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Cyhist Dec. 16 1997 C
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========================================================================= Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 09:02:48 -0600
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: Peter da Silva <peter@BAILEYNM.COM>
Subject: Re: A History of the Atari ST
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971215153148.20866N-100000@shell6.ba.best.com>
from "Andreas Ramos" at Dec 15, 97 03:33:44 pm Content-Type: text
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
>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 Amiga was developed by an Atari spinoff, and Tramiel tried twice to get control of it... first, he tried to get Commodore to buy Amiga from Atari, then he bought Atari... and the people associated with the Amiga took advantage of Commodore's offer and jumped ship.
Tramiel's subsequent decimation of the existing Atari technical staff (who he replaced with his friends from Commodore) is legendary.
>The Atari ST was a fantastic machine at the time.
I had one. I sold it, and got an Amiga. It was as close a bug-for-bug copy of the IBM-PC as could be imagined. Everything about it showed signs of the nasty rush job Tramiel pushed it through to beat the Amiga to market, and it never recovered. The OS was a CP/M clone, with a port of an IBM-PC based GUI slapped on top. The memory management was horrible... I spent a couple of months working on a "shell" and gave up when I realized I'd have to pretty much write a whole O/S underneath it to cover up the bugs in TOS.
>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.
I have an original Macintosh, too... I spent a lot of time analysing the three competing 68000-based graphical computers. Apple's GUI was built on an even more primitive OS than TOS, but at least what they had worked.
I went with the Amiga, in the end, because it was the only one with an operating system worthy of the name, then watched Commodore shrivel up and die in the face of Jack Tramiel's treasonous lawsuit against Commodore over an action *he* initiated. Whatever vision the man has, and he's clearly technically more competant than most computer-company CEOs, he's a ruthless and amoral businessman with no ethics, and the character of a hyena.
>It was the first to have the OS (Called TOS, or Tramiel Operating System) and GEM (Graphic Environment Manager) almost entirely in ROM chips.
All three 68000-based machines of the time did this. In the case of the ST, it was meaningless... all the ROM TOS was good for was loading the disk TOS. It was so flakey that trying to use it in production was sheer insanity. And even the disk-based version was too unreliable to support a shell-based development environment as late as 1987.
>The Atari ST was a wonderful developer's platform. STs were widely used in the sciences; they were cheap, easy to program, and robust.
*cough* So long as you didn't try and use the operating system *cough*
>Tramiel's slogan was "Business is War"
No kidding.
And he destroyed two decent computer systems, the Atari Amiga, and whatever the 68000-based successor to the C-64 would have been if he hadn't crippled it by doing a rush job at Atari. He wasn't even a competent general.
______________________________________________________________________
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: Peter da Silva <peter@BAILEYNM.COM>
Subject: Re: A History of the Atari ST
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971215153148.20866N-100000@shell6.ba.best.com>
from "Andreas Ramos" at Dec 15, 97 03:33:44 pm Content-Type: text
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
>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 Amiga was developed by an Atari spinoff, and Tramiel tried twice to get control of it... first, he tried to get Commodore to buy Amiga from Atari, then he bought Atari... and the people associated with the Amiga took advantage of Commodore's offer and jumped ship.
Tramiel's subsequent decimation of the existing Atari technical staff (who he replaced with his friends from Commodore) is legendary.
>The Atari ST was a fantastic machine at the time.
I had one. I sold it, and got an Amiga. It was as close a bug-for-bug copy of the IBM-PC as could be imagined. Everything about it showed signs of the nasty rush job Tramiel pushed it through to beat the Amiga to market, and it never recovered. The OS was a CP/M clone, with a port of an IBM-PC based GUI slapped on top. The memory management was horrible... I spent a couple of months working on a "shell" and gave up when I realized I'd have to pretty much write a whole O/S underneath it to cover up the bugs in TOS.
>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.
I have an original Macintosh, too... I spent a lot of time analysing the three competing 68000-based graphical computers. Apple's GUI was built on an even more primitive OS than TOS, but at least what they had worked.
I went with the Amiga, in the end, because it was the only one with an operating system worthy of the name, then watched Commodore shrivel up and die in the face of Jack Tramiel's treasonous lawsuit against Commodore over an action *he* initiated. Whatever vision the man has, and he's clearly technically more competant than most computer-company CEOs, he's a ruthless and amoral businessman with no ethics, and the character of a hyena.
>It was the first to have the OS (Called TOS, or Tramiel Operating System) and GEM (Graphic Environment Manager) almost entirely in ROM chips.
All three 68000-based machines of the time did this. In the case of the ST, it was meaningless... all the ROM TOS was good for was loading the disk TOS. It was so flakey that trying to use it in production was sheer insanity. And even the disk-based version was too unreliable to support a shell-based development environment as late as 1987.
>The Atari ST was a wonderful developer's platform. STs were widely used in the sciences; they were cheap, easy to program, and robust.
*cough* So long as you didn't try and use the operating system *cough*
>Tramiel's slogan was "Business is War"
No kidding.
And he destroyed two decent computer systems, the Atari Amiga, and whatever the 68000-based successor to the C-64 would have been if he hadn't crippled it by doing a rush job at Atari. He wasn't even a competent general.
______________________________________________________________________
