Steve Lord

Wow. I watched that interview and missed this. For some reason I don't have a source for the pricing assertion in my notes. I was sure it was in Bagnall's The Amiga Years but it's not. My guess is it would be from a book, but not sure which one. I'm doing corrections and credits in my post going out today, so I'll make sure to add this in. I'll then update the original post later. Chapter 1 of Bagnall's The Amiga Years references it. Yes I am aware of that, but the NS CPU was ditched in favour of the 68k and I had limited space to write due to email size limits (the post goes out as a newsletter). Again this is a Bagnall reference. Bagnall's book is the only place I referenced single sources. I was a little concerned that I couldn't find a lot of other info but I suspect he interviewed people and wrote down what they told him, which may not be the same as what happened. From Chapter 11 of The Amiga Years: This is a reference to multiple discussions between people like Dave Morse, Nicholas LeFevre, Michael Tomczyk, Marshall Smith, Bil Herd and Dale Luck. None of those guys went to Commodore. There's a particular session that was supposed to have taken place involving Marshall Smith and a boozy night with some of the Amiga team, and at a CES I think the engineers went out on a heavy drinking session with Bil. It was definitely a video interview with Jack Tramiel, but I don't know which one as I saw so many, lots of them are quite long and I don't have the time to watch them all again before getting back to you. It was definitely he himself saying it, and it was long after all of this. From what I've seen of Tramiel's interviews online, I get the impression his later memory of events doesn't necessarily match events at the time. I also had that impression with RJ Mical and to a lesser extent Dale Luck and Bil Herd. Others have pointed out that yes, Commodore started well but shot itself in the foot by shredding margins. I don't have anything to add to that. Yup. I'm not going to call RJ Mical a straight up liar, but to hear it from him it's almost as though he built the Amiga and Commodore single handed standing on his head. Yes he only brought across specific people from the Warner Atari company but this is a reference to a later round of firing people on the 8-bit computer line at the new Atari Corp, again from the Bagnall book but I can't find exactly where. I suspected a lot of this would be the case due to RJ Mical's stories bleeding in, and I was concerned about Bagnall's reliability, which you've confirmed for me was questionable. I've not been able to answer all of your questions as this would require me to go off and spend considerable time hunting down specifics. That's on me and for that I can only apologise. But thanks for your links. I've put corrections into today's post so that'll go out via email and I'll update the main post this weekend.

I forgot about Dadhacker! I'll also look out for We Love Atari, thanks!

Hi all, I recently wrote a piece on Jack Tramiel and the battle over Amiga between Atari and Commodore. There's a huge amount of Commodore material from that era. Books, sites, talks, interviews, the lot. I really struggled to find much on the Atari side of the story. There's documentation about the ST's architecture and a really good video from the 1985 CES where the 130ST was introduced. I'm more interested in the story behind the people, the fights, the arguments, blood, sweat and tears that led to the Atari ST's release in 1985. Does anyone have any recommended books or sources they'd recommend?