Interview questions for Bill Wilkinson?

[+slx]

Minding the above, it would be interesting to hear about the commercial arrangements for the Insight: Atari columns. While I had forgotten about them, I now recall reading them every month. (I had a Compute! subscription as that was way cheaper than buying individual issues in Austria and only switched to Antic when Atari coverage was reduced. It's hard to imagine what a highlight a new issue in the mail was in today's age of instant information.)

[TXG/MNX]

Let him announce all oss sources a free :-) and maybe he can release them for action and c/65

[+Allan]

Let him announce all oss sources a free :-) and maybe he can release them for action and c/65

Did/does Bill own OSS? Didn't he sell the rights to all the OSS programs to ICD?

 

Allan

 

 

[BillC]

Did/does Bill own OSS? Didn't he sell the rights to all the OSS programs to ICD?

 

Allan

 

According to this thread, http://atariage.com/forums/topic/104214-fine-tooned-engineering/ , ICD(and presumably OSS before them) never actually purchased ownership of all the software they sold but instead purchased licenses to sell certain software packages.

[gozar]

I would have liked to see Atari license Action! to replace basic in the XE.

[+slx]

I would have liked to see Atari license Action! to replace basic in the XE.

Even if Tramiel had been willing to pay a royalty for Action! instead of using an already paid for BASIC for which he never even cared to invest in an upgrade, I seriously doubt that the public would have been ready. While the BASIC age was coming to an end by then, BASIC was still the main language for home computing and still a lot more accessible than Action! which always lacked a decent tutorial suitable for beginners and a 'direct mode' to fool around with. The effects of hundreds, even thousands of Action! trained programmers would have been interesting, though!

 

Let's be happy Tramiel left the Action! Upgrade Port intact so we can still use Action!

 

(As a proof for my theory about Tramiels reluctance I offer the fact that despite long and - via the peripherals - profitable sales of millions of C64s its primitive PET-derived BASIC never got an upgrade.)

[+MrFish]

Just tell him 'thanks' for The Writer's Tool, such an excellent WP.

 

Speaking of the Writer's Tool, did anybody ever scan the full manual for this?

[kenjennings]

I would have liked to see Atari Jack license Action! to ....

 

Oh, man! ROTFL. The idea... Jack spending money. HA! That was a good one.

[+Allan]

 

Speaking of the Writer's Tool, did anybody ever scan the full manual for this?

No. I keep hoping another one will show up on eBay soon.

 

Allan

 

[+MrFish]

No. I keep hoping another one will show up on eBay soon.

 

Yeah, I know they're not too common. I think it's one of the few OSS manuals that haven't been scanned yet.

[+bob1200xl]

I have a manual for Writer's Tool but it has some highlighted sentences. Can you still scan it?

 

If so, I would be willing to ship it to someone for scanning. (It's pretty big...)

 

Bob

[+Allan]

I have a manual for Writer's Tool but it has some highlighted sentences. Can you still scan it?

 

If so, I would be willing to ship it to someone for scanning. (It's pretty big...)

 

Bob

I'm willing to do it. If I scan it with 'Text mode' the highlighted sentences will be minimized. Privite Message me.

 

Allan

 

[Savetz]

I got the interview, it was great. Bill remembers a lot of details about a lot of things.

 

Thanks for all the question suggestions. I was able to ask many of them in the course of the conversation. We talked for nearly two hours.

 

I expect that the interview will be available in the ANTIC podcast feed in October.

 

For people asking about source code: he doesn't have any source anymore, and believes the rights to the source were indeed sold to ICD.

[Savetz]

The interview will Bill Wilkinson is published. It'll show up in your ANTIC podcast feed, or you can listen by going to http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-7-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-bill-wilkinson-oss

 

and clicking the POD button.

Edited December 22, 2014 by Savetz

[+Ripdubski]

The interview will Bill Wilkinson is published. It'll show up in your ANTIC podcast feed, or you can listen by going to http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-7-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-bill-wilkinson-oss

 

and clicking the POD button.

Excellent!

[walter_J64bit]

why the hell would anyone want to use DOS XE? It's awkward as hell on all counts.

 

-Thom

DOS XE is not that bad, it's just a pian in the butt to move files over the DOS. If you use two drives that's a big help and if the files are packed that's a plus too. Edited December 24, 2014 by walter_J64bit

[TheEditor]

Outstanding interview. I hope he will do another one in the future as his stories are part of the history of the computer/home computer industry.

[Dutch800XL]

The interview will Bill Wilkinson is published.

 

I just listened to the mp3 and must say this is excellent stuff. I'm sitting here with bated breath listening to Bill explaining the semi colon/ minus sign error in Basic. Absolutely amazing!! Then he explains how this was actually the only error in the code, but Atari did no debugging on this (demo) code, and immediately released it.

The very first computer magazine I had was Compute! issue 57, February 1985. Bill's "Insight Atari" was about the only info on the Atari I had in those days, but I've always loved his articles, and I will never forget his "B is Bad for Basic" piece (at least not the title). You can imagine how happy I was with your Antic, Analog and Compute! archives, and then later the scanned versions.

 

Listening to the interview with 70-year old Bill now, knowing he's in the hospital at the time, is just so wonderfully strange and special, as you said it's amazing he remembers all those details. Thank you so much for this...

There are a lot of special moments in the interview, but the part about losing money, and Atati exaggerating sales of the machines, was actually kind of emotional. Well done letting Bill just talk about that as much as he wanted (but also letting him move on when he didn't want to talk about it anymore).

 

Very speciall stuff, thanks for all your great work Kevin!!

[Bryan]

It's interesting to think of how many people supported the Atari even though they couldn't really make a living at it. Since Bill knew the inherent shortcomings of Atari's software, he thought people would be more interested in having them fixed. It does make me want to go check out the early OSS stuff some more, though.

 

I believe ICD sold the OSS stuff to Mike Hohman/FTe and last I'd heard, Mike had lost his storage unit with all the stuff he acquired meaning the OSS stuff probably went to the landfill.

[ricortes]

It's interesting to think of how many people supported the Atari even though they couldn't really make a living at it. Since Bill knew the inherent shortcomings of Atari's software, he thought people would be more interested in having them fixed. It does make me want to go check out the early OSS stuff some more, though.

 

I believe ICD sold the OSS stuff to Mike Hohman/FTe and last I'd heard, Mike had lost his storage unit with all the stuff he acquired meaning the OSS stuff probably went to the landfill.

Back in the day I asked Mike about source code for OSS languages and IIRC he said it wasn't included in the purchase. I think he did get the source to SDX and hard goods like some PR:Connections and manuals, but that was about it.

 

Time for this has mostly passed IMHO. SDX has been expanded, US Doubler has been cloned, people have moved on to cross assemblers. What was important like fast mass storage has been answered a dozen ways from flash carts to SIO2PC and SIO2SD et al.

 

I can't remember if this was something Mr. Wilkinson said in person or in one of his columns. He thought it was somewhat ~questionable that he chose to support a computer with programming languages that fewer then 2% of the user base programmed. I asked him about that and he said '2% was an overly optimistic estimate.' He also said ~even with all the problems connected with supporting Atari computers, it was a Mac product that finally brought down OSS. He seemed to make a point of always including other platforms in any discussion of his Atari work. Not sure if it was to indicate he was more then an Atari fan boy or just how broad his experience was. With his early work supporting Apple it was certainly a statement of fact.

 

He's kind of the last of the old schoolers. I think his degree from Berkeley was in math because he went to school before there was really a computer science field of study at universities and in the job market.

 

The 2% thing is still with us. It wouldn't be too hard to recreate Action source code with the tools available. Ditto for the other languages like BASIC XE. We are kind of a 2% rich environment here but fragmented even at that. Within what's left of us we are still split with people using various languages and implementations.

[Bryan]

I should also add that Tom Harker abandoned the ICD offices as well, so the OSS stuff is gone either way.

[flashjazzcat]

Remarkable to note that further SDX development by DLT was undertaken after first reverse engineering the product, so even if the source for that turned up now, it's largely academic.

[ricortes]

I would of liked to have been a fly on the wall when a lot of these things went down. For instance, I heard the rumor/gossip that what took ICD down was an acrimonious divorce. Having been through one myself I have a lot of sympathy for the principles if that is what happened. You get the [frozen assets, bank accounts seized, retirement funds looted, ...] it really knocks the stuffing out of you.

 

It is great that Mr. Savetz provides us with these interviews. It is always better to hear things from the 'horse's mouth' rather then rumor and innuendo. We won't have the principles around much longer, just a fact of life. Even when the principles have a slightly faulty recollection, it is still interesting to hear how they resolved things in their own narrative.

 

I read a blurb on Clinton Parker retiring from University of NY Rochester.<?> It would make for a good interview too if he was available. Kind of closure to all the Action speculation and who knows, he may even still have a copy of his source code. Lots of people seem to have left their roots behind to start their narrative i.e. the two Steves. Woz occasionally talks about his start at HP and I'm pretty sure the guy<I forgot his name> that started Corvus worked there too. Fairchild/Shockley gets all the buz, but HP spawned a lot of spin offs too.

 

I kind of that kind of success story too: Started with Atari and moved on to bigger and better things. I can think of few things more significant then educating a generation of programmers from the 80's on. They have done well by us. He seems to have literally left skid marks when he left Atari. I'd kind of like to believe he doesn't have hard feelings.

[Bryan]

I would of liked to have been a fly on the wall when a lot of these things went down. For instance, I heard the rumor/gossip that what took ICD down was an acrimonious divorce. Having been through one myself I have a lot of sympathy for the principles if that is what happened. You get the [frozen assets, bank accounts seized, retirement funds looted, ...] it really knocks the stuffing out of you.

 

By the time I was working with ICD, it was down to just Tom Harker. At the peak I think they had 10-15 employees. Mike Gustafson (the main developer) had left some time earlier and Tom's wife helped with the books. I don't know what kind of terms they split on but to the best of my memory Tom didn't indicate that it was particularly messy. I actually have a Bible here that belonged to Mike (it has his name in it).

 

Tom had split the Jaguar stuff off as Black Cat Designs presumably to protect it from whatever happened with ICD (I wish I could remember more of what he said). Of course, BCD ended up with its own problems. Anyway, he had just sold the 8-bit ICD assets to Mike Hohman, and was hoping to revive ICD with some PC-based products which is why I was there.

 

Anyway, we got a T-1 connection (which was amazing at the time) at our office because we needed a real network connection for testing. Tom had found a really good deal on some heavy duty network equipment and we sold dial-up on it to help pay for it. Eventually, the projects fell by the wayside and our newly founded Rock River Internet was the main focus. I was pretty homesick so I quit and moved back to Florida. When Tom moved into a better location downtown, he left all the ICD stuff behind and the building was later abandoned and looted. All kinds of cool stuff was lost including prototypes and bookcases of rare Atari literature.

 

Pictures of the abandoned building:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/slworking/sets/72157630201337122/

 

[atx4us]

Kevin,

 

Your interviewing skills really shined with Bill Wilkinson and you were able to encourage Bill to tell us a lot of interesting information about OSS and Atari. Bill has always been one of my all time Atari heroes. I must admit that it was hard for me to hear about his current state of health. Somehow in my mind, I just think that time and aging doesn't apply the same way to heroes.

 

My best wishes go to Bill along with many more good years to come God bless Bill for inspiring so many of us!

 

PS. Thanks for all the great work that you've done for the Atari community.

Edited December 26, 2014 by atx4us