The Tramiels

[Lynxpro]

The new one looks quite nice. Though I HATED the Amiga o/s back in the day,just awful. GEM was

easy,people loved it. Gui was still pretty new and it was just plain easier for the public to use. Much more Mac like which was all they had really seen up to that point.

 

 

 

I thought GEM was easier than Intuition back in the day although I didn't care for GEM's default green color [blue was better]. My pro-ST'ness was keen to focus on the limitations of the AmigaOS at the time: virus prone [were Atari ST fans writing them?], too dependent upon Kickstart discs, instituting multitasking on computers that shipped with less RAM than the STs and more crash prone. and the fact that Commodore was manufacturing it. I should've respected it for the abilities it could do with such limitations at the time.

 

I think AmigaOS/Intuition would have been better had GEM [or GEMlike] been the GUI. The "workbench" metaphor was rather strange compared to the "desktop" and AmigaOS past 3.x seems to have moved to the "desktop" metaphor from what I've seen. And for some reason, the GUI kinda looked as ugly as GEOS. Surprising that the text font for the GUI looked so cartoonish and 8-Bit. For all the talk of the limitations of the ST's standard fonts, they didn't look as cartoonish in my eyes and a wee bit more professional looking...

[svenski]

The issue here (really) is when someone wades in making very generalized statements saying something is horrible, crap, rubbish - no good for this or that, without seeing the bigger picture and just because you didn't experience the ST being used as a serious business computer there were plenty of people who did.

 

I think that's a pretty odd statement coming from somebody who's just stated that the Mac had a smaller software library than the ST, something which is just obviously ludicrous and, frankly, a bit loopy.

 

I mean, ST magazines at the time complained about how far the STs were falling behind the Mac in terms of productivity software, and it was a common slam against the ST in the general computer media. Until 1987 the STs didn't even have a decent word processor. That's pretty basic. The ST's version of Word Perfect wasn't exactly stellar, either - I definitely recall it being reviewed as a serious mixed bag by a couple of the big ST magazines.

 

A few people in Europe made do with the ST as a "business" machine for a couple of years - it was certainly more capable than a Commodore 64 - but it wasn't a mainstream choice even there as the market share figures prove.

 

Not as oddball and as loopy as you stating that the PC was the first dominant 16-bit computer in Europe. I wish I still had my trade software catalogs from the main distributors to put up here and then you could go through the pages and pages of ST, and Amiga titles compared to the smaller PC section (which did get bigger year on year) and the zero pages for the mac - which the main software distributors hardly touched.

 

As for the Genesis displacing the ST and Amiga, I presume you are talking again about the US market. In the UK the console and home computer markets were quite different for sometime and also at times cyclical. It was probably the PS1 that made console gaming cool for the masses. Do you really think an Amiga owner would rather have had a Genesis (megadrive) ?, really?

 

We get it that you don't like the ST, we really do. We also get the fact that you refuse to recognize any positive impact that the Atari ST may have had on computing.

[SpaceDice2010]

Re: Prints Shops and the ST. In the US it was damn hard to find a print shop that knew what to do with an ST disk. That is a fact. Some may exist.

 

Re: Form Factor. The ST had a horrible form factor for business users. Atari would have been better off tossing it in an pizza box style case with a real keyboard and jacked the price up $500 to sell to businesses and kept the form factor at the price it had for home users. They could have taken that $500 and invested it in advertising and a sales force to businesses. Let me ask a question. How many computers that had the form factor of the ST had succeeded in business in the US? I can't think of any off the top of my head. Businesses care more about solutions than they do price. The Mac and PC proved that.

 

Re: GEM, You know what I feel about it already. But, Sunspot raised a few good points. Graphical OSes have a hard time with a low res screen resolution. That is why the Mac had a built in high res black and white monitor. On the St in low res mode when you pulled down a menu it took up half the screen. The trash can is huge. It's green. Looking back now the Geos OS for the Commodore 8bit line looked just as good as GEM.

 

Re: Color. Color is an assumption that some feel the business market actually cared about. At this time they most likely did not. Many businesses were more than happy to buy an Apple II and choose a mono monitor to get true 80 columns than a color monitor. Sure the ST had a Monochrome monitor. But the actual viewing area size of the screen was just slightly larger than the Mac's. And the monitor alone weighed as much as the Mac and took up more space.

 

Re: Software. Software is what sells a computer. The ST totally missed it as far as what business users wanted for software. Sevenski asked me to look around and see all the wonderful business software that the ST had. Fair enough. I started here - http://www.atarimagazines.com/index/showreviews.php?mag=start and the one piece of software that was known to business users was Word Perfect. I read the first line of the review, "Using WordPerfect 4.1 (WP) for the ST is like driving a Ferrari through rush-hour traffic. The potential for phenomenal performance is there, but unfortunately, WP seems to spend most of its time stalled at the side of the road, rather than leading the pack." http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv2n6/wordperfect.html Next.

 

I am not going to get into a Mac vs. ST debate. The market decided that 20 years ago. If the ST was such a superior product then the market either didn't know about it (thanks to Atari's great marketing), disagreed that it was a superior product, or didn't care one way or the other and was just concerned about what software they run. Businesses are solution based, not as price conscious as many will think.

 

There is an old saying in business, "you never got fired for buying a PC." But, what about buying a computer from a company known for games (at least in the US)? "My kid has an Atari at home so let me spend $500,000 on Atari's at the office to run 1st Word Plus. I am sure a program as good as Excel will come out soon."

 

This all leads me to the question I asked. What was Atari's market? Home computer users? Business users? Those who want to upgrade from the A8 line? Kool Kitty said it was aimed at both business and home computer users. In reality, I would guess that most that bought the ones in the US at first were computer enthusiasts. At least in the US I feel slapping that Atari name on the computer was a liability.

 

Think about this. I went to school in Boston and had no idea where to buy an ST there even if I wanted. (Jack Tramiel didn't have the best relationship with computer dealers after sacking most of the small ones at Commdore and screwing them when he kept lowering the prices to mass merchants.) In Maine where I grew up there was a dealer that sold the ST line for about the first year. Upstairs they were a Radio Shack dealer and in the back they sold computers. But to walk up the stairs you passed what was left of a once thriving videogame business. So as you are walking up to see an St sitting next to a PC and a Commodore you notice a few bins of games selling for $3 a pop that no one really wants. The majority of them had the Atari name on them. What a mixed message. The videogame market had just crashed and in the eyes of consumers Atari's answer was to sell a $1000 computer system.

 

When IBM announced that they were entering the PC market with the PCjr, Tramiel said that more consumers would buy a $200 computer than a $700 computer. He was right.

 

What happened from the time that Tramiel left Commodore and he started TTL after cutting his trip around the world short? Did he see the Amiga at Commodore before he left as some rumors suggest? Did he fear that Apple was going to conquer the computer market with the Mac much like he felt the Japanese were going to do? What motivated him to rush together a Mac clone with off the shelf parts, toss a boring OS that was a total pain to update as time went on, and slap the name of a company that was known for video games and sell it for $1000?

 

Some things are a mystery to me. I would really love to see the initial business plan of TTL, if they even had one.

 

I think sometimes that we have to step outside the box that we live in and look at things as how the average consumer saw things. Many times in this thread and others you see members say, "No you are wrong, what Atari or Apple or Whoever should have does is... and then ramble on about technology". It's all speculation. Consumers didn't care that Asteroids was the first bank-switched game or not. How many kids ran home and told their friends they got the first bank-switched game? Consumers care about solutions. If you have a solution that consumers want and let them know that you have it then they will buy it. A good product is only as good as the marketing that goes behind it.

 

In many ways it may be a plus to Atari that they didn't have a huge marketing budget in the US for the ST as I truly believe, that as far as the US was concerned, the ST line was the wrong product at the wrong time. And since the ST failed in the US after the first couple years I think the market agreed with me.

 

I will say however that I did waste quite a few hours in college playing Dungeon Master and for that I do than Atari.

[SpaceDice2010]

The issue here (really) is when someone wades in making very generalized statements saying something is horrible, crap, rubbish - no good for this or that, without seeing the bigger picture and just because you didn't experience the ST being used as a serious business computer there were plenty of people who did.

 

I think that's a pretty odd statement coming from somebody who's just stated that the Mac had a smaller software library than the ST, something which is just obviously ludicrous and, frankly, a bit loopy.

 

I mean, ST magazines at the time complained about how far the STs were falling behind the Mac in terms of productivity software, and it was a common slam against the ST in the general computer media. Until 1987 the STs didn't even have a decent word processor. That's pretty basic. The ST's version of Word Perfect wasn't exactly stellar, either - I definitely recall it being reviewed as a serious mixed bag by a couple of the big ST magazines.

 

A few people in Europe made do with the ST as a "business" machine for a couple of years - it was certainly more capable than a Commodore 64 - but it wasn't a mainstream choice even there as the market share figures prove.

 

Not as oddball and as loopy as you stating that the PC was the first dominant 16-bit computer in Europe. I wish I still had my trade software catalogs from the main distributors to put up here and then you could go through the pages and pages of ST, and Amiga titles compared to the smaller PC section (which did get bigger year on year) and the zero pages for the mac - which the main software distributors hardly touched.

 

As for the Genesis displacing the ST and Amiga, I presume you are talking again about the US market. In the UK the console and home computer markets were quite different for sometime and also at times cyclical. It was probably the PS1 that made console gaming cool for the masses. Do you really think an Amiga owner would rather have had a Genesis (megadrive) ?, really?

 

We get it that you don't like the ST, we really do. We also get the fact that you refuse to recognize any positive impact that the Atari ST may have had on computing.

 

So, can I ask you a question. What happened to the ST in the Uk? I mean, why did Atari stop making and selling the St line in the UK? It seems that both Germany and the Uk were very strong on the ST. I am sure there was a big enough market in the UK and Germany to continue the ST line if for only those two countries. (There is no sarcasm or anything in this question. I am just curious as to why Atari would stop selling a computer in countries where it was such a success. I am sure there must have been other countries as well.)

[toptenmaterial]

Wasn't computer production sacked to add resources to the up-and-coming jag?

[Pilsner73]

The issue here (really) is when someone wades in making very generalized statements saying something is horrible, crap, rubbish - no good for this or that, without seeing the bigger picture and just because you didn't experience the ST being used as a serious business computer there were plenty of people who did.

 

I think that's a pretty odd statement coming from somebody who's just stated that the Mac had a smaller software library than the ST, something which is just obviously ludicrous and, frankly, a bit loopy.

 

I mean, ST magazines at the time complained about how far the STs were falling behind the Mac in terms of productivity software, and it was a common slam against the ST in the general computer media. Until 1987 the STs didn't even have a decent word processor. That's pretty basic. The ST's version of Word Perfect wasn't exactly stellar, either - I definitely recall it being reviewed as a serious mixed bag by a couple of the big ST magazines.

 

A few people in Europe made do with the ST as a "business" machine for a couple of years - it was certainly more capable than a Commodore 64 - but it wasn't a mainstream choice even there as the market share figures prove.

 

Not as oddball and as loopy as you stating that the PC was the first dominant 16-bit computer in Europe. I wish I still had my trade software catalogs from the main distributors to put up here and then you could go through the pages and pages of ST, and Amiga titles compared to the smaller PC section (which did get bigger year on year) and the zero pages for the mac - which the main software distributors hardly touched.

 

As for the Genesis displacing the ST and Amiga, I presume you are talking again about the US market. In the UK the console and home computer markets were quite different for sometime and also at times cyclical. It was probably the PS1 that made console gaming cool for the masses. Do you really think an Amiga owner would rather have had a Genesis (megadrive) ?, really?

 

We get it that you don't like the ST, we really do. We also get the fact that you refuse to recognize any positive impact that the Atari ST may have had on computing.

 

So, can I ask you a question. What happened to the ST in the Uk? I mean, why did Atari stop making and selling the St line in the UK? It seems that both Germany and the Uk were very strong on the ST. I am sure there was a big enough market in the UK and Germany to continue the ST line if for only those two countries. (There is no sarcasm or anything in this question. I am just curious as to why Atari would stop selling a computer in countries where it was such a success. I am sure there must have been other countries as well.)

 

I'd like to chime in on a few points. I was a home user back in the day so the ST with it's performance, decent software for home, games, and ability to jump on online at a price superior to the Mac/IBM clones was that machine for me. I checked out the Amiga but about that time the IBM clones finally were coming into their own for GUI/Graphics/Sound and Commodore was not doing any better than Atari business wise. Also my memory may be playing tricks but didn't Microsoft either pull out of the Mac market or didn't do much for it?

 

As for lime green/low res. Yeah Atari made some odd choices and the icons/desktop never looked good until some tweaking was done. When the STe line came out Atari should of totally revamped the desktop look and feel which they didn't really do until the Falcon 030. The Falcon030 was too little too late and really was aimed at niche for musicians and artists.

 

As for Europe it seems to me Atari lost the lead in those markets when they lost the price/performance advantage to the Amiga. Now if they could have had the STe and Mega STe out by 1988 and then a Falcon 030 following in 1990 who knows but they didn't release them on those dates. I think Sam T saw the writing on the wall that Atari had missed out in the computer market in the US and Europe was declining and he put all his eggs in one basket with the Jaguar and video games. Of course the Jaguar was another technology that under the Tramiels seemed that it's marketing/development didn't seem good enough. Atari either lacked the cash or was unwilling to mortgage themselves to get back into the marketplace. The first Jaguar had some nice points but it needed more software development with some great titles and then Atari needed to get the Jaguar II readied for release. But Atari didn't use the first Jaguar to reenter the market build a base and then go all out with the Jaguar II (which Microsoft did with the first Xbox).

[SpaceDice2010]

Also my memory may be playing tricks but didn't Microsoft either pull out of the Mac market or didn't do much for it?

 

Microsoft had invested a lot in the Mac early on. They released Excel for the Mac first and was a strong supporter of the Mac platform. In fact Bill Gates even went so far as to push for Apple to open the Mac up to outside manufacturers and basically handed Apple a business plan to do that early on. This is before Windows became such a big success. They had that much invested in the Mac market. At one point a huge percentage of their revenue was coming from Mac products. There was a period later on where Microsoft's heart and soul was not in Mac software, as was true with a lot of other developers. I believe it was around the period of the Word 6.0 fiasco. Even Gates himself finally admitted that what Microsoft was putting out for the Mac was crap and fixed it. If I recall correctly there was a feud over Microsoft supporting OSX with native apps. That was when Amelio and later Jobs worked on the deal with Microsoft where MS would invest in Apple (to show it's faith in a company in trouble) and also announce that they would continue to develop Office for the Mac.

 

So to answer your question, they never pulled out of the Mac market. For a period of time they took their programs that were on the PC and did a half ass job of converting them to the Mac (Word 6 being the best example). Later on Gates played hardball with OSX, but iirc he wanted IE to be on the Mac desktop. There was a little battle going on there. You also have to keep in mind that the relationship between Gates and Spindler was a very contentious relationship as well.

[SpaceDice2010]

Wasn't computer production sacked to add resources to the up-and-coming jag?

 

I believe so. But if you have a hugely successful product it makes no sense to "sack" it. Maybe the markets that Atari was hugely successful in at the time were not big enough to sustain the ST line? Or had the love affair with the St died? I honestly don't know enough about Atari's history outside the US, which is why I am asking.

[SpaceDice2010]

Not really sure how accurate the numbers are, but these charts are rather interesting.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/

[DracIsBack]

<sigh> this thread would be less venomous if people (pro-ST and anti-ST) would stop acting as though their opinions are 'facts'.

Edited February 13, 2011 by DracIsBack

[SpaceDice2010]

<sigh> this thread would be less venomous if people (pro-ST and anti-ST) would stop acting as though their opinions are 'facts'.

 

This happens a lot on Atari Age. I think a little of Marty is wearing off on me.

[sunspot42]

Svenski was right, pc's didn't take off seriously in UK/EU till after commodore went into administration and atari stopped making hardware (mid 90's), I think a little thing called windows 95 made sure of it

 

People keep making this claim, without providing a single iota of evidence. Does anybody have any facts to back up this opinion? I mean, I've dug up market share numbers going back to the '70s, Atari's financials during the late '80s and early '90s, units sold figures for several of the major platforms of that era, all kinds of facts. Surely somebody can find some credible source online to back up the oft-repeated contention that PC's didn't "take off seriously" in Europe until the mid-'90s.

 

I can state definitively that I read UK computer magazines on a monthly basis from '87 - '91, traveled to France and the UK in '92 and '93 and saw Atari's annual reports during the same period. The magazines were full of PCs (as well as alternate platforms), and the PC was certainly treated as the dominant platform. Atari's annual reports sure didn't reflect them having some enormous business in Europe (how could they, when the ST only shifted 4 million units during its entire lifespan?), and when I got to Europe in '92 the Amiga and ST were already obviously on their deathbeds and PCs were everywhere. Not just for sale in the shops, but installed in offices and being used for a multitude of functions.

 

The PC probably didn't rule the home computer roost in Europe until after 1990, but then again the Commodore 64 seems to have remained the king of that domain throughout the '80s, not the ST or the Amiga. Both of the 16-bit platforms from Atari and Commodore seem to have had a period of about two years when they were marginally hot in the home computer space, and then imploded ('86 - '88 for the STs, '88 - '90 for the Amigas). Meanwhile, Apple's profits exceeded Atari's revenues and the clones went on to gobble up a 90% market share.

[+wood_jl]

<sigh> this thread would be less venomous if people (pro-ST and anti-ST) would stop acting as though their opinions are 'facts'.

 

This is quite true. All opinion, none of which is significant. Although the motives of pro-ST (defense, this is AtariAge of course) should be understandable, and the motives of anti-ST (it is an Atari and this is AtariAge) raise question as to what they hope to accomplish here. :roll:

Edited February 14, 2011 by wood_jl

[sunspot42]

Wasn't computer production sacked to add resources to the up-and-coming jag?

 

I believe so. But if you have a hugely successful product it makes no sense to "sack" it. Maybe the markets that Atari was hugely successful in at the time were not big enough to sustain the ST line? Or had the love affair with the St died? I honestly don't know enough about Atari's history outside the US, which is why I am asking.

 

If you go to this page I referenced last night and scroll down to the section labeled "Slipping Sales: Late 1980s and Early 199s", you'll read the following:

 

 

In the spring of 1990, Atari introduced its Portfolio palmtop personal computer. Early the following year, the company came out with a revamped, color Lynx product, and several months later it introduced new notebook computers. Despite these advances, however, Atari was in trouble. Sales of its home computers in Europe began to flag as the company faced increased competition, and in 1991 foreign sales collapsed. In the video games field, Atari's efforts to challenge Nintendo through legal means had been rebuffed, and the company was unable to regain significant market share from its Japanese competitors. By the first quarter of 1992, losses over a three-month period had reached $14 million.

 

As Atari began to ship its Falcon030 system to stores in small numbers in early 1993, the company's fate was unclear. Decidedly, it was experiencing another severe downturn, which by the summer had snowballed into what the San Jose Mercury News called a full-fledged financial meltdown: between the second quarters of 1992 and 1993 Atari's sales plummeted 76 percent to only $5.7 million.

 

Atari hit is post-Warner peak in '87, on the back of the 520 and 1040STs and - more importantly I think - residual sales of the inexpensive to build and support 2600, 7800 and 8-bit computer lines and accompanying software and peripherals. Which is why I've thought for some years now that Atari would have been far better off ignoring the 16-bit computer market entirely and focusing their efforts on videogames. Nintendo did just that, and it made them a colossus.

[Pilsner73]

Svenski was right, pc's didn't take off seriously in UK/EU till after commodore went into administration and atari stopped making hardware (mid 90's), I think a little thing called windows 95 made sure of it

 

People keep making this claim, without providing a single iota of evidence. Does anybody have any facts to back up this opinion? I mean, I've dug up market share numbers going back to the '70s, Atari's financials during the late '80s and early '90s, units sold figures for several of the major platforms of that era, all kinds of facts. Surely somebody can find some credible source online to back up the oft-repeated contention that PC's didn't "take off seriously" in Europe until the mid-'90s.

 

I can state definitively that I read UK computer magazines on a monthly basis from '87 - '91, traveled to France and the UK in '92 and '93 and saw Atari's annual reports during the same period. The magazines were full of PCs (as well as alternate platforms), and the PC was certainly treated as the dominant platform. Atari's annual reports sure didn't reflect them having some enormous business in Europe (how could they, when the ST only shifted 4 million units during its entire lifespan?), and when I got to Europe in '92 the Amiga and ST were already obviously on their deathbeds and PCs were everywhere. Not just for sale in the shops, but installed in offices and being used for a multitude of functions.

 

The PC probably didn't rule the home computer roost in Europe until after 1990, but then again the Commodore 64 seems to have remained the king of that domain throughout the '80s, not the ST or the Amiga. Both of the 16-bit platforms from Atari and Commodore seem to have had a period of about two years when they were marginally hot in the home computer space, and then imploded ('86 - '88 for the STs, '88 - '90 for the Amigas). Meanwhile, Apple's profits exceeded Atari's revenues and the clones went on to gobble up a 90% market share.

 

I am not sure when the PC took off in most of Europe but a lot of reading I have seen has them using the Specturm computers, then the C64, next Amiga/ST and then going to the pc computer but when that was exactly I don't have dates for that. I read somewhere that Commodore before they went bankrupt had a ton of orders for the Amiga 1200 (I think) in Europe but Commdore folded before they could place the orders. So I think the Amiga was still a strong concern until about 1992-93 range.

[sunspot42]

We get it you hated the ST form factor.

 

Yet what you don't apparently "get" is that most potential customers would have felt the same way, which is one of many reasons why the ST didn't thrive and certainly didn't survive.

 

 

Yet the ST had more hardware performance out of the box over the Mac.

 

Define "hardware performance".

 

More CPU cycles? The Mac held a huge advantage over the PC for years in that regard - didn't make any difference. The PC still walked off with 90% of the market.

 

Form factor? The ST's sucked. Amiga, Mac, PCs . . . they all left Atari in the dust.

 

Interfaces? I'd say the STs held a slight advantage here in number, although the Mac's standard SCSI interface was likely a lot more useful for most folks.

 

Keyboard? The Macs had a great keyboard. The ST's? Not so much.

 

Display? Well, the Macs had square pixels. The STs sported a slightly higher resolution. The STs were obviously better for games with their color monitor. For professional work in monochrome? I'd say there's little difference.

 

Ultimately, having a few more cycles of performance in your hardware is nice, but it's only crucial to a tiny handful of buyers. Software availability has clearly always been the #1 factor impacting the success of a given platform over the longterm, and the STs certainly lagged in that regard behind every other 16-bit platform. Which is almost certainly why they were the first semi-major 16-bit platform (more than a couple million units sold) to die.

 

 

Oh no Atari picked low res as default and Lime green (which is still far superior to what colors Mac could use), really they were quickly and easily changed.

 

Again, you seem to have missed the point. The machine has to market itself when it's on display in the store. Apple understood this. Atari and Commodore never really did. A hideous lime green low resolution screen hogged up by icons that look worse than the C64's GEOS - on a machine that costs 3 times as much as a C64 - is not a major selling point. If you can't get the desktop right, the very first view most potential buyers will have of your new computer, what else have you f'ed up?

 

I'd just add the Amiga isn't much better in this regard. Workbench was a freakin' eyesore up into the 1990s. Who chose those godawful colors and that hideous font? Ack! For a "creative" machine targeted to artsy-fartsy types, you'd think they'd have come up with something that looked better than the Macintosh, not worse than the Apple //.

 

 

The Apple II line outsold the Mac for awhile after it came out and was what kept Apple going while they waited for the Mac to be profitable.

 

Yes, but within a couple of years the Mac became very, very profitable indeed. The STs never did. It probably didn't have to end up that way for Atari - there were a lot of obvious mistakes they made with the STs which people criticized at the time but which the Tramiels never effectively addressed, and even more that seem obvious to me and others in hindsight.

[sunspot42]

Since you keep saying the Mac had more software that you wanted to use, why didn't you buy a Spectre GCR and run said software on your Atari Mega ST?

 

You seem to take every observation people make about the failure of the ST platform and why the market reacted the way it did and turn it into some kind of personal assault, as if it's all about either you or about the guy making the observation. Why do you feel psychologically compelled to do that? Why don't you simply stick to the facts at hand? Why are you emotionally invested in this argument at all? It's a discussion about a long, long, long dead computer platform. I owned and used a Mega ST for 8 long years - the longest I've owned and used any single PC. I loved and, well, not hated but was frustrated by it in equal measure over those 8 years. That doesn't keep me from being able to dispassionately assess how and why the STs enjoyed some initial success in the marketplace before failing quite spectacularly. Intellectually I think it's fascinating to discuss, but emotionally I have no attachment to the platform whatsoever. I can't see how anybody still could.

 

Anyhow, I never said that the Mac had more software *I* wanted to use, although clearly that wasn't the case with most potential customers. There were a few Mac packages early on that I'd wished I had access to (mostly Excel and a decent word processor, which the ST *never* got). By a few years in though I didn't want yesteryear's Mac or PC software - I wanted a contemporary Mac or a PC. So I scrimped and saved until I could afford one. I think that's what happened with most ST users, which is why Atari's sales imploded after 1990.

[sunspot42]

Really the Megafile actually at the time was a good deal and I know a lot of ST users who had Hard Drives with their ST computer.

 

Sorry, but the Megafile was not actually at the time a "good deal". I recall looking longingly at Mac hard drives and wishing ST drives were as affordable. If Atari had gone with a standard SCSI port, they would have been . . .

 

 

IMO the buying public have made the PC and it's form factor the number one design which is a separate monitor, detachable keyboard, and case that is either on the desktop or tower.

 

Actually, the #1 form factor today is the laptop.

 

Beyond that, I'd have had no trouble with Atari releasing something like the Mega ST as the original 520ST. Although I still think if you're gonna release a Macintosh clone, your best bet is to release it in a similar all-in-one case. Make it easier for consumers to do a (ahem) apples to apples comparison.

 

 

Not as oddball and as loopy as you stating that the PC was the first dominant 16-bit computer in Europe.

 

What was the ST's peak market share in Europe? Did it ever pass 50%? In terms of units sold? In terms of dollars? The best you can possibly argue is that there was no dominant 16-bit platform in Europe. However, given the price of the average PC, it seems likely the PC was dominant on a dollar basis very early on, achieving unit dominance by 1990 or perhaps earlier. Again, I eagerly await some facts to back up your assertions. So far, we've seen zilch.

 

 

As for the Genesis displacing the ST and Amiga, I presume you are talking again about the US market. In the UK the console and home computer markets were quite different for sometime and also at times cyclical.

 

Yet, curiously, Amiga sales cratered right around the time the Genesis became available in Europe. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though...

 

 

We get it that you don't like the ST, we really do.

 

I neither like nor dislike the ST, that's what you don't seem to "get". What I can see are some of the reasons why the ST failed as a platform. And I say this as someone who used the ST as my only platform from 1985 thru 1995 - 10 full years. Very few people stuck with the ST as long as I did! The Tramiels abandoned the ST before I did!!! (The bastiches!)

 

 

Looking back now GEOS for the Commodore 8bit line looked just as good as GEM.

 

Yes! I noticed this about a decade ago! Saw an old C64 running GEOS and thought, Jezus, that looks better than GEM/TOS ever did (up until the Falcon, anyhow). There's no reason why Atari couldn't have visually improved GEM long before the Falcon - I was running the wonderful DC Desktop by 1990 or thereabouts. They apparently just couldn't be bothered.

 

 

"Using WordPerfect 4.1 (WP) for the ST is like driving a Ferrari through rush-hour traffic. The potential for phenomenal performance is there, but unfortunately, WP seems to spend most of its time stalled at the side of the road, rather than leading the pack."

 

Ha! So true! I managed to score a discounted copy of WordPerfect for substantially less than the $300 and whatever list price, but seldom used it. Total PITA. Would have been better I think if I had a hard drive. I guess they did what they could with single-sided floppies...

 

 

What motivated him to rush together a Mac clone with off the shelf parts, toss a boring OS that was a total pain to update as time went on, and slap the name of a company that was known for video games and sell it for $1000?

 

Some things are a mystery to me. I would really love to see the initial business plan of TTL, if they even had one.

 

Yeah, great fundamental questions. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because he didn't fully understand what Jobs had pulled off at Apple and how hard it had been to reach that point. Tramiel was a hardware guy, and he probably looked at the Mac's hardware and thought, "Hey, that's really simple - fairly cutting edge, but simple. I can totally rip that off and stuff it into a cheaper casing. I can even make it color and stomp all over the Commodore 64." He came from calculators, what did he know about workstation-class hardware or user interfaces? I don't think he had any clue how comprehensive the Mac's operating system was, how much design effort went into it, or how much Apple and Jobs in particular had learned from the relative failure of the Lisa. It's the OS, stupid!!! And I don't think he appreciated how much the business market had changed following the arrival of the IBM PC - even in Europe - and how he just wouldn't be able to compete with his overgrown C64.

 

IIRC, CPM/68K and GEM weren't even Tramiel's first choice. I think they wanted a 68K version of MS-DOS and Windows, but Windows wasn't nearly ready and MS didn't want to produce (or wanted too much money to produce) a 68K version of DOS. Of course as it turns out, DR was lying about how complete CPM/68K was (it wasn't anywhere near complete), and porting GEM turned out to be an enormous effort done in a tremendous rush (especially since even the Intel version of GEM wasn't complete yet, either!).

 

I often wonder if Atari couldn't have just written their own GUI for some other OS (like the multitasking OS-9) in a similar timeframe and been better off. They might have gotten all of the CoCo users to migrate to the ST that way, which would have been good for about a million users in the US, probably doubling their US sales.

[+wood_jl]

We get it you hated the ST form factor.

 

Yet what you don't apparently "get" is that most potential customers would have felt the same way, which is one of many reasons why the ST didn't thrive and certainly didn't survive.

 

Most popular Amiga was 500 and was the same.

 

Yet the ST had more hardware performance out of the box over the Mac.

 

Define "hardware performance".

 

More CPU cycles? The Mac held a huge advantage over the PC for years in that regard - didn't make any difference. The PC still walked off with 90% of the market.

And the argument is? Any increased performance on the part of the ST (over the Mac) is negated by the fact that the PC walked off with the market? What's the argument, here?

 

Form factor? The ST's sucked. Amiga, Mac, PCs . . . they all left Atari in the dust.

See above comment about Amiga 500.

 

Interfaces? I'd say the STs held a slight advantage here in number, although the Mac's standard SCSI interface was likely a lot more useful for most folks.

The Mac Plus. How much did that cost, again? Otherwise it's RS-422, as previously mentioned, and dog-slow.

 

Keyboard? The Macs had a great keyboard. The ST's? Not so much.

Castrated. No cursor keys, function keys, numeric keypad. Previously mentioned.

 

Display? Well, the Macs had square pixels. The STs sported a slightly higher resolution. The STs were obviously better for games with their color monitor. For professional work in monochrome? I'd say there's little difference.

Regardless of what you say, 512x384 on a 9" display sucks, and was quantifiably inferior.

 

Ultimately, having a few more cycles of performance in your hardware is nice, but it's only crucial to a tiny handful of buyers. Software availability has clearly always been the #1 factor impacting the success of a given platform over the longterm, and the STs certainly lagged in that regard behind every other 16-bit platform. Which is almost certainly why they were the first semi-major 16-bit platform (more than a couple million units sold) to die.

So we'll deny any speed advantage, by shifting the argument to software. Sure, the Mac had more software. And your point is......?

 

Oh no Atari picked low res as default and Lime green (which is still far superior to what colors Mac could use), really they were quickly and easily changed.

 

Again, you seem to have missed the point. The machine has to market itself when it's on display in the store. Apple understood this. Atari and Commodore never really did. A hideous lime green low resolution screen hogged up by icons that look worse than the C64's GEOS - on a machine that costs 3 times as much as a C64 - is not a major selling point. If you can't get the desktop right, the very first view most potential buyers will have of your new computer, what else have you f'ed up?

Your subjectivity, attempted to be used as fact. Let's pretend the ST couldn't be set to med/hi res, in order to pretend that you have a point here.

 

Yes, but within a couple of years the Mac became very, very profitable indeed. The STs never did. It probably didn't have to end up that way for Atari - there were a lot of obvious mistakes they made with the STs which people criticized at the time but which the Tramiels never effectively addressed, and even more that seem obvious to me and others in hindsight.

Duh. What isn't more obvious, with hindsight? Wouldn't a crystal ball have been nice? It goes without being said that the Macs were more successful, by virtue of the fact that they're still selling them. Everybody knows this, so one has to question your motives for all of these anti-Atari posts in the Atari forum. Possible guesses:

(1) To claim "I told you so" in a battle that you had nothing to do with, 20 years of hindsight notwithstanding.

(2) To demonstrate (to an uninterested audience) how "smart" and how "right" you are

(3) To troll and inflame Atari users

 

Just wondering what your goal is here? Please state, and have a nice day!

[sunspot42]

the motives of anti-ST (it is an Atari and this is AtariAge) raise question as to what they hope to accomplish here.

 

OMG! It's a conspiracy! Run for your lives!!!

 

[+wood_jl]

the motives of anti-ST (it is an Atari and this is AtariAge) raise question as to what they hope to accomplish here.

 

OMG! It's a conspiracy! Run for your lives!!!

 

 

 

No, it's a troll. Ignore him.

 

[svenski]

I am not sure when the PC took off in most of Europe but a lot of reading I have seen has them using the Specturm computers, then the C64, next Amiga/ST and then going to the pc computer but when that was exactly I don't have dates for that. I read somewhere that Commodore before they went bankrupt had a ton of orders for the Amiga 1200 (I think) in Europe but Commdore folded before they could place the orders. So I think the Amiga was still a strong concern until about 1992-93 range.

 

Yes the Spectrum was the dominant force until the C64 took over, but that didn't happen overnight either and both those platforms refused to roll over and die and remained popular. Reading through some of the magazines from the time it seems Atari UK were taken aback by how well the 520ST sold which is why they quickly shelved plans to release the 130 ST although this didn't go down well with some of their distributors.

 

As for Commodore, well I only got into the Amiga late in the game really. I got an A500 at the time that we had a shop floor stacked high with A500+ systems - we were selling hundreds a week at one point - double that at Christmas and we were only a small store. I remember back ordering new releases and having to order a minimum order of 300 copies sometimes knowing that those would go in 2/3 days. They were good times.

 

When the Amiga became more competitive on price and had become more popular people could quickly compare the two machines and see the differences - the ST didn't stack up well against the Amiga which was the problem and I think in my opinion Atari rested on their laurels and did too little too late. If they'd launched say the Falcon earlier with the original intended design that might have helped.

 

I think Commodore made a few mistakes before the end. The CD32 is now considered a failure but at the time it was quite popular from what I remember at least for us. The A600 was probably a mistake - people didn't seem to like it at all but the A1200 after a short lived shaky start looked like it was going places.

 

From what I remember Commodore UK started selling the A600 and A1200 with a 1 year onsite warranty which sounded great in principal but it put the back up a lot of independent retailers including us and our service centre. If a customer bought a machine new and it was faulty, or it developed a fault a few days after purchase it was a pain as Commodore wanted the customer to contact the service company they were using exclusively to sort out a visit and swap-out and customers wanted to return it to the store. The store was obliged to replace or refund but it was a real pain in the ass as we had to get clearance from the service company, etc and we couldn't just return the faulty unit to the distributor - it had to be handled via the service company so sometimes we were 3 or 4 stock units down waiting for Commodore to send replacements along with new serial number stickers to put on the boxes.

 

Toward the end Commodore, like Atari, had started dipping their toes into PCs and there were efforts to boost the retail channel but I don't think these were too popular with the retailers as usually it involved stumping up cash for advertising. Whilst we could see what was happening with the ST I don't think we saw it coming (Commodore folding).

 

I sold my A500 for an A1200 with hard drive but didn't keep it long as the internet was calling and I wanted to go online. I sold it to buy a DX2-50 with 0.39 colour monitor which cost me quite a bit at the time. I still regret selling the A1200 but at the time I needed the cash to buy a PC.

[Pilsner73]

Not really sure how accurate the numbers are, but these charts are rather interesting.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/

 

Nice charts, they show a lot about the market, not sure how accurate they are but let's say they are close. I was surprised to see the Mac jump in the early 90s so much especially with Atari and Commodore for various reasons were losing market share. Could of it have been because Apple 8bit users (both consumer and educational) were finally upgrading? Apple with their stronger market position and having more cash to market had a serious edge over Atari and Commodore to grab those customers not to mention brand loyalty. Looks like to me around 1999-2000 the Mac line came down to where it's at today for marketshare. Now of course even though the Mac line is around the same market share that couldn't sustain Atari and Commodore we all know it's still going and Apple is making record profits. My opinion is they did a great job branching into other markets/product fields with their ipod, iphone, , ipad and itunes which are usually market leaders in their respective product field.

 

Commodore to me seemed to be all about the Amiga in the early 90s with their 8bit line fading. I know they made the Amiga CD32 game machine but they still went bankrupt.

 

Now Atari on the other hand seemed to see the writing on the wall that their TOS computer business was not strong enough to keep the company going and made attempts to branch out. The Atari portfolio, clone computers, Atari Lynx and Jaguar were all attempts to branch out but by the time of the Jaguar, they pulled back to that one product and it didn't work out. So the Tramiels saw they need to branch out into other fields but they never had the success they needed to keep going. So I give them credit for seeing the need to be more than a computer company but the execution of the plan well history has already judged.

[SpaceDice2010]

the motives of anti-ST (it is an Atari and this is AtariAge) raise question as to what they hope to accomplish here.

 

OMG! It's a conspiracy! Run for your lives!!!

 

 

The ignore button works too.

[SpaceDice2010]

I still regret selling the A1200 but at the time I needed the cash to buy a PC.

 

You know. I regret selling my A1200 as well. That was a damn nice game system. And for some reason I was addicted to this easy to use programming language that I believe was later converted to the ST as well. AMOS or something like that?

 

@Pilsner - Apple is close to 10% market share in the US now.