Alternate History: What Atari Could Have Done Differently?

[Geister]

I agree with all of the above.  

 

I used to work at Air Products and Chemicals when they had 4 or 5 R&D buildings and the company was making a ton of money.  Then a new generation of management killed all the R&D for short term profits.  Now the company is a pale ghost of what it used to be.

 

Atari sold the 8-bits nearly as long as Apple sold the 8-bit model and maybe if they had not deliberately hobbled the IIGS it would still be selling a variant of that.  It was a better MAC than the MAC.

[Geister]

Anybody else feel the earthquake this morning?

[+CharlieChaplin]

alternate timeline... alternate universe...alternate reality...

 

In early 1981 Atari acknowledged that MS Basic is better than their own Atari Basic and tried to make it the standard Basic for Atari homecomputers. Microsoft wanted so much money for it, that Atari decided to "simply" buy Microsoft for some million dollars. MS Basic then became the built-in Basic of Atari XL computers. No-one ever heard of Microsoft again, no MS-DOS was made, no MS Windows appeared. After 1981 MS no longer existed...  😜

 

One small step for Atari, one giant leap for the computer world... 

 

 

 

[cathrynm]

On 4/4/2024 at 7:42 PM, phaeron said:

I don't think the proposed W65C832 would have been effective either. It basically takes all of the weaknesses of the 65832 design and makes them worse.

(Interesting details about 65xxxx processors deleted)

 

 

My view is that the problem with Atari wasn't that 'CPUs weren't fast enough.'  The reason why Mac and PC became dominant is because they kept backwards compatibility in mind, generally. Eventually the very old stuff got abandoned with Apple, but Macs generally could run the previous generation's software. DOS software was still running pretty late in with Windows.  Tramiel's went from PET, to Vic20 to C64, to Plus4, to ST, to TT, to Falcon -- all of these platforms had compatibility issues with previous platform.  In the early 80's you could get away with this, but going into late 1980's and 90's, this just wasn't going to stand anymore.  Users had money invested in their software, and they weren't going to throw that all away for a slightly faster PC. The hint of this should have been failure of Apple 3.  Apple backtracked and went to the IIe that was backwards compatible. Radio Shack went down a similar path of making a handful of platforms where compatibility was confusing, I remember looking at catalogs and not really understanding this. This was a dead end.

I believe now, looking backwards in time, the key to survival was backwards compatibility, and a quality GUI.  Both of these things are hard engineering problems for the time. It's much easier to start clean. For Atari to survive out of the 1990's, they had to solve both of these. I don't see too much evidence they actually cared that much about either.

Edited April 6 by cathrynm

[_The Doctor__]

Apple figured one thing out that Atari kept reversing on, closed systems meant death, the 800 was OPEN... Apple started the MACS closed and made them OPEN later, PC's were always OPEN. with cards slots. Add sound update? not a problem. Add Graphics update? not a problem. Add Ramdisk or persistent memory? Not a problem... closed wedge problem, sealed behind a don't open this sticker.

They knew this and were going to try the 1090 remedy and ditched it, Same for the ST's... The Mega STE, TT030 were a move back to normalcy, then they wedged and sealed the Falcon... dropped it's 040 and made it an 030 Stupid! That meant you had to buy a new case and fix all that stupid up.

Hell even laptops were given access doors to upgrade most things. Sealed behind a closed wedge sticker syndrome is the Trammy way.

The only thing Apple sealed up later were iPods and Phones, and that went to court an lost on 'Right to Fix' grounds. That's why they offer update and battery replacement services today. While high pressure selling you not to fix it and buy new

Edited April 7 by _The Doctor__

[zzip]

On 4/6/2024 at 2:17 PM, cathrynm said:

I believe now, looking backwards in time, the key to survival was backwards compatibility, and a quality GUI.  Both of these things are hard engineering problems for the time. It's much easier to start clean. For Atari to survive out of the 1990's, they had to solve both of these. I don't see too much evidence they actually cared that much about either.

I think Atari computers were a dead-end no matter what.    The ST's were introduced in a small window of time when PC's and Mac's were still insanely expensive and the ST truly delivered "power without the price" for 16-bit computing.    

 

But a couple years later, the PC clone market was on fire, and they were drastically bringing down the cost of a PC into  the ST price range.   The Intel CPUs kept getting faster and faster while the ST stayed at 8mhz for years.  PC's came equipped with cheap IDE drives, while to add a SCSI drive to an ST was much more expensive (external SCSI cost more than internal IDE, plus you need an ACSI<->SCSI adaptor)

 

So by the early 90's the "power without the price" advantage shifted to PC.   It was much more expensive to upgrade STs, innovation fell behind the PC world,  and PC's had the name brand applications that people wanted to run. Finally with Soundblasters and local-bus graphics, the PC became gaming powerhouses which was the last nail in the ST coffin.

 

Atari computers also had a branding problem.   Many people in the business world associated Atari with games and couldn't take Atari computers seriously, and they gravitated to IBM which was all business.   That's why the PC market took off.    Even Mac scraped by in those years.

[Atari8guy]

4 hours ago, zzip said:

Atari computers also had a branding problem.   Many people in the business world associated Atari with games and couldn't take Atari computers seriously, and they gravitated to IBM which was all business.   That's why the PC market took off.    Even Mac scraped by in those years.

This is where Tramiel's approach was needed in 1979/80.  Capture as much market share as possible, as early as possible.  Not sure it would have overcome the brand name issue, but maybe selling C64 like numbers early goes a long way to giving the world a diversified view of the company.  Afterall Microsoft now makes XBox.

[zzip]

7 minutes ago, Atari8guy said:

This is where Tramiel's approach was needed in 1979/80.  Capture as much market share as possible, as early as possible.  Not sure it would have overcome the brand name issue, but maybe selling C64 like numbers early goes a long way to giving the world a diversified view of the company.  Afterall Microsoft now makes XBox.

I still think the PC would have been hard to overcome.   But the PC came together almost by accident:    By most accounts, IBM didn't really believe in microcomputers and thought they were a fad,  but they threw a product together anyway to keep some customers happy.   Because they didn't really believe in the product, they allowed an open architecture that they would come to regret later.   And they would allow a little company named Microsoft to ripoff cobble together an operating system for it.

 

so in an alternate history, where the PC is closed, and the clone market never exists, PC remains expensive and companies like Atari & Commodore would stand a better chance.

[Atari8guy]

6 minutes ago, zzip said:

so in an alternate history, where the PC is closed, and the clone market never exists, PC remains expensive and companies like Atari & Commodore would stand a better chance.

Yeah, a better question would be, what is the scenario where PC doesn't become dominant? and we still have something like the fragmented market of the late 70s early 80s?

[zzip]

20 minutes ago, Atari8guy said:

Yeah, a better question would be, what is the scenario where PC doesn't become dominant? and we still have something like the fragmented market of the late 70s early 80s?

I think a world where the PC wasn't so easy to clone,  PC dominance takes a lot longer to happen or never happens at all.   But then the question is does the computer market rally around another standard instead?

I saw some articles from around 1985 saying how the MSX computing standard was set to take over--   never happened obviously because of PC.

[+mytek]

1 minute ago, zzip said:

I saw some articles from around 1985 saying how the MSX computing standard was set to take over

For a while it was everywhere

[+CharlieChaplin]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

so in an alternate history, where the PC is closed, and the clone market never exists, PC remains expensive and companies like Atari & Commodore would stand a better chance.

 

Yep, thats why I said on page 1 of this topic, in an alternate history IBM should have secured their BIOS and sued anyone trying to copy it. Result: No (cheap) IBM compatible computers, PC remains very expensive forever and for big companies only, while Atari and Commodore still produce Home/Private Computers for the masses.