word.

 

I also don't understand why none of the ATG employees who later worked at DRI didn't mention to Atari Corp. that they had knowledge of the more advanced computers and would help redesign them for a price. Maybe they feared getting hauled off to jail over taking Atari Inc. stuff home with them during the TTL/Atari Corp. reorg; otherwise I can't see why they didn't and preferred working for DRI for salary on GEM... It's just weird to me.

I'm not sure of the context, and Curt and Marty are still digging more up, but:

at one point Marty did mention that some staff (possibly management, maybe Morgan -I forget) had attempted to get Tramiel to look over the existing projects, but that didn't work out for whatever reason, probably a mix of tunnel vision on the RBP/ST, trying to clean up the mess Warner created with the transition, and general lack of coordination also resulting from the split. (they might have even retained many of the necessary documents and perhaps prototypes, but by the time they really were looked over, the design teams were long gone and/or the hardware was difficult to mate to the established ST architecture in a cost-effective manner)

 

Not just the software either, but there was the UNIX OS+GUI in development as well. (again, I'm not sure of the context, but Atarimuseum should eventually get a comprehensive update on the subject -and an even more complete story behind the hardware and events in the final books; there was supposed to be such an update months ago, but it got delayed)

 

I know that the existing designs had been configured as high-end workstations in '83, but that doesn't mean the chipsets themselves were fundamentally limited to such. (the dual or triple 68000s and massive 2 MB of RAM shown in some specs/schematics demonstrate obvious areas for cost cutting totally independent of the chipsets) I actually doubt that the chipsets (or at least the simplest of the 2 or 3 systems created) couldn't have been reworked for a lower-cost consumer level machine. (whether that would involve modifying the custom chips or simply implementing them in a more conservative manner would be another issue though -or even leaving some of the chips out of the final designs -the very fast that at least one of the chipsets was being looked at with game console potential -may have been RAINBOW- hints at the existing chips being cost effective as such)

The super-high-end configuration of the prototype specs is hardly surprising for the environment they were developed in at ATG

 

 

And I don't understand why Jack Tramiel & Co. sued Sight & Sound a few years later after selling off the AMY chip to them. It makes no sense to me. Why did they not re-acquire the chip and use it in the STe? Sigh.

There's got to be more to it and I hope the full story behind that eventually comes out. (if anything, pushing for renegotiation with some royalties for Atari Corp might have been attractive)

I doubt it had to do with the STe though, there were off the shelf alternatives that were cheaper in design and in large scale production by that point (so even without the IP, the economies of scale would push big time), namely Yamaha's various FM synth chips including the YM2203 which was fully backwards compatible with the YM2149 but added 3 4-operator FM synthesis voices (ie YM2151/YM2612 quality FM channels) with a footprint identical to the YM2149 save for an external (tiny) 8-pin DIP serial DAC. (it had also been in production some 4 years by the time the STe was released -and they probably should have added it to at least higher-end ST models from '86 onward)

 

AMY was a synth chip (albeit with some characteristics that allowed interesting voice/speech synth) and not a PCM/sample playback device as such anyway, so not something to displace the DMA sound in the STe, but supplement it. (but IMO, the YM2203+STe DMA sound would have been great for the time, better than the Amiga for a lot of stuff -more hardware voices, and hardware synth meaning less RAM allocated to samples -or higher quality samples for the PCM instruments and SFX that were used)

 

Oh yeah, I was also the guy in March 1993 at our user's group public computer festival who pointed out to Mike Fulton - of Atari Corp. - that the unreleased-at-the-time STe/Falcon/Panther controllers - the ones that became the standard Jaguar controllers - needed to have 6 fire buttons on them to properly play the popular arcade games like Street Fighter 2. His reaction was "the controller already has enough buttons!" and kept on playing Road Riot 4WD. Of course, I was right and was vindicated when the Pro Controllers were later released...the controllers that should have been released from the very start.

A shame no system was released earlier on with those original controllers, thus allowing an evolutionary period by the time 6 buttons were really needed. (the Panther was weak as it was, but there were tons of other opportunities -and the controller port/interface design was from the 1989 STe after all -STe/TT/etc derivatives, Lynx derivatives, a quicker redesign of the Panther allowing better bus sharing and DRAM rather than SRAM, licensing the Slipstream ASIC from Flare, etc)

 

Of course, Sam had made tons of other mistakes prior to that (on the consoles, Lynx, and computers), so less than ideal controllers were really insignificant by comparison. (not having any 4th gen home console was among those many mistakes) So a lot of this postulation is interesting, but a bit redundant when the biggest what-if would be if Jack had stayed into the early 90s alongside Katz or someone as capable as Katz running the entertainment division. (or even pushing to bring Katz back on board after he left Sega at the end of 1990 -might have been early '91)

 

As it was, according to: http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/interactive.html

Katz left in February of '89, replaced by Mead Ames-Klein who handled dual duties as head of Atari Computer and Entertainment (but that article claims he came in early 1990, but that's odd since Katz had left in early '89)

Elie Kenan came in to replace Klein in July of 1990

Larry Siegel became the president of the Entertainment division in fall of 1990 (so again having a distinct president of that division)

Bernie Stolar replaced Siegel in summer of 1992 (the same Stolar who would later join Sony of America and later Sega of America), he left that October (apparently from then on, there was no formal head of Atari Entertainment)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Kitty mentioned already Jack's primary concern at the time was the Japanese. He believed that the Japanese would take over the computer market and he considered that to be the biggest threat, not Commodore. Obviously he would have been pissed about how things ended up between him and Commodore - it was his baby after all but he didn't camp outside Commodore HQ and puncture Commodore management's car tires every day.

I wonder if he was disappointed (or frustrated) by how Commodore ended up getting driven into the ground by weaker management after he left. (let alone to see the same thing happen to Atari Corp under the watch of his own son . . . though that's more of a give for disappointment)

 

I've seen a few examples of Tramiel recounting his departure from CBM and he didn't seem so much bitter as disappointed. (though in some cases he was also probably influenced by being a public spectacle as below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NImJFV3wH88

(it's towards the very end at 9:25 -also interesting that they're still referring to the 130ST when that was just the demonstration unit and there's no mention of the 260ST at all)

Edited February 8, 2011 by kool kitty89

[kool kitty89]

Atari had plenty of advantages over Nintendo too, though. A much better-established brand, for starters. A huge library of arcade games. An existing (if troubled) distribution network. Millions of users.

The existing distribution network was the biggest flaw of Atari Inc in its heyday, though by the time Tramiel came with Atari Corp, that may have been rectified to a fair extent. (or the split may have screwed that up too)

 

As for Arcade games, yes, Atari Corp had IP of all arcade games produced up to mid 1984, but not any after that. And 1. nearly all those old games that had already been ported to home consoles (one of the more notable exceptions would be Tempest), and 2. even with Atari Games licenses, there wasn't a ton that would have added. (again, much bigger issues tied to funding and 3rd party support)

 

If Atari had spent its money either fixing (and rebadging) the 5200 or getting the 7800 out the door instead of developing, manufacturing and marketing the STs and XEs, they'd have been far more competitive with Nintendo. Indeed, a resurgent Atari might have scared Nintendo out of the US market entirely.

Had Warner managed things right, they could have done both. . . (as Morgan had planned)

 

Stop it with the 5200 stuff, the 5200 had already been dropped by the time the Tramiels were on the scene, so that was a non issue.

So? Un-drop it. Better yet, release the redesigned 5200 under a new name and advertise it as 5200-compatible. Kills two birds with one stone - gets away from the failure of the 5200 and its clunky hardware, yet maintains compatibility with the existing 5200 game library and some of the better peripherals (like the trackball and the 2600 module) while moving forward. And essentially keeps their computer and console architectures unified, since the 5200 is practically identical to the 8-bit computers.

Yes, possible, but tricky (marketing wise), and you've still got the 7800 muddying the waters. (test market, hype, 5,000 machines stockpiled, etc) Though maybe they could have carefully positioned it with provisions for the 7800's release. (but if the 5200 was perking up alongside the 2600 in mid '85, that might have favored the cancellation of the 7800 altogether)

 

And you'd need to go well beyond the 5100/Jr for real cost effectiveness. (albeit they could have done that in parallel with the XE consolidated redesigns) Losing CGIA was a pretty big issue too, and if they could have pressed that into production, it would have been rather significant.

 

As above, another option would have been a directly compatible game computer based on the 600XL. (even more attractive due to direct cross compatibility with A8 computers and reducing the number of unique platforms for Atari and 3rd parties to support or publish for) Hell, with a built-in keyboard, they could have even gotten around some of Nintendo's licensing restrictions that only allowed computer platforms as the exception. (with a computer defined as having a keyboard -that's what happened with Tetris iirc)

 

Hmm, actually it may have been a good idea to keep console and computer designs fairly parallel, though probably more separate than above.

I've thought that for 20 years. The 5200 should have been a monster success for Atari. Pity about the crap pack in and the even crapper sticks!

Again, Atari had MUCH bigger issues than the 5200. The 3200 or 7800, or a truly well designed 5200 wouldn't have stopped Atari's downward spiral and the bloated market. (it might have softened the blow, but not solved the real problems)

 

It probably would have been a much better idea to do something more like the XEGS (or just release the 600) back in 1982, not only cutting into the higher-end console market (as the 400 was intended to but too expensive early on) but also cutting into the hugely competitive low-end computer market with a better product with better software (and potentially better marketing) than the VIC, TI99/4a, or others. (having an even lower-end derivative of the 600 with a cheap membrane keyboard and a "game computer" orientation could have cut even deeper -maybe even push for a more compact form factor or re-use the 600 case directly)

 

So they could start with an STe based system (with tweaks to cut out all unnecessary hardware as well as boosting some capabilities to make it more favorable as a console -dual playfields and an FM synth chip probably would have done it, albeit the STe itself could have used such a boost)

 

Problem is, by that point Nintendo was well-established, with a cheap 8-bit console, with developers locked in and with all the floor space in a slew of retailers. Atari needed something on the market by Christmas 1985 - the STs came way too late (unless they'd concentrated on making a 68000 based videogame system first, and then turned it into a computer later, although I don't think the market would have supported a $400 videogame system at that point).

Yes, but Atari was still notable on the market with a significantly stronger market share than Sega and strong profits from the ST sales (mainly in Europe) with a peak towards the end of the 80s.

Atari's position with the exceptionally strong computer market in Europe could have bolstered things for sure (especially strong software support), and as Sega showed under Katz and Kalinske, good marketing could win over the market. (luckily, NEC didn't push for that at all when they had the resources and position to be the Sony of the 4tf gen console market) Hell, if it hadn't been for Katz, the Genesis would have been much weaker in the US market too.

 

You could, but ultimately it hurt Atari Corp more than it hurt Warner (who survived the implosion of Atari Corp quite nicely, thank you very much).

What does that have to do with anything? The Tramiels also made out very well from the liquidation of Atari Corp in spite of Sam's blunders, and unlike Commodore, Atari Inc never went bankrupt.

But in any case, Warner/Time Warner, was a totally separate company at that time and Atari Corp had little to do with it. (other than still having some stock -which they'd have been paid for in the liquidation -since the company was sold off for profit rather than collapsing in bankruptsy)

 

Atari Corp's "implosion" (or downward spiral) didn't start until 1989, up to then it was up and up. (and the 7800 even managed to sell 3.77 million units in the US alone in spite of the limited funding -most sales were in '87 and '88 -almost 3 million in those 2 years alone; actually that peak in '88 would point to '89 being a very good time to launch a next gen console to keep the momentum going -like a cut-down STe derivative with some tweaked enhancements in some areas as swell)

 

As for Atari Corp having "pretty much zero money to spare", they spent a pretty penny developing the STs (which took, what, a year and several million dollars) and XEs (money down the drain as far as I can tell - they'd have been better off just cost-reducing the 800XL and 1050 drive some more and slapping a new motherboard with 128K in the XL). That money would have been far, far better spent relaunching a redesigned 5200 (a very inexpensive proposition compared to the STs) or getting the 7800 to market.

Investing in computers was a very good idea though, it was the mess of the split that ruined other opportunities. (like using the much more advanced existing Atari Inc 16-bit chipsets and OS, let alone following on with Morgan's reorganization plans)

 

Heck, if you were gonna blow cash redesigning the 8-bits, why not revert to using the 1200XL's case, or stuff a drive in the thing and rip-off the very successful Apple //c? The XEs never made any sense to me, design-wise. For the money they spent developing them, they could have come up with something that would have been a lot more successful.

WTF? The 1200XL was the opposite direction of the cost-cut XE models. (using the 600XL form factor would have been the lowest cost option short of new cases)

However with that first line of though: if they were going to invest in cost reducing the 8-bits with a new form factor, why not push the XEGS out at the same time? (ie 1985, not '87 and with 16k like the 5200/600, if not as a followon for a quicker repackaging of the 600 in late '84)

And, of course CGIA would have been quite significant as well.

 

And don't get me started on the portable (luggable) XE, or the 65XE (was it really worth it to support TWO separate models of an obsolete computer?), which Tramiel's Atari also dumped money into designing and, in the case of the 65XE, producing.

I'm sure there wasn't a ton of R&D going into the XE line, it pretty much used all ready-made Atari Inc hardware, the motherboard PCBs and casings would have been the only new changes. (and both should have paid off by far with the lower production costs)

 

Actually, it might have been cheaper to stick with the 600XL tooling, but just change the internals. (maybe use a cheaper keyboard too) It also may have reduced confusion with the XE range being different machines. (ie more obvious that they'd be fully compatible with the previous XLs)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I liked my ST, and even though it was a bucket of parts, I think it had tons of potential. But it was also clear by around '88 that the machine had been a failure in the marketplace - Atari essentially stopped development on it to concentrate on consoles (XE GS, Panther, Jaguar), workstations (TT, Abaq), handhelds (Lynx), PCs - all of which also flopped. Atari wasn't moving enough STs (given their low margins) to be terribly profitable, and Apple and the Macs were walking off with the "not IBM compatible" marketplace. Yeah, the STs were big in Europe for a couple of years (except for France, where the Macs did incredibly well), but that's kind of like one of those bands that's "big in Japan". Nice, but not enough to launch you into the big leagues. Atari had I think $400 million in sales their best year, but a big chunk of that came from games and the XEs, and their overall profits were pretty woeful ($50 million, IIRC) because their margins (especially on the STs) were so thin. That's why they turned their attentions to higher-margin businesses (workstations) and higher-margin cheap products (consoles, XEs) by the end of the decade.

What??? 1987/88 was more or less the peak of the ST, and any apparent decline in the US was probably more due to the surge in European demand taking precedence.

 

Putting priority on the XEGS would have been a bad idea for sure, and the Panther and jaguar came under Sam's watch, after Atari had entered its downward spiral. In terms of the ST, you had updates to the MEGA line, the STE, TT, MEGA STE, and fianlly the Falcon. (now, they may have made mistakes in the evolutionary design of those systems -I think they did in several areas, too conservative at times, not enough at others- but they WERE continually advancing things)

The Transputer was a complete waste of resources too. (pushing a TT class workstation 2 or 3 years earlier would have been much better)

 

The ST line was going to be niche in the US market though, and as such they should have focused on establishing and maintaining a lead in that niche. (in Europe they needed to support it as a general computer though)

But they could have pushed the PC line much more in the long run, a shame that didn't happen. (they had some pretty nice range of machines on the market in the late 80s too with the PC-3/4/5 and ABC)

 

 

With the margins Atari was operating on, they needed to sell millions of STs a year, not a million units a year, for it to be viable. According to Wikipedia, they sold about 4-5 million STs total over the lifetime of the platform. Compare to the C64, which sold between 12.5 and 17 million units. Heck, even the C128 sold 4 million units, and it's considered something of a flop.

And they were selling millions of STs a year as well as millions of 7800s (in '87 and '88 at least), millions of 2600s, but not millions of XEs unfortunately. (of course, the vast majority of those sales were in Europe_

 

I was pissed off at the time that Atari was neglecting the STs, but in hindsight I understand why. I'd expected a machine like the Mega STe - only with better graphics - to come out a year or so after the Mega STs did in '86, not 4 years later!

They should have had 10/12/16 MHz models from the start with console and desktop form factors, or at least by '86 (maybe just 8 and 16 MHz), and a wider range of machines including those in the workstation class (but still of the same architecture) with some offering FPU sockets and introducing fast RAM buses (ie a 2nd bus separate from the shared graphics/general bus), and '020 and '030 models sooner. (probably should have added hardware scrolling and possibly a YM2203 ASAP and made it a base standard -discontinuing the old models- as well as offering upgrades to early adopters)

All models should have at least had a general purpose expansion port, and preferably, an internal design facilitating drop-in upgrades for certain components. (OS ROM already did, but a socketed SHIFTER and CPU among other things would have been nice)

The STe should have had the YM2203 on top of DMA sound and 4bpp dual playfield modes (vs the Amiga which could only do 3bpp dual playfield) and perhaps a full 8bpp mode with 256 colors. (preferably with packed pixels -or chained bitplanes like VGA, or for that matter, drop the dual playfield mode in favor of just the 8-bit packed pixel mode and a blitter that took advantage of the faster manipulation possible with packed pixels -including fast page DRAM accesses)

 

And as it was, with the TT appearing in 1990, they should have had a low-end derivative of that with a 16 MHz 68k and blitter (preferably a 16 MHz one like the MEGA STE, let alone one actually designed to take advantage of the TT's 64-bit video bus), and that should have been the MEGA STE (with a lower-end version in a Falcon/STFM form factor), and maybe a mid-range model with a 16 MHz 68EC020.

 

Albeit, everything from '89 onward was Sam management. (Jack retired in late '88 and had been transitioning out for most of that year iirc) Albeit, things like expandability, introducing faster CPUs, better off the shelf sound chips, and BLiTTER on lower-end models (let alone simpler/cheaper hardware scrolling inside the SHIFTER) would have been under Jack. (hell, a stop-gap STE like machine in '88 with 16 MHz 68k -perhaps optional, YM2203 -maybe add a simple direct-write DAC or an ASIC with a few DAC ports as such -short of DMA sound, and BLiTTER could have potentially better combated the Amiga's price drop and DRAM price hike -ie models with less RAM could have more features and thus be more competitive- and gotten support for the new hardware sooner)

[+wood_jl]

I disagree. I think the Tramiels made a big mistake trying to launch a 68000 based Macintosh clone on a shoestring budget without a definite hardware advantage over the Mac. They came to market about two years later with an inferior product at razor thin margins, one they couldn't really afford to promote well and one they weren't making enough money off of to effectively improve.

 

HA HA. I disagree with your disagreement. I think they did well for what they had to work with. No advantages over the Mac? The Mac was (1) EXPENSIVE, (2) had a tiny screen, (3) had a black and white screen, (4) had an RS-422 serial port for hard drives - laughably slow.

 

It's hard to take the rest of your post seriously, considering those facts.

[Pilsner73]

I have been reading over this thread and keep hearing about Atari's advanced designs for 16-bit computers, is there any solid information, prototypes, development stories out there? I can say I am interested in hearing about it and what if any of the things they were working on made it into actual products Atari or otherwise.

[DracIsBack]

IBM manufactured the Jaguar, not Atari...thought that was common knowledge (Atari only marketed the games system, since it had already closed down/stopped hardware manufacturing)

 

You're reaching a little too far, Carmel ...

 

Atari was the one driving the manufacturing of the Jaguar, peripherals, development, games and platform. They weren't just 'marketing' an assembled white labelled console. Atari was behind the platform. And Atari was in business after Commodore was liquidated.

 

IBM did initial manufacturing, but they were also manufactured by Comptronix (Atari 1994 annual report, pp 2) while Tom and Jerry were manufactured by Motorola.In addition, I think jaguar CD was manufactured by Philips.

Edited February 8, 2011 by DracIsBack

[SpaceDice2010]

 

Then what does that make the Macintosh or PC?

 

When I was in college I bought a Mac for $1000 or $1500 at the campus bookstore. IMHO it was a much better computer than the ST line. The 512 x 342 display was sharp and I preferred the Mac OS over the version of GEM on the ST. One of my friends had an ST at the time and I just didn't like it at all. The keyboard drove me absolutely nuts. The Mac ran the software that I needed (Excel etc.) and you could actually find a place to buy the computer and the software. As for PCs, I have really never liked PCs. I think one of the most stable OSes that MS ever made was Windows 2000 Pro.

 

The ST was a strange machine imho. Was it a home computer? Was it a business computer? Atari gave some mixed messages in their marketing if I recall correctly. If the Mac was the computer for the rest of us, then the St was the Mac for the rest of us. Slapping the Atari name on a computer that they tried to sell to fortune 1000 companies was a big mistake imho. Atari was branded as a games company and having a computer with such an horrendous keyboard did not help Atari at all. (Though that was probably the least of their problems.)

 

About seven years ago I bought an ST and it came with about 200 game discs. 90% of the games are horrible. It wasn't even a good game machine imho. (Not saying the Mac was either, but it had many other advantages over the ST.)

 

Anyways, going to school in Boston at the time, I am not even sure where I would have gotten an ST if I even wanted to.

[SpaceDice2010]

I have been reading over this thread and keep hearing about Atari's advanced designs for 16-bit computers, is there any solid information, prototypes, development stories out there? I can say I am interested in hearing about it and what if any of the things they were working on made it into actual products Atari or otherwise.

 

I would like to know as well. If they didn't get the Amiga chipset and these were so far along why didn't they use them?

[DracIsBack]

When I was in college I bought a Mac for $1000 or $1500 at the campus bookstore.

 

When I was a student, the Atari 520 ST was $500, the Amiga 500 was $800 and the Mac 512 was $2000. The ST was in color. The Amiga was even more colors. The Mac was black and white. I didn't find the interfaces to lean better in one direction over the other. But I thought Macs were laughably over-priced relative to what you got.

 

There were stores where I could buy software for all three easily so that wasn't an issue.

[Pilsner73]

When I was in college I bought a Mac for $1000 or $1500 at the campus bookstore.

 

When I was a student, the Atari 520 ST was $500, the Amiga 500 was $800 and the Mac 512 was $2000. The ST was in color. The Amiga was even more colors. The Mac was black and white. I didn't find the interfaces to lean better in one direction over the other. But I thought Macs were laughably over-priced relative to what you got.

 

There were stores where I could buy software for all three easily so that wasn't an issue.

 

Also the ST also had a very good for the time Monochrome monitor option.

Edited February 8, 2011 by Pilsner73