Infinity Software for the Atari 8-bit at '85 CES

[MrMaddog]

20 hours ago, FifthPlayer said:

Did this Infinity software ever see the light of day on the ST?  The sales rep in the video pointed out it was developed for both the 8 and 16-bit families.

 

Nope, never did...  Not even listed on Atarimania.

 

My guess was Jack tried to change the "handshake" deal at the last minute to get the product for free w/o having to pay the developers, so they walked away.

 

Same thing happened when Synapse Software tried to release their own productivity apps through Atari (during the Warner ownership for the XL computers).  The Syn programs can exchange data between themselves using DIF files that can be edited with the Atariwriter cart.  But of course once Jack took over he didn't want to pay anyone for them.  Synapse nearly went bankrupted and had to be sold to Broderbund.

 

22 hours ago, mytek said:

 

I was also laughing at all the BS that Sig Hartman from Atari was spitting out, that of course never came to be. Typical Marketing guy.

 

Definitely a Jack Tramiel guy, always loyal until he got fired of course.

 

7 hours ago, rkindig said:

By the way, in the video they were hyping the 130ST (that's right, ST!) and 520ST.  I find it hilarious that they ever thought 128K was enough for the 68000 machines.  (I know, I know, the first Macs had just 128K, but that was ridiculous too).

 

Had TOS came out on 192K ROMS like they were suppose to, there would be enough room for a single program since TOS didn't have to take up room on the RAM.

 

In Europe, there was a 260 ST but it had 512K RAM because about half of it was filled up by TOS 1.0 off a boot disk.  In the States it was called the 520ST, weird...

(Seen it on a Ctrl-Alt-Reese video)

 

Edited June 26 by MrMaddog

[+Allan]

On 6/25/2024 at 2:59 PM, rkindig said:

CALL FOR SOFTWARE!  I just listened to James Copland and his interview on the recently digitized Computer Cafe radio show (https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1985-02-08_James_Copland).  He talked about the Infinity integrated suite of software. That led me to the 2 videos linked in this thread from CES Winter 1985 (https://rumble.com/vclpib-1985-winter-consumer-electronics-show-part-2.html, https://rumble.com/vclpsv-1985-winter-consumer-electronics-show-part-3.html) that have extensive discussions and demos of the Infinity software.

 

After seeing these demos and hearing about the software, I'd really love to see if we can find anyone who might have it.  Supposedly, there were demo disks of it from the CES show.  I know the software was never officially released (and no one knows why), but someone who was involved with its creation surely is still around and could possibly have a version of it lying around.

 

This was an amazing piece of integrated (word processing, spreadsheet, graphics, database, telecommunications) software that ran on a 64K computer and allowed 4 documents open at once (more on a 130XE or ST)!

 

I checked all the software CD compendiums I have (Pool Disks 1 & 2, Atari Everything CD, Atari Forever CD, Archive.org TOSEC) and couldn't find it there.

 

Did anyone attend that show and possibly pick up a demo disk?

I did this years ago with no success. Maybe this can be your new goal, @rkindig. The people involved were young so maybe they are still around.

[pcrow]

10 hours ago, DjayBee said:

As hilarious as a 400 with 4K or an 800 with 8K.

In 1978, that wasn't crazy.  That's also why the cassette drive was the 410 and the disk drive was the 810; they were intended for use with the 400 and 800 respectively.  Really, the 400 was designed for playing games on cartridges and not much more.  I would bet that most cartridge-based games would play on 4K, though I expect most disk-based games required more.  It would be an interesting project to take all the commercial software, especially from the first two years, and determine what the real memory requirements were.  (Now I'm wondering if there was every any effort by pirates to relocate cartridge games to run a lower addresses to work on systems with 16K?  I've never heard of that, but I would think it wouldn't be too crazy.)

[rkindig]

On 6/26/2024 at 8:28 PM, Allan said:

I did this years ago with no success. Maybe this can be your new goal, @rkindig. The people involved were young so maybe they are still around.

Challenge taken!

Randy

[_The Doctor__]

I still wonder if there was something different about the machines at the time as well with a separate access pool etc.