The Atari interview discussion thread

[Bryan]

 

This was always my impression of Jack during those years reading Antic and Analog.

It's certainly the opinion of many who did business with him. There's a difference between being shrewd and just plain stiffing people.

[Kyle22]

Hows does Windows read an Atari 8bit disk natively?

Might he have been thinking of an Atari ST disk?

[Savetz]

Tandy Trower, Atari product manager

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-77-tandy-trower-atari-product-manager

 

Tandy Trower started at Atari evaluating software titles, then moved on to the position of product manager, managing new titles including Missile Command, Asteroids, and the port of Microsoft BASIC for the Atari. Then, he left Atari for Microsoft, where — once again — he managed Microsoft BASIC for the Atari. Tandy also wrote the Character Set Editor program which was sold by Atari Program Exchange.

This interview took place May 13, 2015.

Teaser quotes:

“The Atari executives were so impressed with Bill [Gates] at the time that they flew up in their corporate jet to Seattle and offered to try to acquire Microsoft. But Bill and Paul [Allen] were not interested in selling at all at that time.”

“If you had a title, you had to make sure there was an engineer who was available and interested in doing it. So if you couldn’t talk an engineer into writing it — unless you were going to write it yourself. Except for me, there were very few people in the marketing department that could write their own code.”

[ilaskey]

Might he have been thinking of an Atari ST disk?

That would make much more sense.

[Savetz]

Manny Gerard, The Man Who Fired Nolan

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-78-manny-gerard-the-man-who-fired-nolan

For this interview, we’re getting a different perspective of the Atari/Warner relationship, this time from the Warner side. (Emanual) Manny Gerard was a member of the Office of the President for Warner during the Atari days from 1976, when they acquired Atari, to 1984 when it was sold to the Tramiels. He in fact was the key person in the decision for Warner to acquire Atari. As you will hear in the interview, he was also the man who ousted Nolan Bushnell from Atari. We get Manny’s perspective on Atari from Warner’s view, on the decision to bring out the computer line, and much more. I think you’ll appreciate Manny’s honesty and his sense of humor.

This interview took place on August 9, 2015.

Teaser Quotes

“I can remember saying this to Nolan, over and over again: You cannot run the company by divine right of kings, Nolan”

It feels to me like the computer’s problem at Atari was that it was; it lived in the shadow of the game systems, because they were so bloody successful.”

“I mean I think the early Apples were good computers but I don’t think they were better than the Atari computers by any considerable margin and they may not even been as good, but we sure got out-marketed.”

“Manny Gerard, the guy who fired me at Atari! Everybody looks up; who is this guy? And I said, yeah, Nolan, and the guy who made you a millionaire.”

John Constantine, General Accounting Manager

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-79-john-constantine-general-accounting-manager

John Constantine was General Accounting Manager in Atari's Consumer Division from 1978-1981, then became Executive Director until he left the company in 1984.

This interview took place May 14, 2015.

Marty Payson, Warner, Office of the President

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-80-marty-payson-office-of-the-president-warner

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another in the long-standing series of interviews being published for Antic, the Atari 8-bit Computer Podcast. I’m Randy Kindig and this interview is a follow-up to the recent interview that we published with Manny Gerard of Warner Communications, the company that bought Atari in 1976. This time the interview is with Marty Payson, also of Warner Communications. Marty began with Warner in 1970, became executive vice president and general counsel in 1982, and in 1987 became a member of the Office of the President for Warner. He was with Warner during the Atari days, up to 1984 when it was sold to the Tramiels, and was still involved with Atari for some time after that, as you will hear. Marty was not as intimately involved with Atari as was Manny Gerard, but nonetheless I hope you find his perspective from the Warner side interesting.

This interview was conducted on August 17, 2015.

Teaser Quotes

“The problem with it was, it was uncontrolled growth. And, I’m not pointing a finger at either Atari or Warner. I think it was a combination of both.”

“It began a point that Warner was going to have to take control of Atari. It was out of control.”

David Burling, Atari in-house counsel

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-81-david-burling-atari-in-house-counsel

I like interviewing the lawyers, they always know what’s really going on. David Burling was in-house counsel for Atari from 1980 through 1984. His job included distribution contracts, licensing, and manufacturing. He supervised the customs department, intellectual property, and international business transactions. His stint included being general council of the international division, and council for the AtariTel telecommunications products.

This interview took place on May 22, 2015.

Teaser quote:

“Try and dress like I was in the coin-op industry. I wore sort of an open-throated shirt with two buttons undone at the top and an old, wide lapel jacket and jeans, trying to look sort of hip slick, and cool ... and went down to Los Angeles. They sent me to a major coin-operated games retail ... outlet to see if I could buy one of the Asteroids copies that was coming from Japan.”

[tschak909]

You can tell, that Manny was a consumer entertainment analyst at his core. Virtually every single one of his decisions revolved around the traditional economic model of maintaining an infrastructure of scarcity and staunch control...

 

So to him, sure, the impact of third party software would seem to him like the death of a cash cow, but what all the executives ignored (mostly again, because they were focused on the idea of record players, records, and consume-only-media) was that they seriously thought that the 2600 was like a record player, and, gee, to them, all record players were fundamentally the same, weren't they? ... Why would any effort be expended in trying to make the next big thing?

 

That was their ginormous mistake. The market tanked because it was being flooded by more of the same, nothing new, and it literally took Nintendo coming in after a nuclear holocaust, with a graphic chip design that was very much on par with the arcade machines of 1983, to produce something that consumers would want, again.

 

-Thom

[Savetz]

Cathryn Mataga: Shamus, Zeppelin, Mindwheel

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-82-cathryn-mataga-shamus-zeppelin-mindwheel

Cathryn Mataga wrote several games that were published by Synapse software: Shamus, Shamus Case II, and Zeppelin, then three electronic novels: Brimstone, Essex, and Mindwheel.

In this interview we discuss Ihor Wolosenko, whom I previously interviewed for this podcast.

This interview took place on May 17, 2015.

Teaser quotes:

“These games were pretty hard. It was quite a bit of work, actually, to make a game by yourself. And it was all assembly language. And I was doing all the art and all the stuff. They were pretty involved projects for me, personally.”

“There was a tragic bug in the music driver in all of the Synapse 8-bit titles ... When they went to the new Atari XLs, when they upgraded the operating system, all these games crashed. And they all came back.”

[Savetz]

Peter Rosenthal, Marketing and Strategic Planning

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-83-peter-rosenthal-marketing-and-strategic-planning

Peter Rosenthal worked at Atari from March 1979 thru the middle of 1983. He joined Atari as a marketing research associate in the consumer division, and served as Vice President of Business Development in the Home Computer Division, then Vice President of Strategic Planning.

After Atari, he moved to marketing and sales at Designware, an educational software startup that published software for the Atari 8-bits and other platforms.

This interview took place on May 18, 2015.

Teaser quote:

“That tension between marketing and engineering is not unique to Atari. I’ve been around now long enough to see lots of other companies and very often when a company’s sales goals aren’t achieved or product reviews are less favorable than one would like, I think generally marketing is the butt of the argument as to why it wasn’t successful.”

[firebottle]

"Cathryn Mataga wrote several games that were published by Synapse software: Shamus, Shamus Case II, and Zeppelin, then three electronic novels: Brimstone, Essex, and Mindwheel.”

 

I think Mataga wins the prize for Most Usage Of The Word "Like" in an interview.

 

Otherwise a very entertaining segment, one I was looking forward to hearing...

Edited September 24, 2015 by firebottle

[Lynxpro]

Tim McGuinness, Atari Senior Research Engineer and Founder of ROMOX

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-76-tim-mcguinness

Tim McGuinness was a Hardware Design Engineer in Atari’s Personal Computer Division in 1980 and 1981, then moved to become Senior Research Engineer/Assistant Director of Corporate Research Engineering through 1982. Tim was co-developer of 400, 800, and 1200XL computers and peripherals. He was also the initial architect and designer of the first version of the Amiga computer. He left Atari in 1982 to co-found Romox, a software publisher that had a unique software distribution system where you could load new software onto cartridges using an in-store kiosk.

This interview took place on May 23, 2015.

Teaser quotes:

“Talking to the Tramiels. Sam was pretty rational, his brother was insane, and the old man was just an asshole.”

 

 

Man, I have a bunch of these to catch up on!

 

I wonder if he has the Tramiels mixed up. Surely Leonard would be considered the rational one, followed by Gary.

[Savetz]

John Schulte and Feridoon Moinian, Dorsett Educational Systems

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-84-john-schulte-and-feridoon-moinian-dorsett-educational-systems

 

John Schulte and Feridoon Moinian were both employees at Dorsett Educational Systems, the company that created the Talk And Teach educational cassette tapes which were sold by Atari. Dorsett also sold many more cassette-based classes directly via mail order, for the Atari, TRS-80 Color Computer, and other platforms. Feridoon worked primarily as a programmer, and John was primarily an editor.

As my co-interviewer for this discussion, I invited Thomas Cherryhomes, an expert in the technical aspects of the Talk and Teach system. I interviewed Thomas previously on this podcast, in ANTIC interview 57.

Nearly every educational cassette tape that Dorsett released for the Atari has been digitized, they’ll all available at Archive.org.

This interview took place on June 25, 2015.

Teaser quote:

“He [Loyd Dorsett] would tell them, “Shall we go have lunch now?’ Yes. ‘OK, let’s go downstairs and we’ll have some lunch.’ He’d take them downstairs, and on top of the little five-foot refrigerator was a Styrofoam cup that had 10 Cents written on it. That was 10 cents that you’d do on the honor system to buy a packet of Cup of Soup. ... This is the way he would entertain people because you were stuck out in the middle of nowhere, it was 20 minutes to get to a restaurant. But he would actually pull coins out of his pocket and say ‘My treat.’”

[rkindig]

Harold Lee, Home Pong Designer and the Man Who Hired Jay Miner

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-85-harold-lee-home-pong-designer-and-man-who-hired-jay-miner

 

In 1974 an engineer by the name of Harold Lee had become burnt out from his work designing arcade game boards and he quit and left Atari. No sooner had he left then he would receive a call from Allan Alcorn. Al asked Harold a question - "Could Pong be put on a chip?" Harold said it could be done and suddenly he found himself now hired back at Atari as an outside consultant. Harold and Al worked on the design and the chip was finished in the latter half of 1974. It was, at the time, the highest performing chip used in a consumer product. Harold was kind enough to talk about his experiences working for and with Atari and the fact that he was the one who hired the legendary Jay Miner into Atari.

[Master Phruby]

Can you interview the late night janitor at Atari that was cleaning Howard Warshaw's computer keyboard and accidentally changes two numbers in the original E.T. game code that made it almost impossible not to fall in the pits and brought about the fall of the entire video game industry?

[rkindig]

Good suggestion! Kevin's good at tracking down people. How about Kev?

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Savetz]

@Phurby — sorry, no, he's sworn to secrecy. But how about the woman who invented AtariLab?

[+Allan]

@Phurby — sorry, no, he's sworn to secrecy. But how about the woman who invented AtariLab?

I hope you asked/will ask her what other Atarilabs they where going to do?

 

Allan

[Savetz]

@Allan — I didn't. . .but that's fairly well documented by Michael Current's Atari timeline.

 

Atari proposed, or announced but never shipped, several AtariLab add-on modules including a Timekeeper Module, Lie Detector Module, Reaction Time Module, Heartbeat Module, Biofeedback Module, Mechanics Module, Robotics Module, and Nuclear Radiation Module (!!).

[Savetz]

Dr. Priscilla Laws, AtariLab

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-86-dr-priscilla-laws-atarilab

 

AtariLab was a hardware and software package for the Atari 400 and 800 computers. The AtariLab Starter Set with Temperature Module was released in 1983. The Light Module add-on was released in February 1984.

AtariLab was developed at Dickinson College under the direction of physics professor, Dr. Priscilla Laws. Dr. Laws joined the faculty at Dickinson in 1965. She has dedicated herself to the development of activity-based curricular materials and computer software to enhance student learning in introductory physics courses — which started with AtariLab.

This interview took place May 14, 2015

Teaser quotes:

“I saw somebody dip a thermistor into cold water — ice water — and a real-time cooling curve was appearing on the screen. And it blew me away.”

“So, Ron said: ‘I watched Ray Kassar open the safe, and he pulled $200,000 in bills out of the safe. He handed it to the woman and he said “Please say no more.”’”

[Master Phruby]

What about the often hyped pregnancy module?

Edited October 7, 2015 by Master Phruby

[russg]

Hows does Windows read an Atari 8bit disk natively?

The only way a Windows or DOS PC 5.25" floppy drive can read an Atari disk is with a sector reader like Sydex Anadisk.

I suppose you could dump all 720 sectors and then write the resulting file back. The first three sectors are always read

128 bytes, but I think the disk still has 256 byte sectors 1 to 3 on an Atari dbl dens floppy.

Modern PC floppy controllers don't do single density pretty much. Anadisk can do 512 byte sectors I think.

I don't remember if Anadisk can do single density, but it's the PC controller that can't. There are old PC

controllers that do single density.

I say 'modern' PC controllers, but there haven't been 5.25" floppy controllers and drives in PCs a long time.

When there were 5.25" PC floppies, they usually had 360k, dbl sided dbl density. Come to think, I think

late PC floppies had 1.4 meg, .... no that's 3.5".... no it was 5.25". It is/was 'HI' density.

Lemme add.. 360k...5.25"/// 720k 3.5", 1.44 3.5". I Still think there were 'HI' density 5.25".

Edited October 7, 2015 by russg

[Savetz]

Leslie Wolf, Product Manager for Atari Logo and AtariLab

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-87-leslie-wolf-product-manager-for-atari-logo-and-atarilab

Leslie Wolf was a product manager at Atari from 1981 through 1984. She managed the design and development of educational hardware and software products such as Atari Logo software and AtariLab. In this interview, we talk about Pricilla Laws, whom I previously interviewed. This interview took place on May 15, 2015.

Teaser quote:

“I had gone over to my guys in the manufacturing operation and I said, ‘You know what? They don’t know you’re here. Keep working until you don’t get a paycheck anymore.’”

[Savetz]

Dan Horn, The Man Who Brought Infocom Games to Microcomputers

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-88-dan-horn-infocom

 

Dan Horn stated as a programmer at Scott Adams’ Adventure International, where he programmed the Atari version of Treasure Quest. Then he moved to Infocom where he was technical director, then became head of the microcomputing group.

This interview took place on May 21, 2015.

Teaser quotes:

“The feelies were really the copy protection. If you had a feelie, you were compelled — not really for copy protection purposes — but you were compelled to have it because it was cool.”

“With the Atari we had thousands of colors. We had the rippling, shimmering effect, and we had all this other stuff. Now, most of it never got to an Infocom game. But it was cool!”

[Savetz]

Bruce Poehlman, The Last Starfighter/Star Raiders II

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-89-bruce-poehlman-the-last-starfighterstar-raiders-ii

Bruce Poehlman only worked at Atari for a year — from June 1983 until July 1984 — but he told me “it was an interesting year.” Bruce coded the game The Last Starfighter for the Atari 5200 and 8-bit computers — a game that was never released. Two years later, he was contracted to re-brand the game as Star Raiders II.

Teaser quotes:

“We have this contract with a movie, and we think you game with little tweaks might be able to fit the theme of that movie. And that movie was The Last Starfighter.”

“That bonus, within six months of my starting there, went from $40,000 to $20,000. Then in another three months it went to $12,000 then it went to $8,000.”

[kenjennings]

Atari proposed, or announced but never shipped, several AtariLab add-on modules including a Timekeeper Module, Lie Detector Module, Reaction Time Module, Heartbeat Module, Biofeedback Module, Mechanics Module, Robotics Module, and Nuclear Radiation Module (!!).

It would be cool if it were possible to find out what these were expected to do, and how they would work.

Now that I'm not a 12 yr old with a paper route the control module is affordable, so I have two of them.

 

The computer itself is a crazy fast clock, so I figure there would not be a lot to the timekeeping and reaction time modules. Maybe a switch to turn on and off with supporting software.

I've seen cheap lie detectors using analog sensors for skin electrical resistance -- basically the same as biofeedback sensors. These would probably be similar to potentiometers for input.

A heartbeat sensor would probably be pretty simple too.

 

But, the Mechanics, Robotics, and Nuclear Radiation?!? i'd really like to know how those were supposed to work.

[tschak909]

Basically, the AtariLab master module was nothing more than a breakout for the pins on the controller port. The temperature and light modules used the paddle pins to emit an analog value from 0 to 255, there are the following connectors:

 

* Paddle, 0 and 1 respectively.

* Ptrig, also 0 and 1.

* Control, tip being 0, ring being 1, tip of second one being 2, ring of second one being 3. (Joystick pins)

* two power connectors which correspond to the +5V pin on the joystick port. They're hooked together, so whatever you power off of that needs to not exceed a total of .... shit, I forget... is it 500mA?

 

So you can make your own experiments, even if we can't find any official atari ones.

 

-Thom