7800 Atari Corp. Revival

[Lynxpro]

The deal with Commodore was already in play before Jack bought Consumer, and in fact they returned the money before Jack even started negotiating. Jack had no idea about Atari Inc.'s investment in Amiga, and had zero plans to use the Amiga. In fact he had visited them as TTL that May while looking at several different companies to buy technology from and nixed the idea when they couldn't come to an agreement (he was interested in the tech and not the staff that came with it).

 

 

And this is one of the cases where I have to question his strategy... It is not just RJ who states Jack Tramiel point blank said that he was interested in acquiring Amiga's tech but would can all of its staff. Multiple Amiga people said the very same thing. What rational business person would say something like that? Unless hindered by the agreement to purchase the company, you buy the company and then fire the staff. You don't tell them ahead of time before serious negotiations begin! That's a total WTF and it is a main reason why Amiga went running to Commodore to save them.

 

I believe Jack Tramiel may be Jack Tramiel's own worst enemy, not the late Irving Gould nor any of us irate old school Atari owners.

 

 

 

But in another case of a computer company executive behaving stupidly, you gotta hand it to Steve Jobs who dismissed acquiring Amiga because the tech was too complicated. WTF? Of course, that was Steve Jobs 1.0. I doubt post-1997 Steve Jobs v. 2.0 would make a similar statement even in a dismissive one sentence reply from his iPhone...

[Retro Rogue]

And this is one of the cases where I have to question his strategy... It is not just RJ who states Jack Tramiel point blank said that he was interested in acquiring Amiga's tech but would can all of its staff. Multiple Amiga people said the very same thing. What rational business person would say something like that?

 

At that time he already had his engineering staff (via Commodore) and was traveling up and down California to different companies looking for possible technology to leverage. Remember, Amiga was a nobody and a nobody on very shaky financial ground at that. From his perspective, why would he need to start trying to pump something up when all he was interested in was technology to fold in? The bang for the buck was not there compared to say....doing the same thing 2 months later with Atari where he got a huge catalog of IP, a distribution network, manufacturing, back stock to sell, etc.

 

Unless hindered by the agreement to purchase the company, you buy the company and then fire the staff. You don't tell them ahead of time before serious negotiations begin!

 

He was just interested in buying the technology, not the company and all the baggage that came with it.

 

That's a total WTF and it is a main reason why Amiga went running to Commodore to save them.

 

No it's not, that's another part of the myth. That was a brief meeting in early May, long before he became involved with any sort of Atari purchase, and Amiga was still in solid dealings with Atari during that time. Commodore approached Amiga in early June, they began negotiating for the company up through late June where the got Commodore to give them money in good faith so they could turn around use it to pay back the loan to Atari Inc. with interest. Jack was nowhere around during any of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[kool kitty89]

He could have instead have invested that in buying up Amiga Inc outright when he had the chance (unattractive as he still had much to invest for distribution/production/etc) and putting the rest towards securing manufacturing agreements and a distribution network for TTL, or kept going with the RBP alone and avoid investment with Amiga.

 

I don't think he ever HAD a chance to buy up Amiga. The deal was with Warner/Atari. (1) When Amiga heard Warner was dumping Atari, this would have scared them off, enough to make them look for a more financially-secure suitor. (2) When they heard it was Tramiel at Atari, they figured (by reputation) he'd take the chips and can the engineers, not wanting to pay them. Put those together, and I don't think he had the chance. I'm sure if he DID have the chance, he WOULD HAVE purchased them; he'd have the superior technology and Commodore wouldn't have anything good for the 16-bit generation.

No, no, I was talking about well before Tramiel bought Atari Consumer, I mean months earlier when TTL was looking around for additional resources and such. (I'm not sure if it's still accurate, but wiki -quoted from Atari Museum iirc- has a short summary of that basically stating that Amiga wanted to sell the company as a whole, but Tramiel was mainly interested in buying/licensing the chipset -and Amiga wasn't interested in licensing to yet another investor)

 

My comment was in the context of Tramiel going ahead without Atari at all, building up TTL in other ways.

 

 

 

Wgungfu addressed the other issues in your post, so I'll leave it at that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The deal with Commodore was already in play before Jack bought Consumer, and in fact they returned the money before Jack even started negotiating. Jack had no idea about Atari Inc.'s investment in Amiga, and had zero plans to use the Amiga. In fact he had visited them as TTL that May while looking at several different companies to buy technology from and nixed the idea when they couldn't come to an agreement (he was interested in the tech and not the staff that came with it).

 

And this is one of the cases where I have to question his strategy... It is not just RJ who states Jack Tramiel point blank said that he was interested in acquiring Amiga's tech but would can all of its staff. Multiple Amiga people said the very same thing. What rational business person would say something like that? Unless hindered by the agreement to purchase the company, you buy the company and then fire the staff. You don't tell them ahead of time before serious negotiations begin! That's a total WTF and it is a main reason why Amiga went running to Commodore to save them.

 

I believe Jack Tramiel may be Jack Tramiel's own worst enemy, not the late Irving Gould nor any of us irate old school Atari owners.

That would be at TTL, well before Jack bout Atari consumer and before Amiga entered into negotiations with CBM. (by the time Jack bought Atari, Amiga had merged with CBM -or was about to- already)

 

 

The only real missed opportunity for such an offer (ie not the NES, and not the Amiga -both lost prior to Atari Corp's existence), would be the offer for North American distribution of Sega's Mega Drive in 1988. (Katz favored it but Tramiel and Rosen couldn't agree on terms -and there were many other trade-offs from Atari Corp's perspective at the time, the biggest plus would be Sega's software support though) OTOH, if Katz had still left and Sam taken over, the MD/Genesis may have gotten driven into the ground rather than hit big like it did under Sega of America. (just as Atari Corp drove itself into the ground under Sam -and without Katz for that matter)

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this is one of the cases where I have to question his strategy... It is not just RJ who states Jack Tramiel point blank said that he was interested in acquiring Amiga's tech but would can all of its staff. Multiple Amiga people said the very same thing. What rational business person would say something like that?

 

At that time he already had his engineering staff (via Commodore) and was traveling up and down California to different companies looking for possible technology to leverage. Remember, Amiga was a nobody and a nobody on very shaky financial ground at that. From his perspective, why would he need to start trying to pump something up when all he was interested in was technology to fold in? The bang for the buck was not there compared to say....doing the same thing 2 months later with Atari where he got a huge catalog of IP, a distribution network, manufacturing, back stock to sell, etc.

Yep, and not only that, he was also getting a lot of in-house tech from Atari Inc . . . or at least he should have if Warner hadn't made a huge mess in the transition. (Atari's Rainbow chipset may have even been superior overall to Amiga's -not just in performance, but perhaps actual value -I haven't seen any added details, so that's total speculation on my part, and could also depend on additional consolidation over the 1983 design -2 years would give a lot of advantages in newer manufacturing processes, let alone shifting more towards surface mounted packages like LCCs and QFPs -even the 1983 CGIA prototype was in a 68 pin LCC)

 

Hell, not just the hardware, but the pretty powerful OS and GUI Atari Inc was developing (somewhat ambiguously) for MICKY and a possible Rainbow (etc) based system. (was Rainbow/silver/gold+AMY the only chipset, or were there others -ie were Gaza and Sierra to use the same chips in different loadouts?

 

So, technically speaking, Atari Inc would have been an even better value that it was (better in pretty much every way than Amiga) had Warner not deflated that value (so to speak) with the mess created in the split.

 

Unless hindered by the agreement to purchase the company, you buy the company and then fire the staff. You don't tell them ahead of time before serious negotiations begin!

 

He was just interested in buying the technology, not the company and all the baggage that came with it.

Yes, and he'd still have to put more resources into establishing a distribution network, manufacturing, etc, etc. (let alone a brand name)

 

In that respect, TTL was probably better off sticking it out alone with the RGB design than investing in Amiga and the related risks. (the risk/reward with Atari was much better, though again, it was a lot less than it should have been because of Warner's mistakes)

 

Hell, as I mentioned before, TTL could actually have been a rather positive change for Atari consumer with a proper transition: sure, they'd lose Warner's direct connections and such, but they'd also be completely cutting away all the bureaucratic red tape associated with it (that Morgan was still trying to break through). If Morgan (or at least his reorganization plans) had been properly transitioned over smoothly with Atari consumer to Atari Corp (with the necessary modifications necessary to cater to the change in plans), things could have worked out quite favorably.

Edited February 11, 2011 by kool kitty89

[jbanes]

At that time he already had his engineering staff (via Commodore) and was traveling up and down California to different companies looking for possible technology to leverage. Remember, Amiga was a nobody and a nobody on very shaky financial ground at that. From his perspective, why would he need to start trying to pump something up when all he was interested in was technology to fold in?

 

Because the technology is worthless without the people who know how to maintain and enhance it.

 

I know that's a very modern view, but that's something that used to really bug me about the corporate market. They seemed to think that technology somehow existed in a vacuum. Yet technology can easily be best described as an expression of a person or team's knowledge and understanding. Taking the expression without the source will give the tech a very short shelf-life, indeed!

 

Not historically helpful in the slightest, but I needed to get that off my chest.

[DracIsBack]

Taking the expression without the source will give the tech a very short shelf-life, indeed!

 

Totally agree ... I've seen this blow up *BADLY* where the original dev team was let go and then the new team taking over took forever to get up to speed and couldn't act quickly to update anything. Plus source code, documentation, knowledge etc went down the tube. A lot of time spent on new features for it was actually spent figuring out how it currently did things.

[krewat]

Totally agree ... I've seen this blow up *BADLY* where the original dev team was let go and then the new team taking over took forever to get up to speed and couldn't act quickly to update anything. Plus source code, documentation, knowledge etc went down the tube. A lot of time spent on new features for it was actually spent figuring out how it currently did things.

 

Isn't this what happened with Microsoft and Windows NT?

 

It took them FOREVER to actually do anything with the real insides of the kernel. If they ever have, even to this day.

[jbanes]

Isn't this what happened with Microsoft and Windows NT?

 

It took them FOREVER to actually do anything with the real insides of the kernel. If they ever have, even to this day.

 

No, I don't think so. Dave Cutler still works for Microsoft and (AFAIK) his team never experienced a significant purge. The seeming under-utilization of kernel features has more to do with Microsoft's research being significantly more advanced than their implementation groups. If a feature fails to gain traction with the rest of the company, it can just sit there doing very little in the kernel. Which by no means should suggest that Microsoft won't use it in the future or that customers won't find nifty uses for those kernel features.

 

Many of the features also allow Microsoft to re-tune the kernel for different product lines. The difference between Home, Professional, and Server editions typically consist of system configuration +/- a few management tools.

 

Now if you wanted to make the argument against DEC (who lost Cutler and his team to Microsoft), I could readily support a number of "brain-drain" suppositions.

[carmel_andrews]

Tramiel was only partly right about the Japanese, the attack did happen but not in the computer market, the msx did threaten but failed in the US and was only moderately popular in europe (some say it was more supported by third party publishers in UK then the A8 was), the attack happened in the games market, thanks largely to Nintendo and Sega (sega, which had only then recently returned to Asian/Japanese ownership)

 

Tramiel read the signs wrong, remembering that in the US, it was still pretty much a games market, though that market started slightly shifting to the computer games (just to get those publishers throught the games downturn) if Tramiel had been on the ball about his 'japanese are coming' fears, he should have kept with the 7800 and forgot about the XE (initially) and just stepped up production of the XL series and like he did, keep slashing the prices, at least then tramiel might have taken out some of the sting out of nintendo's initial push (since publishers in late 84/1985 were still sort of interested in dev'ing/publishing atari software

 

As for marketing, tramiel missed another trick, bearing in mind that the 7800 was really a 2 in one system (i.e you could play 2600 games as well as 7800 specific ones) why didn't Atari market the 7800 like that from the begining

[kool kitty89]

At that time he already had his engineering staff (via Commodore) and was traveling up and down California to different companies looking for possible technology to leverage. Remember, Amiga was a nobody and a nobody on very shaky financial ground at that. From his perspective, why would he need to start trying to pump something up when all he was interested in was technology to fold in?

 

Because the technology is worthless without the people who know how to maintain and enhance it.

 

I know that's a very modern view, but that's something that used to really bug me about the corporate market. They seemed to think that technology somehow existed in a vacuum. Yet technology can easily be best described as an expression of a person or team's knowledge and understanding. Taking the expression without the source will give the tech a very short shelf-life, indeed!

 

Not historically helpful in the slightest, but I needed to get that off my chest.

I think it depends on the circumstances too, and how well the technology makes the transition to th new team. Atari Inc would have been doing just that with MICKEY, they would have full documentation and schematics (and presumably some consultation from the original engineers), but not have direct access to the Amiga staff as such, and anything going forward would be with Atari Inc staff. (they already had an OS in development intended for their 16-bit machines and/or the MICKY console.computer design)

 

It really would depend on the hardware in question and how the transition took place with the licensed chipset.

 

 

 

In any case, Commodore had many of the problems you mention in spite of retaining the Amiga staff (or much of it at least), but that was due to issues beyond what you mention. (more due to poor decisions from upper management)

 

 

 

But back to the cirsumstances for Tramiel:

it really would make sense to avoid investing in Amiga as such given how much else TTL still needed to do to even consider brining a product to the mass market. (and investing in in-house development could indeed be the more cost effective option in that respect -hell, if they'd continued to evolve the existing ST/RGB hardware immediately after the first production models were finalized, they probably could have pushed up to something more in the Amiga's range of capabilities -with trade-offs- relatively quickly -maybe by some time in '86, and it wouldn't have to focus on the same design philosophy as the Amiga but could focus on its own development path -maybe not even push for the blitter right away but simple V/H scroll registers instead, maybe extend to 8 bitplanes and expand the SHIFTER's address range and color depth -logic for dual playfields with independent scrolling would be significant too -logic for true packed pixel modes would probably come later but would be great for the time too, maybe a faster CPU and wait state mechanism to allow more shared access with other bus masters, DMA sound -perhaps simpler like the STe- and a YM2203 replacing the YM2149, etc, etc)

 

OTOH, Atari Inc itself was an incredible value in spite of the risks of taking it on, better in every way than Amiga . . . except Warner diminished that value considerably with the sloppy split that ruined so many possibilities.

[Lynxpro]

 

Because the technology is worthless without the people who know how to maintain and enhance it.

 

 

The AMY chip debacle being a prime example of that.

 

 

I think it depends on the circumstances too, and how well the technology makes the transition to th new team. Atari Inc would have been doing just that with MICKEY, they would have full documentation and schematics (and presumably some consultation from the original engineers), but not have direct access to the Amiga staff as such, and anything going forward would be with Atari Inc staff. (they already had an OS in development intended for their 16-bit machines and/or the MICKY console.computer design)

 

 

Commodore basically did the same thing. It didn't take long for Jay Miner to exit and the whole "Commodore-Amiga, Inc." to be swallowed up into the rest of mediocre Commodore.

Edited February 11, 2011 by Lynxpro

[krewat]

Now if you wanted to make the argument against DEC (who lost Cutler and his team to Microsoft), I could readily support a number of "brain-drain" suppositions.

 

Oh, hey, anything about DEC would take the next decade, and a few more terabytes of forum space to discuss. Take a look at alt.sys.pdp10 some day. I've been active there, and still read it from time-to-time, but the regulars there are STILL discussing "What DEC did wrong"

 

I started out on PDP-10s when I was 14. By the time I was 16, I was offered a job by the consulting firm that ran the school mainframes (one PDP10 served schools across all of Long Island, having up to 100 or more logged in users during a regular school day - and it became FOUR DECSystem-2020's with at least 40-50 people at once each), and then worked for them at the age of 17 for 2 years afterwards and was still active on the systems for another 2-3 years after that.

 

It's funny though, now that you mention DEC, it somewhat mirrors what Atari went through. Although they never had anyone say to the minions "Thou shalt not call us Atari, thou shalt call us Atari Technology And Research Institute" (ala DEC reinventing itself as "Digital"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Force

[kool kitty89]

Tramiel was only partly right about the Japanese, the attack did happen but not in the computer market, the msx did threaten but failed in the US and was only moderately popular in europe (some say it was more supported by third party publishers in UK then the A8 was), the attack happened in the games market, thanks largely to Nintendo and Sega (sega, which had only then recently returned to Asian/Japanese ownership)

The MSX was never a threat as such, and it was not a Japanese standard either, Spectravision was one of the definitive founder of the standard... it was NEC's 8 and 16-bit machines that were a real threat if NEC had chosen to push hard for an export market. (1979 PC-8000, '81 PC-8801, and '82 PC9801 -the latter 2 with progressively advanced models and the 9801 being rather like the IBM PC but a bit better in some areas -graphics and sound for one, at least as time went on).

NEC has a monopoly on the 8 and 16-bit home/business computer markets from the early 80s up into the early 90s when DOS based PC clones finally pushed into the market full-force.

The MSX was small potatoes in a lower-end niche/home game computer market. (between the "real" computers and game consoles -namely the famicom, albeit that had a computer/heyboard add-on early on as well)

 

Hell, they had vertical integration on top of all that: they had their own Z80 and x86 CPU lines, PCB manufacturing, even DRAM production. (let alone various other logic chips, etc, etc -many components used by IBM, Sega, Nintendo, Atari, CBM, etc, etc)

 

However, the C64 and PC pretty much locked up the US market. The ST probably played a much bigger role in locking out Japanese competition in Europe though.

 

Tramiel read the signs wrong, remembering that in the US, it was still pretty much a games market, though that market started slightly shifting to the computer games (just to get those publishers throught the games downturn) if Tramiel had been on the ball about his 'japanese are coming' fears, he should have kept with the 7800 and forgot about the XE (initially) and just stepped up production of the XL series and like he did, keep slashing the prices, at least then tramiel might have taken out some of the sting out of nintendo's initial push (since publishers in late 84/1985 were still sort of interested in dev'ing/publishing atari software

Tramiel did push for games though, he was depending on it (regardless of whether that was his passion), the delays and other problems were as harmful to computers as they were to the games (it not more so) and was a result of Warner's sloppy management of the split. (TTL management did a great job considering that and it would have been a miracle to hold it all together with the mess Warner made)

 

It shouldn't have been like that though: Warner should have promoted a normal smooth transition of Atari consumer to Atari Corp, laid out all the properties and assets TTL would get and what would go to Atari Games (and how any licensing would be arranged). Morgan's management should have transitioned over carefully to keep reorganization going and possibly adjust it for Tramiel's plans (preferably keep Morgan and some other upper management around for the transition -if not in permanent positions at Atari Corp).

The 7800 would have launched on schedule, the Jr would have gone more smoothly, the A8 line would have pushed ahead as planned, Amiga would have been sued more quickly and aggressively and the plans for Micky (and RBP/ST) may have been shifted over to the Rainbow chipset (still working with the nice UNIX based OS and GUI Atari Inc had), etc, etc.

 

Better organization would mean selective downsizing and much less lost (just as Morgan was pushing for), much sooner profits and expansion on the market, more funds to work with in general for better marketing and R&D, etc, etc. (it was a bit late to push it, but they may have even been able to find a chip vendor to partner and eventually merge with -Honeywell halted Synertek's operations in '85 due to problems related to the video game crash, perhaps Atari Corp could have been in a position to take advantage of that situation even though money would still likely have been pretty tight -strong sales of the 2600, 7800, and A8 in late '84 and '85 along with promoted developments of new 16-bit machines may have given them the clout they needed to negotiate such with Honeywell -it may have involved taking on some debt tied to Synertek operations, but could have paid off in the long run -hell, if it involved taking on overstock of unsold chips, that may have been even better -especially since Synertek had a massive percentage of their operations tied to producing custom chips for Atari Inc along with 2nd sourcing MOS CPUs and support chips, so any such inventory could have actually been useful to Atari Corp)

 

 

As for marketing, tramiel missed another trick, bearing in mind that the 7800 was really a 2 in one system (i.e you could play 2600 games as well as 7800 specific ones) why didn't Atari market the 7800 like that from the begining

I think the bigger issue was limited marketing all around. By the time marketing was fairly decent (if limited), they were pushing that angle AFIK. (Atari Inc's original campaign plans had pushed that as well iirc)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think it depends on the circumstances too, and how well the technology makes the transition to th new team. Atari Inc would have been doing just that with MICKEY, they would have full documentation and schematics (and presumably some consultation from the original engineers), but not have direct access to the Amiga staff as such, and anything going forward would be with Atari Inc staff. (they already had an OS in development intended for their 16-bit machines and/or the MICKY console.computer design)

 

 

Commodore basically did the same thing. It didn't take long for Jay Miner to exit and the whole "Commodore-Amiga, Inc." to be swallowed up into the rest of mediocre Commodore.

They should have spun off MOS (or at least the engineering segment) into a separate R&D company, or at least a definitive advanced technology R&D division of MOS/CSG (maybe a subsidiary, maybe a separate company with controlling interest from CBM, but in either case, a reasonable amount of freedom to develop new tech -sort of like Atari's ATG). Amiga should have then been folded into that R&D division/subsidiary/spin-off for a rather formidable combined force of engineering resources. (plus coupled with direct access to MOS/CSG for fast turnaround of LSI prototypes, etc, etc)

 

OTOH, if their in-house R&D division had been successful enough, they wouldn't have really had interest in Amiga anyway. (they could have had better plans already in-house, like a 16-bit successor to the 6502 but a better overall design than the '816, a fully compatible successor to the C64 -and a clean, evolutionary upgrade vs the hacked together C128)

 

But even in '85, they had every reason to shift that and finally push MOS's engineering resources like that (in a dedicated technology division -or a whole spin-off company) and fold Amiga into that. (had they done that, we might be thinking how much management improved after jack left, but no, nothing like that happened -and thanks to Warner's botched split, we also don't know how Tramiel might have managed Atari Inc's ATG with a proper transition tying into Morgan's reorganization)

 

Hell, CBM lost a chunk of their own engineering staff when Jack left and formed TTL.

Edited February 12, 2011 by kool kitty89

[Lynxpro]

Hell, they had vertical integration on top of all that: they had their own Z80 and x86 CPU lines, PCB manufacturing, even DRAM production. (let alone various other logic chips, etc, etc -many components used by IBM, Sega, Nintendo, Atari, CBM, etc, etc)

 

 

We should all remember that IBM had all of those resources as well but the ongoing Federal antitrust case against them made IBM look to having their eventual PC made from off-the-shelf industry standard parts and outsourcing the whole OS as well.

 

 

 

The 7800 would have launched on schedule, the Jr would have gone more smoothly, the A8 line would have pushed ahead as planned, Amiga would have been sued more quickly and aggressively and the plans for Micky (and RBP/ST) may have been shifted over to the Rainbow chipset (still working with the nice UNIX based OS and GUI Atari Inc had), etc, etc.

 

 

Are there any Snowcap GUI pics available or will they become available in a future update to Curt's website?

 

 

 

Honeywell halted Synertek's operations in '85 due to problems related to the video game crash, perhaps Atari Corp could have been in a position to take advantage of that situation even though money would still likely have been pretty tight -strong sales of the 2600, 7800, and A8 in late '84 and '85 along with promoted developments of new 16-bit machines may have given them the clout they needed to negotiate such with Honeywell -it may have involved taking on some debt tied to Synertek operations, but could have paid off in the long run -hell, if it involved taking on overstock of unsold chips, that may have been even better -especially since Synertek had a massive percentage of their operations tied to producing custom chips for Atari Inc along with 2nd sourcing MOS CPUs and support chips, so any such inventory could have actually been useful to Atari Corp)

 

 

Is it confirmed Atari bought 6502s and 6507s from Synertek? The way the press has told it is Atari bought those CPUs from Commodore's MOS. Maybe Honeywell wanted too much money for Synertek in 85 because Tramiel was talking about the need for vertical integration practically right after Atari Corp. was christened.

 

 

 

Wow, I just read the filed NATCO claims from Curt's site. Had there been justice, the NATCO plaintiffs would've ended up owning a chunk of Atari Corp and Warner.... That was quite a read...

Edited February 12, 2011 by Lynxpro

[kool kitty89]

We should all remember that IBM had all of those resources as well but the ongoing Federal antitrust case against them made IBM look to having their eventual PC made from off-the-shelf industry standard parts and outsourcing the whole OS as well.

Just imagine a kick-ass custom IBM based machine built around ROMP (or similar), custom OS, custom graphics chipset, custom sound hardware, etc.

 

Are there any Snowcap GUI pics available or will they become available in a future update to Curt's website?

Nothing posted yet, not sure if there are any pics of it in action. (or code for that matter) He hasn't elaborated more AFIK.

 

Honeywell halted Synertek's operations in '85 due to problems related to the video game crash, perhaps Atari Corp could have been in a position to take advantage of that situation even though money would still likely have been pretty tight -strong sales of the 2600, 7800, and A8 in late '84 and '85 along with promoted developments of new 16-bit machines may have given them the clout they needed to negotiate such with Honeywell -it may have involved taking on some debt tied to Synertek operations, but could have paid off in the long run -hell, if it involved taking on overstock of unsold chips, that may have been even better -especially since Synertek had a massive percentage of their operations tied to producing custom chips for Atari Inc along with 2nd sourcing MOS CPUs and support chips, so any such inventory could have actually been useful to Atari Corp)

 

 

Is it confirmed Atari bought 6502s and 6507s from Synertek? The way the press has told it is Atari bought those CPUs from Commodore's MOS. Maybe Honeywell wanted too much money for Synertek in 85 because Tramiel was talking about the need for vertical integration practically right after Atari Corp. was christened.

Yes, I'm certain Synertek second sourced MOS parts (let alone Atari's custom versions like Sally), not just 6502/6507, but various support chips (RIOT, PIA, etc), and supplied Apple and others as well, but Atari was their biggest customer by far iirc.

 

Atari had several other vendors as well, I think Rockwell was second sourcing MOS chips for them as well, maybe WDC, not sure. (basically they pushed for the lowest bidder AFIK, and I don't think that MOS parts were super common in later models -my 1977 VCS only has one MOS part, and it's only stamped on the bottom of the chip -need to check if it's RIOT or the 6507, there's 1 Synertek chip and 1 chip from somewhere else -I need to check again)

 

MOS had extremely favorable licensing agreements for their chips (at least up to the CBM merger), so you had 6502s, 6507s, other 6502 derivatives (some licensed and others modified from licensed 6502 cores), RIOT, PIA, VIA, CIA, RRIOT, etc, etc all being produced by a number of vendors as common off the shelf parts.

 

What gave CBM the edge, is cutting out the middle man: ie producing chips at cost (no profit for the vendor) as well as hainv much faster (or more predictable) turn around times for chip deliveries. (as well as profits of being a 3rd party vendor) They wouldn't have to gouge prices at all, in fact they couldn't do that and expect any sales as a 3rd party vendor (due to competition), they just cut out the overhead for their in-house machines. (which could be a small to very substantial advantage depending on the profit margins pushed by vendors on the market at the time -Atari tended to push competitive bids with different vendors to get the best deal iirc -as most reasonably smart companies in the business would have done- and also pushed pretty high volume orders, so they could get pretty good deals on chips -Nintendo never had an in-house vendor, but made some very tight deals for massive orders with Ricoh -one of the ways they managed a highly competitive price with the Famicom at launch against competition using off the shelf parts -and of course also having the afvantage of new, highly integrated LSI chips -CPU+IO+sound and video all on 2 40 pin DIPs- to push for low cost as well -the motherboard is about the size of a ZX81 for god's sake! -imagine if Atair had pushed that for the 5200 -merge POKEY with Sally and use CGIA, plus a DRAM interface ASIC, 2 small 8k DRAM chips, and a very compact motherboard closer in size to the VCS -OTOH the 5200's 1982 chipset should have had a motherboard no larger than the 7800 as it was...)

 

 

Wow, I just read the filed NATCO claims from Curt's site. Had there been justice, the NATCO plaintiffs would've ended up owning a chunk of Atari Corp and Warner.... That was quite a read...

It also shows how much Warner botched the transition . . . all those issues should have been dealt with before the sale went though and (ideally) much of Morgan's plans for NATCO and Atari consumer in general should have continued under TTL/Atari Corp. (they wouldn't have conflicted with Tramiel's plans either, and in fact would mean downsizing in a much more orderly manner than Tramiel was more or less forced to do -it was so much of a mess with the entire staff laid off by Warner, total chaos in the company, noone knowing what the hell was going on, lots of blame and animosity, frustration, lawsuits, etc, etc) Tramiel may have shifted Morgan's plans a little (Morgan wasn't pushing the 16-bit computers very hard), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. (especially since MICKY was dead -honestly I'm not sure how marketable such a high end game system would have been in 1984, maybe they'd use it in the arcade more so early on -there's no way to set up the amiga graphics chipset -let alone sound- with much less than 128k and still have it useful, 64k would be pushing it and you'd have to deal with single buffered graphics and 32k or less of work RAM).

Honestly, I don't see the Amiga (or rainbow) chipsets being attractive consoles in any configuration until 1987 at the very earliest. (and even then more dependent on consolidation and features cut out to customize for a console only chipset -you'd really want at least 128k DRAM -plus ROM, of course)

[kool kitty89]

Edit: Rockwell was definitely one of Atari Inc'c (and Corp's) prime vendors for 6507s and also a fair amount of 6532s. I've had a hard time finding any Atari motherboard shots with MOS ICs on them at all.

 

This one's got a Rockwell CPU, and a Synertek chip plus a Motorola one. (not sure which is TIA and which is RIOT)

 

Also interesting that they were still using sockets for the earlier 4 port models.

Edited February 12, 2011 by kool kitty89

[Retro Rogue]

Is it confirmed Atari bought 6502s and 6507s from Synertek? The way the press has told it is Atari bought those CPUs from Commodore's MOS. Maybe Honeywell wanted too much money for Synertek in 85 because Tramiel was talking about the need for vertical integration practically right after Atari Corp. was christened.

Yes, I'm certain Synertek second sourced MOS parts (let alone Atari's custom versions like Sally), not just 6502/6507, but various support chips (RIOT, PIA, etc), and supplied Apple and others as well, but Atari was their biggest customer by far iirc.

 

 

Yes, Synertek was set up as Atari's secondary source for 6507's from the beginning. They already had a relationship with them via their PONG IC's, which is how they got Jay Miner. You can read a bit more about the process in an older article of mine -

 

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Articles.Detail&id=401

[kool kitty89]

Is it confirmed Atari bought 6502s and 6507s from Synertek? The way the press has told it is Atari bought those CPUs from Commodore's MOS. Maybe Honeywell wanted too much money for Synertek in 85 because Tramiel was talking about the need for vertical integration practically right after Atari Corp. was christened.

Yes, I'm certain Synertek second sourced MOS parts (let alone Atari's custom versions like Sally), not just 6502/6507, but various support chips (RIOT, PIA, etc), and supplied Apple and others as well, but Atari was their biggest customer by far iirc.

 

 

Yes, Synertek was set up as Atari's secondary source for 6507's from the beginning. They already had a relationship with them via their PONG IC's, which is how they got Jay Miner. You can read a bit more about the process in an older article of mine -

 

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Articles.Detail&id=401

Yes, that's the article I was looking for!

 

And they seem to have been set up as a second source for the whole VCS chipset (my heavy sixer has a Synertek TIA -or maybe RIOT, need to double check, but a lot of other motherboard shots showing a mix of different manufacturers in different combinations -with Synertek seeming to do all 3 chips, not really surprising though but good to note).

 

On that note: do you know if Atari/Warner management ever considered negotiations for a merger with Synertek? (it seems like they had a pretty strong workign partnership with them -at least as far as normal business relationships go- and Synertek does seem to have been in the smaller -and younger- category that would have favored a merger/buyout -probably more so than a company like MOS even, which was an idea tossed around at Atari Inc at one point apparently, and Synertek wasn't snapped up by Honeywell until after '79, so that's a pretty fair window to work with when Atari was doing well on the market -vs MOS which got snapped up by CBM back in '76)

[accousticguitar]

Yes, Synertek was set up as Atari's secondary source for 6507's from the beginning. They already had a relationship with them via their PONG IC's, which is how they got Jay Miner. You can read a bit more about the process in an older article of mine -

 

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Articles.Detail&id=401

I couldn't find the next part of that article.

[Retro Rogue]

Yes, Synertek was set up as Atari's secondary source for 6507's from the beginning. They already had a relationship with them via their PONG IC's, which is how they got Jay Miner. You can read a bit more about the process in an older article of mine -

 

http://classicgaming...s.Detail&id=401

I couldn't find the next part of that article.

 

Never got around to writing it, got too busy - though the material is all there as part of the book. Hopefully I'll be able to do it as part of a much larger article for Retro Gamer in the future.

[accousticguitar]

Yes, Synertek was set up as Atari's secondary source for 6507's from the beginning. They already had a relationship with them via their PONG IC's, which is how they got Jay Miner. You can read a bit more about the process in an older article of mine -

 

http://classicgaming...s.Detail&id=401

I couldn't find the next part of that article.

 

Never got around to writing it, got too busy - though the material is all there as part of the book. Hopefully I'll be able to do it as part of a much larger article for Retro Gamer in the future.

Let us know if you do.

[toptenmaterial]

Quick question: was Atari (in some form) still manufacturing the 2600 during or immediately after the split? Was there any disruption in supplies? Or was it all Atari Corp controlled backstock through '86. The delay of the 7800 has been painstakingly detailed here, but how did the 2600 do during the real messy times? Thanks guys.

Edited February 12, 2011 by toptenmaterial

[Lynxpro]

Wow, I just read the filed NATCO claims from Curt's site. Had there been justice, the NATCO plaintiffs would've ended up owning a chunk of Atari Corp and Warner.... That was quite a read...

It also shows how much Warner botched the transition . . . all those issues should have been dealt with before the sale went though and (ideally) much of Morgan's plans for NATCO and Atari consumer in general should have continued under TTL/Atari Corp. (they wouldn't have conflicted with Tramiel's plans either, and in fact would mean downsizing in a much more orderly manner than Tramiel was more or less forced to do -it was so much of a mess with the entire staff laid off by Warner, total chaos in the company, noone knowing what the hell was going on, lots of blame and animosity, frustration, lawsuits, etc, etc) Tramiel may have shifted Morgan's plans a little (Morgan wasn't pushing the 16-bit computers very hard), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. (especially since MICKY was dead -honestly I'm not sure how marketable such a high end game system would have been in 1984, maybe they'd use it in the arcade more so early on -there's no way to set up the amiga graphics chipset -let alone sound- with much less than 128k and still have it useful, 64k would be pushing it and you'd have to deal with single buffered graphics and 32k or less of work RAM).

Honestly, I don't see the Amiga (or rainbow) chipsets being attractive consoles in any configuration until 1987 at the very earliest. (and even then more dependent on consolidation and features cut out to customize for a console only chipset -you'd really want at least 128k DRAM -plus ROM, of course)

 

 

I think you may be giving too much credit to Jack Tramiel about his intentions being compatible with James Morgan's NATCO plans. The lawsuit specifically calls out Tramiel over unnecessary firings just to make him look aggressive to the media for maximum publicity...

 

Had Warner left NATCO alone, that would've probably been enough to prevail legally against Commodore's actions with Amiga since NATCO essentially was Atari Inc. Commodore would've been twiddling their thumbs at that point because they would've lost the Amiga and they would've still been involved with the lawsuit against TTL.

 

 

On that note: do you know if Atari/Warner management ever considered negotiations for a merger with Synertek? (it seems like they had a pretty strong workign partnership with them -at least as far as normal business relationships go- and Synertek does seem to have been in the smaller -and younger- category that would have favored a merger/buyout -probably more so than a company like MOS even, which was an idea tossed around at Atari Inc at one point apparently, and Synertek wasn't snapped up by Honeywell until after '79, so that's a pretty fair window to work with when Atari was doing well on the market -vs MOS which got snapped up by CBM back in '76)

 

 

Wgungfu, I believe Koolkitty89 is asking you this question....

 

I don't know if the proposed Atari Inc. purchase of MOS is widely known; I didn't hear about it until Al Alcorn mentioned at the Commodore 64's anniversary panel that he himself had tried to persuade the Warner brass about it [i'm assuming he meant he lobbied Manny Gerard with the idea]... I don't recall if Motorola was suing MOS in 1976 over the 6502 being an alleged copy of Motorola's chip but perhaps that might've made the Warner brass a bit risk averse over such a potential acquisition. I also have no idea how much impact the case would've had on the "second source" suppliers had MOS eventually lost the case too, but Atari Inc. never switched over to Motorola's 8-bit chip line nor to the Z80 or 8080 to mitigate such a negative outcome... *EDIT* I should've read Wgungfu's article first since it covered that lawsuit...

 

The amusing [and alt.history] idea of the whole potential Atari acquisition of MOS would be to c-block Tramiel from making Commodore vertically integrated and thus preventing him from launching his price war with the C64. Of course, I guess one could say that he could've responded by purchasing Synertek. He wouldn't have had the cash to buy Rockwell Semi, but I guess he could've made a run for Zilog and then the VIC-20 and C64 would've been Z80 powered...

 

And an Atari acquisition of MOS in 1976 would not have prevented them from acquiring Synertek later on in the game [especially when Atari Inc. was flush with cash]. Had they acquired both, MOS's East Coast operations and manufacturing probably would've been moved and consolidated to the Bay Area though...or somewhere else on the West Coast...

Edited February 12, 2011 by Lynxpro

[kool kitty89]

Quick question: was Atari (in some form) still manufacturing the 2600 during or immediately after the split? Was there any disruption in supplies? Or was it all Atari Corp controlled backstock through '86. The delay of the 7800 has been painstakingly detailed here, but how did the 2600 do during the real messy times? Thanks guys.

I'd gotten the impression that production had been halted (or heavily curtailed) due to the extensive stockpiles left over from overproduction (mainly due to faulty market growth/demand figures derived from the flawed distribution system) on top of the reduced demand in the heat of the crash. (Morgan was planning on launching the Jr in late 1984 though, so that would imply they were at least continuing production to some degree up to that point)

Katz mentioned that they were selling beyond capacity by late 1985; that is: selling faster than they could produce more consoles (so they were in production by about mid '85 at least) as they hadn't boosted their output yet. (something addressed by early 1986 -Katz commented that they probably could have sold several hundred thousand more 2600s in 1985 with optimal capacity)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think you may be giving too much credit to Jack Tramiel about his intentions being compatible with James Morgan's NATCO plans. The lawsuit specifically calls out Tramiel over unnecessary firings just to make him look aggressive to the media for maximum publicity...

Wan't the lauwsuit largely generated by Warner's horrible management of the split and utter confusion over it: no notification of staff (upper management or otherwise), no normal transition, etc, etc.

 

Tramiel didn't fire anyone during the split: Warner laid off 100% of ALL Atari Inc staff (save the coin guys who got rolled into Atari Games).

 

What Tramiel had to do was start interviewing and hiring people to TTL (which then became Atari Corp by name). Every single Atari consumer employee became unemployed with the signing of the contract. (that's one of the many issues of Warner's horrible management and the compiled issue of it happening over a holiday weekend -4th f July- etc, etc)

Jack wasn't given a remotely adequate inventory of what he was taking on with Atari consumer, let alone the necessary preparations for any realistic transition from the ongoing plans and operations.

 

Had Warner left NATCO alone, that would've probably been enough to prevail legally against Commodore's actions with Amiga since NATCO essentially was Atari Inc. Commodore would've been twiddling their thumbs at that point because they would've lost the Amiga and they would've still been involved with the lawsuit against TTL.

Nope, the Amiga deal was 100% dead a couple days before Warner made the final offer to Jack and entered negotiations for the split, all that would have changed is how well/quickly any litigation over breech of contract would go. (to stop that from happening, Atari Inc needed to stop whatever employee from cashing the return/cancellation check from Amiga)

 

I don't know if the proposed Atari Inc. purchase of MOS is widely known; I didn't hear about it until Al Alcorn mentioned at the Commodore 64's anniversary panel that he himself had tried to persuade the Warner brass about it [i'm assuming he meant he lobbied Manny Gerard with the idea]... I don't recall if Motorola was suing MOS in 1976 over the 6502 being an alleged copy of Motorola's chip but perhaps that might've made the Warner brass a bit risk averse over such a potential acquisition. I also have no idea how much impact the case would've had on the "second source" suppliers had MOS eventually lost the case too, but Atari Inc. never switched over to Motorola's 8-bit chip line nor to the Z80 or 8080 to mitigate such a negative outcome... *EDIT* I should've read Wgungfu's article first since it covered that lawsuit...

Yes, the 6501 suit was something that made Atari's decision for immediate 2nd sourcing all the more important.

 

The amusing [and alt.history] idea of the whole potential Atari acquisition of MOS would be to c-block Tramiel from making Commodore vertically integrated and thus preventing him from launching his price war with the C64.

The price war wasn't with the C64, I got corrected on that assumption too. The price war (the one peaking in '83 that led to TI dropping out of the market) was mainly with the VIC-20, not the C64. (though the C64 closing up the upper end of the market was significant too -sandwiching the TI99/4a between the 2 -except TI never pushed for a proper C64 class version, or higher end even with a ton more main RAM -a shame really since DRAM by '82/83 should have been getting fast enough to support the TMS9900's requirements -though they should have been able to add wait states much earlier for use with slower DRAM, though they must have already had a slower memory interface for ROM, so it's even stranger that they didn't offer more RAM even back in '81 . . . for that matter the VIC was all SRAM including the external 8k/16k/etc expansion carts -more RAM and a desk top form factor might have pushed it into the "serious" computer role especially with the rather powerful CPU, which had been one of the major issues jacking up the price as it was vs related Z80 based derivatives of the same chipset, though that's also an argument for TI releasing a lower-cost Z80 based system as well -OTOH they also made a massive mistake with the 3rd party blocking strategy and emphasis on 1st party software, it was a computer, not a game console, so I have no idea why they thought that was a good idea in the competitive mass market)

 

And an Atari acquisition of MOS in 1976 would not have prevented them from acquiring Synertek later on in the game [especially when Atari Inc. was flush with cash]. Had they acquired both, MOS's East Coast operations and manufacturing probably would've been moved and consolidated to the Bay Area though...or somewhere else on the West Coast...

Again, I don't think Warner was necessarily in a position to outbid and out-haggle Tramiel on the MOS merger: CBM should have had some fairly solid funds in '76, but more so, they still had the added leverage to pull MOS towards them.

Edited February 13, 2011 by kool kitty89

[SpaceDice2010]

 

 

The price war wasn't with the C64, I got corrected on that assumption too. The price war (the one peaking in '83 that led to TI dropping out of the market) was mainly with the VIC-20, not the C64. (though the C64 closing up the upper end of the market was significant too -sandwiching the TI99/4a between the 2 -except TI never pushed for a proper C64 class version, or higher end even with a ton more main RAM -a shame really since DRAM by '82/83 should have been getting fast enough to support the TMS9900's requirements -though they should have been able to add wait states much earlier for use with slower DRAM, though they must have already had a slower memory interface for ROM, so it's even stranger that they didn't offer more RAM even back in '81 . . . for that matter the VIC was all SRAM including the external 8k/16k/etc expansion carts -more RAM and a desk top form factor might have pushed it into the "serious" computer role especially with the rather powerful CPU, which had been one of the major issues jacking up the price as it was vs related Z80 based derivatives of the same chipset, though that's also an argument for TI releasing a lower-cost Z80 based system as well -OTOH they also made a massive mistake with the 3rd party blocking strategy and emphasis on 1st party software, it was a computer, not a game console, so I have no idea why they thought that was a good idea in the competitive mass market)

 

 

I thought the price war was with the C64 as well. Didn't TI goto the Consumer Electronics show and bail out of the computer market right after Commodore announced that they were cutting 50% off all the titles for the C64 at the show?

 

Now that I think about it, TI was fighting a price war with the Vic-20; but I think when they realized that they now had to fight a price war on software (which is how they made their money) that they couldn't make up for selling the TI at a loss w/o additional software revenue.

 

If I recall correctly the decision to cut software didn't go over well with Irving. Commodore had to ship a lot of free products to it's major dealers after that.

[+wood_jl]

[quote name='kool kitty89' date='Sat Feb 12, 2011 11:57 PM' timestamp='1297580223'

The price war wasn't with the C64, I got corrected on that assumption too. The price war (the one peaking in '83 that led to TI dropping out of the market) was mainly with the VIC-20, not the C64. (though the C64 closing up the upper end of the market was significant too

 

You're right; the VIC and the TI were at each other's throats. So, the Commodore 64 was in a different price war, then? I figured it was just a price war free-for-all. The Commodore 64 was introduced in September, 1982 for $595, and sometime (late????) 1983, it was 1/3 of that at $200. So it was in some price war: which? Where was the line?