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========================================================================= Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 15:33:44 -0800
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Andreas Ramos <aramos@BEST.COM>
Subject: A History of the Atari ST
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______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
A History of the Atari ST
Andreas Ramos andreas@andreas.com
The origins of the Atari ST are legendary. Jack Tramiel came to the USA as orphaned, teenage Jewish death camp refugee. He grew up in Brooklyn and became a taxi cab driver. He entered into a partnership with another friend who repaired typewriters. This was mutually advantageous: Tramiel would pick up and deliver typewriters in his cab; if he was lucky, he could even combine a typewriter delivery with a paying cab customer. This went on until Tramiel had two Wall Street passengers. Tramiel overheard them talking about the investment future of the first desktop computers. He told his typewriter repair partner about this and they started a company to build desktop computers. They wanted to become as big as IBM (International Business Machines), so they named their company Commodore Business Machines (CBM).
Tramiel built the Commodore 64 (the C-64), which is the most successful mass-market computer ever built. It sold millions. Battalions of computer programmers cut their baby teeth on the C-64. One could learn programming and the basic principles of working with computers. C-64 also spawned armies of hackers.
By 1984 or so, Tramiel got into a fight with the board of Commodore: he wanted to install his sons as vice-presidents. The board didn't think they were qualified. In a huff, Tramiel left Commodore. He needed a computer company with a name. Nolan Bushnell developed Pong and built Atari to sell it. It was the first mass-market computer game. Atari's revenues on a graph are ridiculous: it went straight up like a sky rocket. Of course, six months later, everyone else came out with computer games, and Atari's revenues went straight down like an anvil. Their revenues on a graph resemble a darning needle. Time-Warner wanted to get into the computer market, so they bought Atari. Big mistake. It sat there like a rock. Tramiel needed a computer name brand, so he comes along and took Atari off their hands for a lousy $40 million. He charged it to his Visa card. Meanwhile, Bushnell noticed that kids liked pizza and video games, so he went on to start the Chuck E. Cheese pizza / video game franchise, aimed at kids.
Tramiel looted Commodore of their top talent, including their next project. So the Atari ST was really the Commodore Amiga. In a way, it was a favor to Commodore; they had to rethink the project and they came out with the Amiga, which, ten years later, is still ahead of its time: Unix text interface, GUI, MIDI, and so on.
The Atari ST was a fantastic machine at the time. The computer magazines thought it has the potential to take over the entire market: Tramiel was the CEO who had built the C-64 and had more business experience than the kids at Apple. The Atari had MIDI and a GUI better than the Macintosh. It was extremely cheap. It was based on the 68000 chip. It was delivered with the best monitor on the market. It was the first to have the OS (Called TOS, or Tramiel Operating System) and GEM (Graphic Environment Manager) almost entirely in ROM chips. For years, the Atari was the standard machine for musicians. Madonna and the Rolling Stones used STs to produce their concerts. STs were named as Computer of the Year in various magazines.
At the time, programs were tiny. Word processors filled 70 KB. Terminal programs took no more than 20 KB. Text editors could fill less than 10 KB. RAM was cheap, so we had one and two megabytes of RAM, which meant that we could make one megabyte RAM disks and everything ran extremely fast.
In the mid-80s, I went to Denmark to work on a doctoral thesis. I wanted to buy a computer to write my thesis. At the time, there were Apple, IBM PCs, and the new Atari ST. American products tend to be marked up by 50 to 100 percent, so the Apples was wildly expensive. (This pricing policy kept Apple Europe from capturing the entire European market.) The PC ran something called Windows, but it was a primitive static split-screen view. One could open two documents, but only in two horizontal screens. It was nothing compared to the Apple. The Atari ST was as good as the Macintosh but much cheaper, so I bought an ST.
The name ST was a bit of a debate. Many thought it was named for Sam Tramiel (ST). Atari insisted it meant Sixteen-Thirtytwo (a description of the CPU). Unfortunately in the UK, ST is the polite way of referring to sanitary towels (menstrual pads). That wouldn't be the first Euro-naming disaster for Tramiel; at Commodore, they had a machine named the Commodore Pet. In French, "pet" means 'fart" so they changed the European name to Vic. Out of the frying pan into the fire. In German, "vic" is masturbation (wichsen).
In the first year or two, Atari USA granted national distributorships to whomever had the money. In Denmark, a guy who had built up a video store empire bought the distribution rights to Atari. Of course, he had no idea about computers. He hoped to score on the next Pong. They sold Atari ST in video stores.
In Germany, the Atari established its best footing. Atari Germany was headed by an excellent businessman, who made the Atari ST into the standard machine for students and small businesses. It was so easy to use that one could teach total newbies how to work with it in a few minutes. It was the Macintosh of Europe, but more successful than the Macintosh in the USA. There were dozens of German companies that developed software and hardware for the ST. The German magazine ST COMPUTER was run by four engineering students and it became the reference source for programmers and business users.
Atari Corp became a lop-sided beast: although it was an American company, its best market was in Germany, so new STs were sold in Germany first, and only much later in the USA. American user groups cried loudly but there was nothing they could do.
So in late Summer 1985, I had my Atari ST in Denmark, but it couldn't produce Danish or German characters. Printer drivers didn't exist for European printers. ASCII only used the lower 128 character set. I began to learn programming, bit editors, and other tools, so that I could change the software. I built the fonts for Danish and handed them out to other Danish Atari users. I started the Danish Atari users group, which later expanded to include the Amiga users. I started a BBS for the user group and for years, it ran on an ST parked on a shelf over the toilet. Everyone had my home phone number and if the BBS crashed, they called and my wife or I would go in and press the reset button. I began writing faqs, guides, and manuals for products. These were collected and expanded into the book "Your Second Manual," which was wildly successful: it came out in five languages and was the most sold book for the Atari. ST World, the main British magazine, chose me "Man of the Year"; the runner-up was Jack Tramiel.
With the money from the book, I started a publishing company to produce computer books and software. We came out with the Harlekin software package, similar to Sidekick, a toolbox with a text editor, terminal program, calendar, bit editor, and a number of other tools. It ran entirely in a RAM disk and was reset- and crash-proof: reset your machine and you could continue working without losing your work. It ran entirely in RAM and was blindingly fast. It made the front covers of nearly all of the European Atari magazines and for several years, was one of the most sold products in Europe. I produced it in German, Danish, Swedish, English, and Spanish. I built up distribution channels in most European countries. We developed a number of packages and also distributed packages from other countries in catalog swap agreements: the major British producer got distribution rights to our title catalog and we got the Scandinavian rights to their catalog. I did this with Sweden, Germany, France, and Spain. We sold thousands of computers.
We also learned that product pricing has nothing to do with reality. At the time, moderate word processors cost $100 or more. I bought the rights to a German word processor. The programmer was a nice kid who only wanted everyone to enjoy the program and didn't care about the money. So we figured that we'd sell it for $10, so that everyone could afford it. It barely sold. So we did a few minor changes, raised the price to $75, and released it as version 2.0. It sold like hotcakes. At that price, we could give all sorts of student discounts. We realized that customers judge the quality of a product by its price. If we set the price too low, it killed the product. There's also the corporate price effect. Corporations expect to pay high prices. Hard disks fans were very noisy, but we knew that hard disks specifications could tolerate quite a bit of heat. So we put together a kit of a temperature sensor, an adjusting device, and a fan. We sold the kit as either the economy or corporate package. Both were the same, but the professional kit was at a corporate price. The corporate customers would not buy it if it had the economy price.
On the other hand, computers are sold practically at cost. Dealers make their profit on the peripherals, including mice, mouse pads, books, software, and so on. When people spend $2,000 on a machine, they see $250 in stuff as a minor add-on. That's why computer books cost $45 or more.
In early 1987, the librarian at the Aarhus city library and I started probably the first European public library distribution of shareware disks. We couldn't get the central library in Copenhagen to give us a budget for a radical and untested idea and besides, computers were too expensive. But she and I decided to do it anyway. I went to Atari and told them that Apple had promised a computer. Atari gave me an unsellable one that usually crashed after an hour, but that was okay for disk copying. Then I went to Commodore and told them that Atari had given me a computer. So they gave me an Amiga. The same with Apple. Then I went to IBM and of course, they weren't going to let Apple and Atari get away with this. A month later, we opened the shareware library with several thousand disks. It was a big success and people came from all over Denmark and stood for hours in line. Disks cost $2 each back then. The library made a whopping profit in selling blank disks, but they didn't tell the central library in Copenhagen, so they used the money to buy more books. We had the complete set of Fish Disks for Amiga, the ST Computer Magazine disks for the Atari, and other shareware for Macs and PCs. The library was very proud to be at the tip of technology. After a year, the other libraries in Denmark did the same thing. The free computers from the various companies was a great investment; they ended up selling many computers to libraries.
The Atari ST was a wonderful developer's platform. STs were widely used in the sciences; they were cheap, easy to program, and robust. The Germans had Calamus, a vector-based DTP program, on the Atari. The German word processor Signum, written by a mathematics doctoral student so that he could produce his thesis, was able to write in dozens of languages, including Arabic right-to-left, and print at a very high quality on 24-pin printers by moving the paper slightly to reprint at an offset. There were nothing like these for any other computer at the time. We did all sorts of hardware and software hacks to add capabilities.
There were emulators for other machines. The Magic Sac Macintosh emulator made a better Macintosh than a Macintosh. There were also PC emulators so that one could run business packages. In 1987 or so, a 16-year old German kid showed up with an Atari and his hardware DOS emulator. He took it around to the main third-party Atari companies and demonstrated it: it started up, you could run various programs, including Flight Simulator (it was considered the test to see if a machine was truly DOS compatible). He sold the national distribution rights to each country at the trade show: Germans, British, Danes, Swedes, and so on. Everyone had non-disclosure agreements and were sworn to secrecy. The final delivery was promised in three months. When time was up, he announced that he had developed a better version for the latest chip and DOS version, so he needed another two months. This went on for six months or so, until the distributors found out about each other and all showed up together at his house and demanded to see the product. The truth was that the kid had strung together a series of screens, put them into ROM chips, and faked the entire thing. Nothing could be done against him; he was underage and the companies couldn't enforce the contracts. It's kinda funny now, but a friend of mine had bought the distribution rights for Denmark; his company went bankrupt and he ended up losing his house and his wife divorced him.
Not all kids were ninja in sneakers. Major products came about by sheer chance. A 19-year old kid wrote a programming package, got on the train with a sandwich from his mom, and went to the main Atari computer trade show. None of the major companies were interested. That evening, before he went home again, he walked into a bar next to the tradeshow. Standing next to him at the bar was a businessman from an engineering company called GFA. They got to talking. A few months later, the engineering company came out with GFABasic. It became an empire on multiple platforms.
One fellow was named Peter Peterson, who had a Danish Atari shop called Pixel. One day, an angry competitor stumbled over his name and shouted at me "I'll bury that Peter Pixel!" We found this very funny and from then on, everyone in Denmark knew him as Peter Pixel.
Do you remember chip creep? The CPU was put into a socket so that it could be replaced. As you turned the machine on and off, the CPUs would heat up and cool off. They slowly worked their way out of the socket. This meant that the machine would suddenly shut off. When it cooled down, the pins would make contact again and you could use the machine again. At first, everyone thought it was a program error or a hardware bug. Then we found that it could be fixed by picking up the machine and slamming it down firmly. Later, we found a non-violent method: just press the CPU back into the socket. Open the computer and press firmly on the CPU. Motorola finally solved this problem by coming out with something like a paperclip to hold the CPU in the socket. Later, they came up with the locking socket.
In the USA, Atari Corp marketed the machine as a game machine. This was a realistic strategy for the American market since they couldn't compete against Apple and Compaq. Regrettably, it meant that a technically superior computer was not taken seriously.
Tramiel's slogan was "Business is War" and he aimed at the lowest possible price to secure market share and demolish his competitors. This was very successful for him with the C-64. But the business market needs stability, professional support, and a serious image. Sam Tramiel and his brothers continuously undercut or betrayed their distributors, who abandoned Atari in disgust. Atari would obligate the dealers to buy large numbers of machines and then suddenly cut the price, thus underselling their own dealers. At Atari, Tramiel installed his sons as VPs for marketing, engineering, and so on. The Commodore board was right: it was a disaster. The director of one of Atari's European offices told me: "Tramiel gave his kids a Christmas present. They broke the toy, so now they're playing in the empty box."
By 1989-90, the machine also began fall behind technically. Atari Corp. couldn't keep developers, people began moving to the IBM PC world, where programmers could get real jobs and customers could get real support. A little outfit in Redmond was hiring. The head of Atari Germany and Atari Scandinavia went back to Commodore, taking the best of their staff and their dealers. The ones left behind were the incompetents.
Commodore had the same problem with the Amiga: a technically superior machine sold as a games platform. It never made it into the business market. The Archimedes was a 32-bit machine at least six years before Windows 95/Macintosh. Developed by Olivetti, it would have buried everything on the market. But Olivetti was plagued by distribution problems and the machine never sold more than several hundred developer copies. The same with Steve Job's Next, which caused huge developer interest: we developers all thought it would be the next step beyond Atari, Commodore, and Macintosh. PCs were nothing at the time. But Steve Jobs is probably the worst businessman in the entire industry, so the Next never sold more than developer copies and a university copies.
In early 1991, I gave up my Atari business, moved to California, and entered the PC/Unix world in Silicon Valley, where I've worked at Sun and Silicon Graphics. All I have left from Atari is copies of my books in five languages and an Atari pocket calculator. Although Atari Corp is not more than three miles down the road, I've never gone by to see the place.
Now, in 1997, the Atari is not only dead, but almost forgotten. In writing this, I checked out many Atari sites on the web; most of the URLs are dead. The flagship Atari Germany doesn't exist anymore. A few die-hard fans remain. Occassionally, someone will see my name on the net and send an email asking "aren't you the guy who wrote that book?"
There were good, creative, brilliant products for the Atari and Amiga; maybe someday, people will began to dig through these old machines and recreate some of these programs, such as MidiMaze (multi-user maze shoot-em-up), HiSoft's Tornado flight simulator (probably the best ever written), and the German file transfer programs that were very fast. TOS and GEM could also be investigated; RAM disks were a great idea: hard disks were slow at 70ms but programs were tiny, since most of the OS and GUI was in ROM, so programs only had to call processes from ROM. Therefore an upgrade to 4 MB of RAM meant a huge workspace so that one could run the entire set of software in RAM, including the work files. With a reset-proof program, such as Harlekin, RAM disks were the way to work. For daily tasks, such as word processing, text editors, terminal programs, etc., it was faster to use the 8 Mhz / 4 MB RAM Atari than my current 200 Mhz/64 MB Window machine. I could hop between programs as fast as I could tap the keys; on a current Windows or Macintosh, one has to wait for the elements of the glacially slow interfaces to appear on screen, since they have to fetch 50 megabyte programs and a 300 megabyte OS from multi-gigabyte hard disks.
The web site http://www.excelprinters.com/tos_main.htm has pictures of various STs and a bit of history.
Here's an observation for those who love to wage Microsoft/Apple wars or Windows/Unix wars: the road behind is littered with better machines. Technical superiority is irrelevant, whether it's the hardware, the OS, or the GUI. Microsoft was nothing until 1992-93, long after Apple, Commodore, and Atari had trashed their own markets from 1984-1990. Frankly, there has been very little improvement in desktop computers in the 1990s. It's mostly a question of establishing market share, distribution chains, and customer support. This is undercut by the turmoil caused by constant technical improvement, rapidly dropping prices, and razor-thin retail profit margins. The computer industry is made up of producers, retailers, and customers: it's bad business to be a retailer and customers are not happy with their rapidly disappearing investments and unstable systems. Computer enthusiasts tend to see computers as an issue of "computing power to the masses" or some sort of idealist science fiction. The reality is shady, opportunistic, manipulative businessmen at the origins of mass-market computers. Jack Tramiel was a combination of PT Barnum and a sea pirate.
End of text
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Andreas Ramos <aramos@BEST.COM>
Subject: A History of the Atari ST
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
A History of the Atari ST
Andreas Ramos andreas@andreas.com
The origins of the Atari ST are legendary. Jack Tramiel came to the USA as orphaned, teenage Jewish death camp refugee. He grew up in Brooklyn and became a taxi cab driver. He entered into a partnership with another friend who repaired typewriters. This was mutually advantageous: Tramiel would pick up and deliver typewriters in his cab; if he was lucky, he could even combine a typewriter delivery with a paying cab customer. This went on until Tramiel had two Wall Street passengers. Tramiel overheard them talking about the investment future of the first desktop computers. He told his typewriter repair partner about this and they started a company to build desktop computers. They wanted to become as big as IBM (International Business Machines), so they named their company Commodore Business Machines (CBM).
Tramiel built the Commodore 64 (the C-64), which is the most successful mass-market computer ever built. It sold millions. Battalions of computer programmers cut their baby teeth on the C-64. One could learn programming and the basic principles of working with computers. C-64 also spawned armies of hackers.
By 1984 or so, Tramiel got into a fight with the board of Commodore: he wanted to install his sons as vice-presidents. The board didn't think they were qualified. In a huff, Tramiel left Commodore. He needed a computer company with a name. Nolan Bushnell developed Pong and built Atari to sell it. It was the first mass-market computer game. Atari's revenues on a graph are ridiculous: it went straight up like a sky rocket. Of course, six months later, everyone else came out with computer games, and Atari's revenues went straight down like an anvil. Their revenues on a graph resemble a darning needle. Time-Warner wanted to get into the computer market, so they bought Atari. Big mistake. It sat there like a rock. Tramiel needed a computer name brand, so he comes along and took Atari off their hands for a lousy $40 million. He charged it to his Visa card. Meanwhile, Bushnell noticed that kids liked pizza and video games, so he went on to start the Chuck E. Cheese pizza / video game franchise, aimed at kids.
Tramiel looted Commodore of their top talent, including their next project. So the Atari ST was really the Commodore Amiga. In a way, it was a favor to Commodore; they had to rethink the project and they came out with the Amiga, which, ten years later, is still ahead of its time: Unix text interface, GUI, MIDI, and so on.
The Atari ST was a fantastic machine at the time. The computer magazines thought it has the potential to take over the entire market: Tramiel was the CEO who had built the C-64 and had more business experience than the kids at Apple. The Atari had MIDI and a GUI better than the Macintosh. It was extremely cheap. It was based on the 68000 chip. It was delivered with the best monitor on the market. It was the first to have the OS (Called TOS, or Tramiel Operating System) and GEM (Graphic Environment Manager) almost entirely in ROM chips. For years, the Atari was the standard machine for musicians. Madonna and the Rolling Stones used STs to produce their concerts. STs were named as Computer of the Year in various magazines.
At the time, programs were tiny. Word processors filled 70 KB. Terminal programs took no more than 20 KB. Text editors could fill less than 10 KB. RAM was cheap, so we had one and two megabytes of RAM, which meant that we could make one megabyte RAM disks and everything ran extremely fast.
In the mid-80s, I went to Denmark to work on a doctoral thesis. I wanted to buy a computer to write my thesis. At the time, there were Apple, IBM PCs, and the new Atari ST. American products tend to be marked up by 50 to 100 percent, so the Apples was wildly expensive. (This pricing policy kept Apple Europe from capturing the entire European market.) The PC ran something called Windows, but it was a primitive static split-screen view. One could open two documents, but only in two horizontal screens. It was nothing compared to the Apple. The Atari ST was as good as the Macintosh but much cheaper, so I bought an ST.
The name ST was a bit of a debate. Many thought it was named for Sam Tramiel (ST). Atari insisted it meant Sixteen-Thirtytwo (a description of the CPU). Unfortunately in the UK, ST is the polite way of referring to sanitary towels (menstrual pads). That wouldn't be the first Euro-naming disaster for Tramiel; at Commodore, they had a machine named the Commodore Pet. In French, "pet" means 'fart" so they changed the European name to Vic. Out of the frying pan into the fire. In German, "vic" is masturbation (wichsen).
In the first year or two, Atari USA granted national distributorships to whomever had the money. In Denmark, a guy who had built up a video store empire bought the distribution rights to Atari. Of course, he had no idea about computers. He hoped to score on the next Pong. They sold Atari ST in video stores.
In Germany, the Atari established its best footing. Atari Germany was headed by an excellent businessman, who made the Atari ST into the standard machine for students and small businesses. It was so easy to use that one could teach total newbies how to work with it in a few minutes. It was the Macintosh of Europe, but more successful than the Macintosh in the USA. There were dozens of German companies that developed software and hardware for the ST. The German magazine ST COMPUTER was run by four engineering students and it became the reference source for programmers and business users.
Atari Corp became a lop-sided beast: although it was an American company, its best market was in Germany, so new STs were sold in Germany first, and only much later in the USA. American user groups cried loudly but there was nothing they could do.
So in late Summer 1985, I had my Atari ST in Denmark, but it couldn't produce Danish or German characters. Printer drivers didn't exist for European printers. ASCII only used the lower 128 character set. I began to learn programming, bit editors, and other tools, so that I could change the software. I built the fonts for Danish and handed them out to other Danish Atari users. I started the Danish Atari users group, which later expanded to include the Amiga users. I started a BBS for the user group and for years, it ran on an ST parked on a shelf over the toilet. Everyone had my home phone number and if the BBS crashed, they called and my wife or I would go in and press the reset button. I began writing faqs, guides, and manuals for products. These were collected and expanded into the book "Your Second Manual," which was wildly successful: it came out in five languages and was the most sold book for the Atari. ST World, the main British magazine, chose me "Man of the Year"; the runner-up was Jack Tramiel.
With the money from the book, I started a publishing company to produce computer books and software. We came out with the Harlekin software package, similar to Sidekick, a toolbox with a text editor, terminal program, calendar, bit editor, and a number of other tools. It ran entirely in a RAM disk and was reset- and crash-proof: reset your machine and you could continue working without losing your work. It ran entirely in RAM and was blindingly fast. It made the front covers of nearly all of the European Atari magazines and for several years, was one of the most sold products in Europe. I produced it in German, Danish, Swedish, English, and Spanish. I built up distribution channels in most European countries. We developed a number of packages and also distributed packages from other countries in catalog swap agreements: the major British producer got distribution rights to our title catalog and we got the Scandinavian rights to their catalog. I did this with Sweden, Germany, France, and Spain. We sold thousands of computers.
We also learned that product pricing has nothing to do with reality. At the time, moderate word processors cost $100 or more. I bought the rights to a German word processor. The programmer was a nice kid who only wanted everyone to enjoy the program and didn't care about the money. So we figured that we'd sell it for $10, so that everyone could afford it. It barely sold. So we did a few minor changes, raised the price to $75, and released it as version 2.0. It sold like hotcakes. At that price, we could give all sorts of student discounts. We realized that customers judge the quality of a product by its price. If we set the price too low, it killed the product. There's also the corporate price effect. Corporations expect to pay high prices. Hard disks fans were very noisy, but we knew that hard disks specifications could tolerate quite a bit of heat. So we put together a kit of a temperature sensor, an adjusting device, and a fan. We sold the kit as either the economy or corporate package. Both were the same, but the professional kit was at a corporate price. The corporate customers would not buy it if it had the economy price.
On the other hand, computers are sold practically at cost. Dealers make their profit on the peripherals, including mice, mouse pads, books, software, and so on. When people spend $2,000 on a machine, they see $250 in stuff as a minor add-on. That's why computer books cost $45 or more.
In early 1987, the librarian at the Aarhus city library and I started probably the first European public library distribution of shareware disks. We couldn't get the central library in Copenhagen to give us a budget for a radical and untested idea and besides, computers were too expensive. But she and I decided to do it anyway. I went to Atari and told them that Apple had promised a computer. Atari gave me an unsellable one that usually crashed after an hour, but that was okay for disk copying. Then I went to Commodore and told them that Atari had given me a computer. So they gave me an Amiga. The same with Apple. Then I went to IBM and of course, they weren't going to let Apple and Atari get away with this. A month later, we opened the shareware library with several thousand disks. It was a big success and people came from all over Denmark and stood for hours in line. Disks cost $2 each back then. The library made a whopping profit in selling blank disks, but they didn't tell the central library in Copenhagen, so they used the money to buy more books. We had the complete set of Fish Disks for Amiga, the ST Computer Magazine disks for the Atari, and other shareware for Macs and PCs. The library was very proud to be at the tip of technology. After a year, the other libraries in Denmark did the same thing. The free computers from the various companies was a great investment; they ended up selling many computers to libraries.
The Atari ST was a wonderful developer's platform. STs were widely used in the sciences; they were cheap, easy to program, and robust. The Germans had Calamus, a vector-based DTP program, on the Atari. The German word processor Signum, written by a mathematics doctoral student so that he could produce his thesis, was able to write in dozens of languages, including Arabic right-to-left, and print at a very high quality on 24-pin printers by moving the paper slightly to reprint at an offset. There were nothing like these for any other computer at the time. We did all sorts of hardware and software hacks to add capabilities.
There were emulators for other machines. The Magic Sac Macintosh emulator made a better Macintosh than a Macintosh. There were also PC emulators so that one could run business packages. In 1987 or so, a 16-year old German kid showed up with an Atari and his hardware DOS emulator. He took it around to the main third-party Atari companies and demonstrated it: it started up, you could run various programs, including Flight Simulator (it was considered the test to see if a machine was truly DOS compatible). He sold the national distribution rights to each country at the trade show: Germans, British, Danes, Swedes, and so on. Everyone had non-disclosure agreements and were sworn to secrecy. The final delivery was promised in three months. When time was up, he announced that he had developed a better version for the latest chip and DOS version, so he needed another two months. This went on for six months or so, until the distributors found out about each other and all showed up together at his house and demanded to see the product. The truth was that the kid had strung together a series of screens, put them into ROM chips, and faked the entire thing. Nothing could be done against him; he was underage and the companies couldn't enforce the contracts. It's kinda funny now, but a friend of mine had bought the distribution rights for Denmark; his company went bankrupt and he ended up losing his house and his wife divorced him.
Not all kids were ninja in sneakers. Major products came about by sheer chance. A 19-year old kid wrote a programming package, got on the train with a sandwich from his mom, and went to the main Atari computer trade show. None of the major companies were interested. That evening, before he went home again, he walked into a bar next to the tradeshow. Standing next to him at the bar was a businessman from an engineering company called GFA. They got to talking. A few months later, the engineering company came out with GFABasic. It became an empire on multiple platforms.
One fellow was named Peter Peterson, who had a Danish Atari shop called Pixel. One day, an angry competitor stumbled over his name and shouted at me "I'll bury that Peter Pixel!" We found this very funny and from then on, everyone in Denmark knew him as Peter Pixel.
Do you remember chip creep? The CPU was put into a socket so that it could be replaced. As you turned the machine on and off, the CPUs would heat up and cool off. They slowly worked their way out of the socket. This meant that the machine would suddenly shut off. When it cooled down, the pins would make contact again and you could use the machine again. At first, everyone thought it was a program error or a hardware bug. Then we found that it could be fixed by picking up the machine and slamming it down firmly. Later, we found a non-violent method: just press the CPU back into the socket. Open the computer and press firmly on the CPU. Motorola finally solved this problem by coming out with something like a paperclip to hold the CPU in the socket. Later, they came up with the locking socket.
In the USA, Atari Corp marketed the machine as a game machine. This was a realistic strategy for the American market since they couldn't compete against Apple and Compaq. Regrettably, it meant that a technically superior computer was not taken seriously.
Tramiel's slogan was "Business is War" and he aimed at the lowest possible price to secure market share and demolish his competitors. This was very successful for him with the C-64. But the business market needs stability, professional support, and a serious image. Sam Tramiel and his brothers continuously undercut or betrayed their distributors, who abandoned Atari in disgust. Atari would obligate the dealers to buy large numbers of machines and then suddenly cut the price, thus underselling their own dealers. At Atari, Tramiel installed his sons as VPs for marketing, engineering, and so on. The Commodore board was right: it was a disaster. The director of one of Atari's European offices told me: "Tramiel gave his kids a Christmas present. They broke the toy, so now they're playing in the empty box."
By 1989-90, the machine also began fall behind technically. Atari Corp. couldn't keep developers, people began moving to the IBM PC world, where programmers could get real jobs and customers could get real support. A little outfit in Redmond was hiring. The head of Atari Germany and Atari Scandinavia went back to Commodore, taking the best of their staff and their dealers. The ones left behind were the incompetents.
Commodore had the same problem with the Amiga: a technically superior machine sold as a games platform. It never made it into the business market. The Archimedes was a 32-bit machine at least six years before Windows 95/Macintosh. Developed by Olivetti, it would have buried everything on the market. But Olivetti was plagued by distribution problems and the machine never sold more than several hundred developer copies. The same with Steve Job's Next, which caused huge developer interest: we developers all thought it would be the next step beyond Atari, Commodore, and Macintosh. PCs were nothing at the time. But Steve Jobs is probably the worst businessman in the entire industry, so the Next never sold more than developer copies and a university copies.
In early 1991, I gave up my Atari business, moved to California, and entered the PC/Unix world in Silicon Valley, where I've worked at Sun and Silicon Graphics. All I have left from Atari is copies of my books in five languages and an Atari pocket calculator. Although Atari Corp is not more than three miles down the road, I've never gone by to see the place.
Now, in 1997, the Atari is not only dead, but almost forgotten. In writing this, I checked out many Atari sites on the web; most of the URLs are dead. The flagship Atari Germany doesn't exist anymore. A few die-hard fans remain. Occassionally, someone will see my name on the net and send an email asking "aren't you the guy who wrote that book?"
There were good, creative, brilliant products for the Atari and Amiga; maybe someday, people will began to dig through these old machines and recreate some of these programs, such as MidiMaze (multi-user maze shoot-em-up), HiSoft's Tornado flight simulator (probably the best ever written), and the German file transfer programs that were very fast. TOS and GEM could also be investigated; RAM disks were a great idea: hard disks were slow at 70ms but programs were tiny, since most of the OS and GUI was in ROM, so programs only had to call processes from ROM. Therefore an upgrade to 4 MB of RAM meant a huge workspace so that one could run the entire set of software in RAM, including the work files. With a reset-proof program, such as Harlekin, RAM disks were the way to work. For daily tasks, such as word processing, text editors, terminal programs, etc., it was faster to use the 8 Mhz / 4 MB RAM Atari than my current 200 Mhz/64 MB Window machine. I could hop between programs as fast as I could tap the keys; on a current Windows or Macintosh, one has to wait for the elements of the glacially slow interfaces to appear on screen, since they have to fetch 50 megabyte programs and a 300 megabyte OS from multi-gigabyte hard disks.
The web site http://www.excelprinters.com/tos_main.htm has pictures of various STs and a bit of history.
Here's an observation for those who love to wage Microsoft/Apple wars or Windows/Unix wars: the road behind is littered with better machines. Technical superiority is irrelevant, whether it's the hardware, the OS, or the GUI. Microsoft was nothing until 1992-93, long after Apple, Commodore, and Atari had trashed their own markets from 1984-1990. Frankly, there has been very little improvement in desktop computers in the 1990s. It's mostly a question of establishing market share, distribution chains, and customer support. This is undercut by the turmoil caused by constant technical improvement, rapidly dropping prices, and razor-thin retail profit margins. The computer industry is made up of producers, retailers, and customers: it's bad business to be a retailer and customers are not happy with their rapidly disappearing investments and unstable systems. Computer enthusiasts tend to see computers as an issue of "computing power to the masses" or some sort of idealist science fiction. The reality is shady, opportunistic, manipulative businessmen at the origins of mass-market computers. Jack Tramiel was a combination of PT Barnum and a sea pirate.
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