Jump to content
IGNORED

The Atari interview discussion thread


Savetz

Recommended Posts

Dennis Zander: Artworx, Hazard Run, Strip Poker
http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-376-dennis-zander-artworx-hazard-run-strip-poker


Dennis Zander was one of the founding partners of the software publishing company Artworx. He programmed a number of games and educational titles, including Hazard Run, Rings of the Empire, Monkeymath, Giant Slalom, Intruder Alert!, Monkeynews, and others. He collaborated with Roger Harnish on Artworx popular Strip Poker game.

 

This interview took place on June 13, 2019. In it, we discuss Art Walsh, whom I previously interviewed.

  • Like 8
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

James Hugard, Neanderthal Computer Things

 

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-377-james-hugard-neanderthal-computer-things

 

James Hugard was co-founder of Neanderthal Computer Things, a company that created just one product. "810 Turbo" was a hardware conversion board for the Atari 810 disk drive that promised true double density storage, and faster data reading and writing. The device, released in 1983, could be installed inside your 810 disk drive with "no jumpers, no soldering, no extra box." It cost $295. James wrote the firmware for the device.

 

Check the show notes for links to the 810 Turbo Manual and advertisement, photos of the board, and a lively discussion on AtariAge (in which James has answered some questions and added more commentary.)

 

This interview took place on June 7, 2019.

 

ALSO: In this AtariAge thread, James has answered some questions and the AtariAge community has reverse-engineered the firmware, and is working on creating replica 810 Turbo devices. 

 

  • Like 10
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...
On 11/30/2019 at 9:45 AM, Savetz said:

Dennis Zander was one of the founding partners of the software publishing company Artworx. [...]

This interview took place on June 13, 2019. In it, we discuss Art Walsh, whom I previously interviewed.

 

Great interview as always, Kev! I was especially intrigued to hear Dennis talk about _Intruder Alert,_ which I always had in my head as an extremely obscure but quite efficiently programmed BASIC curio. There's actually a fun article on our website about it from a few years back:

 

https://orphanedgames.com/articles/Real-Time_Reactions/Intruder_Alert/Intruder_Alert.html

 

Thanks as usual for all the awesome work!
Chris++
(courtesy of BallyAlley's account here)

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Craig Hickman, Atari Photography Software and Security System

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-378-craig-hickman-atari-photography-software-and-security-system

 

Craig Hickman was featured in the June 1982 edition of Atari Connection magazine for his photography software tools. "Craig has developed two programs written in Atari BASIC for use in his darkroom. One of the programs times the negative’s development, and the other monitors and times enlargements and the making of the positive prints." His Developing program could store up to 30 film processing combinations. "Once the film is developed into a negative, you are ready to use Craig's Enlarger/Timer program to make a positive print." The Atari 400 was connected to the enlarger with relays: the computer would turn the enlarger on and off at precise intervals for making photographic prints.

 

Craig also rigged up an apartment security system using his Atari 400, which he wrote about in an article on his web site. He wrote: "I designed a home surveillance system for our apartment in Seattle that used little magnetic switches from Radio Shack. It displayed a representation of our apartment on the screen and showed when a door or window was open. It worked so well I expanded the system to include little tilt switches placed on bushes outside the windows. This also worked fine until one windy night when I was away from home and it set off the alarm every few minutes. The next day my wife told me to dismantle it."

 

Later, Craig created the popular program Kid Pix for the early Macintosh computer.

 

This interview took place on January 29, 2020. See the show notes for links to Craig's web site and YouTube channel, and the Atari Connection magazine article.
 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
On 4/8/2015 at 9:25 AM, Savetz said:

Jerry Jessop, Atari

ANTIC Interview 30 - Jerry Jessop, Atari

 

Jerry Jessop worked at Atari from 1977 through 1985 where he did many jobs - including lead of production repair, customer service supervisor for the Atari 400/800, and he worked with the secret skunkworks group that was creating the Amiga, when it still could have been an Atari product. In this interview he shares great stories, including how he hand-assembled Atari 800s on the production floor, and fired up the very first 800XL prototype the very first time.

 

Teaser quotes:

 

"I worked on the 1400XL. I could tell from day one, nobody had their heart into it."

 

"It was good stuff cutting up Atari 2600s on a Sunday afternoon."

 

"I shoved 72 Atari 810s in a 1979 Dodge Colt one day. I took the seats out so that I could load up as many 810s as I could possibly get in there."

 

"We had this big inflatable frog that we grabbed from the party, and we're walking down the street in Chicago and we ran into a very drunk on-the-street Muhammad Ali."

After listening to this fantastic interview it is clear that he is entirely correct that Apple became what Atari set the foundation for.  Atari should have and would been Apple.  Jobs and Woz made some better strategic business/marketing decisions and took advantage of hiring away and continuing the unique Atari creative culture and engineers as it crumbled. Also fascinating that the Amiga would have been an Atari had the company not been sold.  Atari’s downfall was that it saw itself as a consumer gaming company and that limited its computer market potential tremendously. Atari is very likely the most important and influential early IT company of all time, or at least in the Top 4 or 5. (Xerox, IBM, HP, Atari) The Macintosh, iPod, iPad could have so easily have been an Atari products (decades earlier too) instead of an Apple if Jobs and Woz had not started their own breakaway company. 

Edited by YSG2020
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/7/2019 at 2:57 PM, Savetz said:

 

 

He did. Bruce did not reply (tried two contact methods.) I'll try again but am not hopeful.

 

-Kevin

Kudos to you, Kevin, for pulling off an interview with Bruce Irvine anyway!  It's a great interview and we're all very thankful for it.

Edited by nonprophet
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/17/2017 at 7:38 AM, rkindig said:

Jay Balakrishnan, HESWare

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-285-jay-balakrishnan-hesware

 

Jay Balakrishnan bought his first Commodore PET in 1978, which spurred him to found Human Engineered Software (HES or HESWare) in 1980. HESWare got its start on the Commodore PET but later moved into many other platforms. They developed or sold software for C64, Vic-20, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Atari ST, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Dragon, TI-99, DOS and others. Many Llamasoft games, through an alliance with Jeff Minter, were published in the US by HESWare. For the Atari 8-bit, they published games like Pastfinder, River Raid, Decathlon, Space Shuttle, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner.

 

By early 1984 InfoWorld estimated that HES was tied with Broderbund as the world's tenth-largest microcomputer-software company and largest entertainment-software company.

 

In early 1984 they made their biggest splash when they acquired the services of Leonard Nimoy as spokesman.

 

This interview took place on November 20, 2016.

Kevin,

Have you ever sought an interview with Jaron Lanier, the "father of Virtual Reality", whom Jay Balakrishnan mentioned during his interview?

 

According to a WIRED story from 1993,

Quote

[H]e...got work with Atari, creating sound and music for video games.

and

Quote

He free-lanced a high-quality game called Moondust for Atari...

 

Interestingly, Moondust is only listed as being a C64 title in all of the video game databases that I'm aware of so perhaps there was an Atari 800 version that went unpublished?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, nonprophet said:

Kevin,

Have you ever sought an interview with Jaron Lanier, the "father of Virtual Reality", whom Jay Balakrishnan mentioned during his interview?

 

According to a WIRED story from 1993,

and

 

Interestingly, Moondust is only listed as being a C64 title in all of the video game databases that I'm aware of so perhaps there was an Atari 800 version that went unpublished?

As Jay was my interview, I still have his contact info and I can ask him if he knows how to contact Jaron Lanier.

 

thanks

 

Randy

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, rkindig said:

As Jay was my interview, I still have his contact info and I can ask him if he knows how to contact Jaron Lanier.

 

thanks

 

Randy

Hi Randy!

 

Maybe Jay has kept in touch with Jaron through all these years but, in case he hasn't, his current email address on his homepage—which I also provided a link to in my last post—is hello at jaronlanier dot com.

 

Thanks for following up!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 7/15/2016 at 8:51 PM, Savetz said:

John (Harris) told me today:

 

"Pretty sure I don't have any of the basic games. I think the Blythe Valley games may be on the hard drive of the Channel Plus, and Bankster is there for sure. Even mustache game is on it. :) I had to reconstruct that one from a bad floppy at one point, where I could read most, but not all of it. So I patched in missing sections of code from memory and sleuthing.

 
Looks like the CMOS battery died on it though, so it's going to take some effort to resurrect. Most of it is probably on floppies too, but I don't even have any drives, and unlikely the disks would be readable anyway.
 
In any case, I'll see what I can come up with, but we're still trying to do our beta release, so no free time at the moment. "
 
He's now on my list to follow up in a few weeks.

 

Is there any update on this?

Edited by www.atarimania.com
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, www.atarimania.com said:

 

Is there any update on this?

In 2017 John sent me a batch of disks ("This wasn't actually the main stash I was looking for," he wrote) which I was able to read in June 2018. Yikes! I can't find any record that I posted those to Internet Archive or AtariAge. I emailed Roland about trying to compile Bankster, then forgot about it. At the time, I wrote to John [with current comments in brackets]:

 

"A ZIP file containing the disk images are attached. Plus some screenshots which are easier to look at.

 

Bankster: there is plenty of assembly source code, but I don’t seem to have any object code. I’ll ask a techie friend if it’s compile-able. [John told me "The last game I was working on for Synapse, "Bankster". Might not be the most recent, but probably close." It was done with the MAE Assembler. I asked Roland about it and then we both forgot about it.]

 

Board Advent: in BASIC. if you RUN”D:ADVEN then at the ? prompt, enter one of the four-letter filenames (like SERP) it seems to let you edit enemy stats for a game. ["Something called "Board Adventure 2.0". This would be interesting to recover, because I don't quite remember what it is. I just know that I used to play homemade board games with a group of friends in San Diego, and I think this is either a supplement to, or a simulation of some of those efforts."]

 

Briar Rose: I got it to work by putting “Briar Rose side A dd” in drive 1, and “Storybook side B” in drive 2. [Neither of these have files or screenshots on AtariMania)]

 

Hansel & Gretel: got the program to run but it wants the Picture Disk, I’m not sure what file it wants where. [Neither of these have files or screenshots on AtariMania)]

 

Maneuvering: data seems to be good, but it doesn’t self-boot and I can’t get a list of list of files.  Stuck for now. ["A work in progress board game called “Maneuvering”.  “It’s a very cool strategy board game that I was working on along with Warren Schwader doing an Apple ][ version."]

"

 

Today, I just emailed John again to see if he has found more disks or the hard drive data.

 

-K

unnamed-1.png

unnamed-2.png

unnamed-3.png

unnamed-4.png

unnamed-5.png

unnamed.png

John Harris disks.zip

  • Like 8
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, www.atarimania.com said:

Thanks to some incredible work by Fandal (once again!), here's a playable prototype of Bankster assembled from the code on John Harris' disks: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-bankster_35883.html

Wow, this could have been a great game. I love all the stuff going on, the color, the wide playfield. There's no sound or death detection, but you can get around on the overhead scrolly things and elevator, and sometimes the ladders. You can jump, and pick up the gold bars and drop them (even from very high, they fall.) You can pick up an axe and (very temporarily) kill the guy pursuing you. 

 

-K

 

Screenshot 2020-04-14 at 6.56.09 AM.png

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/13/2016 at 8:13 AM, Savetz said:

Joel Gluck: Babel, Attank!, Pushover, Fun-FORTH

...
He later worked at Atari's corporate research under Alan Kay.
...

Hi Kay,

Have you ever sought an interview with Alan Kay?

 

It'd be interesting to hear what his goals were during his time at Atari and the obstacles he faced whilst trying to achieve them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, nonprophet said:

Hi Kay,

Have you ever sought an interview with Alan Kay?

 

It'd be interesting to hear what his goals were during his time at Atari and the obstacles he faced whilst trying to achieve them.

Many times. He has layers of protection around him.

 

-K

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/15/2020 at 4:16 PM, Savetz said:

Many times. He has layers of protection around him.

 

-K

Hi Kay,

Well thanks for trying!

 

I've watched a number of his presentations and interviews but I can only remember him mentioning Atari once so, AFAICT, he could probably still tell some stories that few have heard.

 

Hopefully he'll come around before it's too late; you and Randy have long since proven yourselves to be legitimate interviewers who shall be remembered in the annals of computing history for the preservation work that you've collectively done.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Gabriel Baum: Atari Conversational French and Spanish

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-378-gabriel-baum-atari-conversational-french-and-spanish

 

Gabriel Baum worked at Thorn EMI, where he managed the project to create two early language learning programs that were published by Atari: Conversational French and Conversational Spanish. (Atari's language learning series would also include Conversational German — Gabriel started that, but left Thorn EMI before that project was finished — and Conversational Italian.)

 

After Thorn EMI, Gabriel moved to Mattel where he became one of the "Blue Sky Rangers," creating Intellivision games. If you'd like to hear more about that, Paul Nurminen interviewed him about that time in episode 37 of The Intellivisionaries podcast.

 

For a deep dive into the Atari Conversational French software, listen to season 5, episode 1 of the Inverse ATASCII podcast. You can download the software and audio for all of the conversational language series from AtariWiki.

 

This interview took place on March 31, 2020. In it, Gabriel mis-remembers a bit of the technical capabilities of the Atari cassette drive, which was a lot less sophisticated than he recalls. If you'd like to read the technical details of how the Atari 410 and 1010 program recorders worked, check out Appendix C of De Re Atari.

 

Update that's not reflected in the episode: Paul Nurminen of the Intellivisionaries podcast listened moments after it went online, and clarified something: Paul wrote "It definitely sounds like Gabriel is confusing the Intellivision Keyboard Component 'Conversational French' — which did record, rewind/seek and playback phrases — with the Atari 8-bit programs." 

 

 

 

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Atari Speed Reading: Karlyn Kamm and Brad Oltrogge

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-380-atari-speed-reading-karlyn-kamm-and-brad-oltrogge

 

The Atari Speed Reading software package was released by Atari in 1981. It was a self-paced program, for use with the Atari computer and a cassette drive, that promised to teach you to increase reading speed and comprehension with 30 days of practice. The package contained a workbook and five cassette tapes.

 

This is an interview with two of the people who created the Atari Speed Reading package. Karlyn Kamm created the speed reading educational material at the University of Wisconsin with Dr. Wayne Otto. In 1975, she and Dr. Otto published a book titled "Speedway, the Action Way to Read." Dr. Otto died in 2017.

 

Brad Oltrogge is president of Learning Multi-Systems, the software publisher that was contracted by Atari to turn Kamm and Otto's speed reading material into a product for the Atari home computer.

 

This interview took place on April 16, 2020.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 4/25/2020 at 10:43 PM, Savetz said:

Atari Speed Reading: Karlyn Kamm and Brad Oltrogge [Interview]

 

The Atari Speed Reading software package was released by Atari in 1981. It was a self-paced program, for use with the Atari computer and a cassette drive, that promised to teach you to increase reading speed and comprehension with 30 days of practice. The package contained a workbook and five cassette tapes.

 

This was a really fun interview.  I didn't realize that speed reading is meant to do anything more than to help you read faster.  I had no idea that it is actually a study tool.  After listening to the interview, I figured that I might try to run the software under Altirra.  Kay (did I spell that right, old-Kevin?) linked to a page with all of the FLAC files (and more!) for Speed Reading:


https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Atari Speed Reading


Is there a tape format that I can easily use to run this program and hear the voice?  Oh, and doesn't the guy holding the book on the cover of Speed Reading look like he might be holding a modern-day tablet?


Adam

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...