Origin/Meaning of "2600" ?

[+SpiceWare]

I always wanted to start a copy called MacroSoft run by Gill Bates and release the Doors OS.

In one episode of Sliders the gang was in a store that was promoting the latest version of "Microsoft Doors". It might not have been Microsoft per say, been a while since I saw that episode.

[Curt Vendel]

Remember these guys were in a bathtub smoking some pot when they came up with the 2600 design and concept.  For all we know, they took 2600 just becausethey wanted to.

 

 

Contrary to myth and fokelore... "Stella" was conceived in Grass Valley by Cyan Engineering: Ron Milner, Joe Decuir, Steve Mayer and Jay Miner conceived the original design. This was not a "hot tub" creation like I'm sure most would like to believe.

 

 

Curt

[Curt Vendel]

The only hot tub smoking insanity may have come when Nolan at a Warner Corporate meeting demanded that the Atari 2600 be canceled, it was a waste of time and money and that it needed to be canned.

 

 

Fortunately smarter minds prevailed, Nolan got the boot from Atari for his insanity, took Chuck E Cheese with him and the rest is history... otherwise the 2600 would today be "a great console that was canned before it got a chance to really see its full potential" and who knows what might've happened at Atari.

 

 

 

Curt

[mos6507]

The only hot tub smoking insanity may have come when Nolan at a Warner Corporate meeting demanded that the Atari 2600 be canceled, it was a waste of time and money and that it needed to be canned.

 

Fortunately smarter minds prevailed, Nolan got the boot from Atari for his insanity, took Chuck E Cheese with him and the rest is history...   otherwise the 2600 would today be "a great console that was canned before it got a chance to really see its full potential" and who knows what might've happened at Atari.

Curt

 

 

That's not the way Nolan presents his exit from Atari. In fact he never gave hint that he had no faith in the 2600 during my interviews with him. All he said was that the Atari 8-bit should have been released in 79 as a console, and then the 2600 would naturally phase out. This opinion was not that outlandish or unique. Remember that the Atari 8-bit was designed by those who designed the 2600, and the OS was being written by what would become the Activision core team.

 

According to Nolan, it was an argument over the positioning of the Atari 400/800 as a home computer that caused his exit. That's when he really got a taste of what it was like to be a powerless figurehead.

 

However, I wouldn't deny that there were questions as to the viability of the 2600 platform right before Space Invaders came out. Which is exactly WHY the way the 400/800 project was being handled was so CRITICAL during that period.

 

That's the reason why the 5200 was rushed to market and why the 7800 came too little too late.

 

 

BTW, I have to say I'm surprised you are calling the Warner guys "smarter minds", Curt.

[Mot]

x86, where x refers to the "generation" (which really isn't correct either) of the chip.   Pentiums were 586 chip and as I recall there was some trademark or copyright issues with Intel trying to protect a number.  Similar to MS and TM part of a house's construction.  I always wanted to start a copy called MacroSoft run by Gill Bates and release the Doors OS.

 

But I digress.

 

Better ask Mike Rowe about this first.

[Mot]

Remember these guys were in a bathtub smoking some pot when they came up with the 2600 design and concept.  For all we know, they took 2600 just becausethey wanted to.

 

 

Contrary to myth and fokelore... "Stella" was conceived in Grass Valley by Cyan Engineering: Ron Milner, Joe Decuir, Steve Mayer and Jay Miner conceived the original design. This was not a "hot tub" creation like I'm sure most would like to believe.

 

 

Curt

 

I always though it was a bicycle.

[Curt Vendel]

Glenn,

 

The 8bit that Ron Milner and Steve Mayer presented to Nolan at the time was a very rough and early prototype, "Colleen" was still just idea's floating around and was still on conceptual when it was moved into Sunnyvale to be revised and formerly designed. This was started in August 1977 and the 2600 was barely out of the gate.

 

Since the 2600 was intended to be a 2-3 year lifespan product, that would've put Colleen, what should've been the Atari 5200 out around 1980 on schedule and not turned into Computer System hardware instead as declared by Ray Kassar to compete against the Apple ][ line.

 

Yeah, I figured if anyone it would you who would comment on me actually putting Warner in a good light over Nolan, but come on lets face it, everyone who worked with Nolan during his time at Atari right up to Al Alcorn said that Nolan did more harm then good with his decisions and counter decisions, he was actually barred from going into the research lab directly by Al Alcorn and Steve Bristow didn't want Nolan confusing his engineers as Nolan had a habit of walking into the labs, telling a bunch of engineers what they were doing was wrong, for them to do it the way Nolan wanted it, then he's come back later that day or several days later and say "nah that was a stupid idea, do it the way you were originally doing it."

 

By Fall of 1977 Nolan's appearance in the offices was more out of ego and wanting the firm back then actually being involved in decisions anymore and it was him wanting control back that flared up into arguments and stubborn refusal to work with Warner anymore and personally I don't blame him. It's tough to create something that grows so big that you look to others for help, they come in and help and as part of their plan to help is pushing out the company's father/founder. Lets face it, this is not a one time occurance, so many firms have done this to their creators and the same pattern of resistance and argumentative attitude is all to common when the same thing happens.

 

 

 

Curt

[Curt Vendel]

Remember these guys were in a bathtub smoking some pot when they came up with the 2600 design and concept.  For all we know, they took 2600 just becausethey wanted to.

 

 

Contrary to myth and fokelore... "Stella" was conceived in Grass Valley by Cyan Engineering: Ron Milner, Joe Decuir, Steve Mayer and Jay Miner conceived the original design. This was not a "hot tub" creation like I'm sure most would like to believe.

 

 

Curt

 

I always though it was a bicycle.

 

 

Stella was the codename of the Atari 2600, Stella was also the brandname of the bicycle ridden by Joe Decuir, one of the Stella designers. Later Atari product codenames would be of attractive women who worked at Atari as well as project managers and/or engineers wifes names.

 

 

Curt

[mos6507]

Glenn,

  The 8bit that Ron Milner and Steve Mayer presented to Nolan at the time was a very rough and early prototype, "Colleen" was still just idea's floating around and was still on conceptual when it was moved into Sunnyvale to be revised and formerly designed.    This was started in August 1977 and the 2600 was barely out of the gate.

 

It was much farther along by the time Nolan left. Not sure what your point is here. Nolan had a pretty good idea what the architecture was capable of by the time he left. Besides the GTIA issue I think the hardware was finalized for a pretty long while before it actually came out because it needed an OS written for it, which is why some of the early games like Basketball don't even use the OS at all.

 

  Yeah, I figured if anyone it would you who would comment on me actually putting Warner in a good light over Nolan, but come on lets face it, everyone who worked with Nolan during his time at Atari right up to Al Alcorn said that Nolan did more harm then good with his decisions and counter decisions, he was actually barred from going into the research lab directly by Al Alcorn and Steve Bristow didn't want Nolan confusing his engineers as Nolan had a habit of walking into the labs, telling a bunch of engineers what they were doing was wrong, for them to do it the way Nolan wanted it, then he's come back later that day or several days later and say "nah that was a stupid idea, do it the way you were originally doing it."

 

By Fall of 1977 Nolan's appearance in the offices was more out of ego and wanting the firm back then actually being involved in decisions anymore and it was him wanting control back that flared up into arguments and stubborn refusal to work with Warner anymore and personally I don't blame him.      

 

I guess this is a battle over secondhand evidence, but I don't feel my secondhand knowledge is that inferior to yours. However, I'm open to the idea that I've gotten a different slant from my conversations with Atari veterans than you.

 

Do you have a specific anecdote that you can cite? You seem to be paraphrasing what Al Alcorn said in Stella at 20. But he didn't lay on the negative vibe that you are here. He was chuckling about it, actually, in a rather playful way. If anything, Al seemed to recognize that whoever it was who was in Nolan's role might be tempted to act that way and that Al felt his job was to act as a buffer. He did not imply that Nolan as a whole was a good-for-nothing the way you are. Al made it seem as though everything was basically hunky dory because there was a check and balance system in place--a check and balance which Nolan was able to accept, which is a pretty unusual thing. That sounds pretty progressive to me. Not only that, but one of the things the 2600 designers mentioned was how swift the development cycle for the VCS was. I don't see how Nolan could have possibly wasted much of their R&D time in the end. (In fact they stated that they would have been able to release the machine even earlier if not for the lawsuits.)

 

For whatever reason you seem to be on a really negative Nolan kick lately and I think whatever he's accomplished or failed to accomplish post-Atari should be separated from his Atari accomplishments.

 

To me, Nolan was born to run Atari, not Ray Kassar, and not Jack Tramiel, Hasbro Interactive, or Infogrames. What he wanted to accomplish in business was only going to come to fruition within Atari with that particular group of people and nothing he ever did since then would have the magic ingredients necessary for lightning to strike again.

 

I mean, there were plenty of nice things said about the guy during my interviews. Al Miller said he wouldn't have left if Nolan had stayed on rest of the Activision guys nodded their heads in solidarity when he said that.

 

Maybe they were just kissing his ass because they were in his mansion, but I don't think so. Even in the separate interview session I did with Al and David Crane outside of the mansion similar feelings were expressed.

 

Not only that, but some of those guys went on to work with Nolan again in some of his post-Atari ventures (like the grass valley guys working on the Axlon toys). That's not something they would do if they felt that all Nolan amounted to at Atari was a meddlesome micromanager.

 

And Nolan was in fact able to mention some very SMART business decisions he made which were later undone by Warner Communications like the contracts with competitors that stalled the TI, Intellivision, and perhaps others.

 

Not only that, but let's not look at the flaws of Nolan alone. Nobody's perfect... Al Alcorn, I respect the guy, but his final years at Atari were spent evangelizing the Cosmos game system which, let's face it, wasn't really very innovative. Holograms were cool back then, but static holograms aren't really much of a contribution to gameplay, and Atari was supposed to be all about gameplay, not gimmicks. That's the kind of thing I would have expected Ralph Baer to have worked on as it was in-line with his whole analog-mixed-with-digital mindset, but not Atari. That thing was not going to save Atari from the crash. I would have expected Atari to come out with a more advanced Microvision system (if LCD) or an earlier take on the Adventurevision idea (for LED) within the portable space.

 

Nolan, to me, was a catalyst. He took the Pong money and rolled it into new games, new genres of games, new evolutions of hardware. First there was Computer Space with a bunch of daughtercards and then it rolled back to Pong with a minimalistic approach. He learned from his mistakes. Then only a year later you have Space Race, perhaps a business failure but a ramping back up of graphical complexity while maintaining an economy of silicon, unlike the ultimate approach taken by, let's say, Midway with their 8080-based systems. The next year you have Tank with ROM-based sprites, and so on. Atari did not just rest on its laurels after Pong. There was plenty of groundbreaking work going on at Atari with a very small team all before Warner Communications entered the picture to dump a wad of cash in their laps. Now as Nolan himself said, the company was spending the money as it was coming in, but look at the long-term debt that Amazon.com is carrying around. Instead of going for a quick buck, Nolan was driving an entire industry forward to get it out of the dark ages.

 

This is not Sente Nolan. This is not PlayNet Nolan. This is not uWink Nolan. This was the Nolan of the early to mid 70s in an era bristling with opportunities in the virgin technology sector. Nolan was one of the few who had a vision of the future when a lot of people must have thought he was crazy. He had the balls to go out there and do it when it was as risky if not riskier in comparison to Henry Ford setting up an auto manufacturing company at the turn of the 20th century. This was the Nolan who, by that time already a millionaire with the Warner deal who had no need to do much of anything if he didn't feel like it, went down to the factory during the ramp up to Xmas and put consoles together with his own two hands!

 

 

And I doubt that was some kind of publicity stunt otherwise he probably would have gotten a haircut and worn a better looking shirt

 

Nolan wanted the mainstream to get accustomed to the idea of videogames, that televisions could be used more than just be watched passively. He wasn't the only agent of change, but he was a very influential part of that, and a big reason why sites like this exist for people of our generation to venerate that era. And it seemed like he cared for Atari deeply in ways that nobody after him ever really did.

 

Now I wasn't there. I can't know for sure whether those tabloid style anecdotes really happened or not. But I can see what the end result was at Atari and the braintrust which Nolan brought together by the time Warner entered the mix, and this was the main fuel which Warners fed on during the boom years of the company. Once those people left, the company became all corporate and completely lost its cohesion. It was embarassing that Warner Atari green-lit the Sylvia 10-bit system. It was embarassing that Warner Atari would subburnly force the 5200 to be released as an incompatible system, refusing to listen to internal memos from the engineers who warned about the analog sticks. It was embarassing that a company like GCC which had ripped off Atari hardware was then given a contract to develop the 7800 and its initial roster of games. Atari was supposed to be a state of the art R&D facility!!! They were never able to restaff with the same calibre of people after the defection wave from 78-80. Some of the coolest stuff that WAS developed pre-crash was never released, like the Atari 1450XLD and the 1090XL PBI interface.

 

I'd have put my money on Nolan over Ray Kassar anyday.

 

Consider this message a companion piece to "In Defense of Nolan" which I wrote back in 1997:

 

http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/atari/art...e-of-Nolan.html