Did the Tramiels kill the 8-bit?

[atarifan49]

The other thing was the market had changed, but Jack didn't.   He thought he could build a machine, not have to advertise and people would just flock to his new machine and feel honored to own it.

 

 

You said it right there. That was the Tramiels biggest downfall IMHO.

 

 

...well the same was true for the GEM GUI, while an excellent start for 85' it grew long in the tooth by 87' and nothing true MAJOR was done until many years later, meanwhile the Apple Finder and MS's Windows would continue to evolve and heavily improve.

 

 

The only thing that I see that GEM had over the others was it's compactness. Able to boot the OS all from ROM. But like you said, without the continued enhancements, like the ones Apple and MS did, it lost its appeal.

 

 

 

As that mouse was a hunk of sh*t, it was difficult to use, klunky and I'd bet the Atari 2600 TrakBall had better resolution!!!

 

I know I prefer to use my modified Wico trackball over the standard ST mouse. Even other mouses made for the ST all seem to have that clunky feel also. Too bad Kensington never made their trackball for the ST, that one is the Cadillac of trackballs!

[Curt Vendel]

The other thing was the market had changed, but Jack didn't.   He thought he could build a machine, not have to advertise and people would just flock to his new machine and feel honored to own it.

 

 

You said it right there. That was the Tramiels biggest downfall IMHO.

 

 

...well the same was true for the GEM GUI, while an excellent start for 85' it grew long in the tooth by 87' and nothing true MAJOR was done until many years later, meanwhile the Apple Finder and MS's Windows would continue to evolve and heavily improve.

 

 

The only thing that I see that GEM had over the others was it's compactness. Able to boot the OS all from ROM. But like you said, without the continued enhancements, like the ones Apple and MS did, it lost its appeal.

 

 

 

As that mouse was a hunk of sh*t, it was difficult to use, klunky and I'd bet the Atari 2600 TrakBall had better resolution!!!

 

I know I prefer to use my modified Wico trackball over the standard ST mouse. Even other mouses made for the ST all seem to have that clunky feel also. Too bad Kensington never made their trackball for the ST, that one is the Cadillac of trackballs!

 

 

Mine got smashed in a move, but I had the most incredible mouse from Best Electronics called... ahem, The BEST Mouse... that was THE best Atari mouse I'd ever seen, I used it primarily on my XE for Diamond GOS, but it also worked on the ST and that was a great mouse, too bad Brad doesn't have anymore, I'd buy 3-4 in a minute if he did.

 

 

Curt

[atarian1]

The Tramiels claimed that they didn't upgrade the GUI much because they wanted to promote 3rd party GUIs. I think they're just trying to disguise their cheapness.... I myself bought Neodesk, and couldn't live without it. Neodesk was light years ahead of Windows and MacOS at the time. The great thing was that authors took input directly from the users themselves to improve their product. It's funny to see how many useful features that were in 3rd party Atari GUIs, would eventually show up on later versions of Windows and MacOS!

 

I never understood the incremental hardware upgrades myself. The ST to STe to TT upgrade path wasn't very "major" IMO. Now the latter three to the Falcon was a major upgrade. Thank heaven Atari went all out with the Falcon instead of just an incremental upgrade.

 

I am a lone defender of the Atari mouse. Yes, I like the Atari mouse. I can't explain it. I guess it's just...simple. I just wish it had microswitches so that the buttons would last longer.

[Atari 7800.com]

The Tramiels killed *everything* but their own egos. Why else do you think Sam Tramiel named it the ST.... its his own initials.

 

This arguement can go back and forth for years... but it comes down to the bottom line... Jack Tramiel and sons did not save Atari... had they done what they stepped in to do, we would all be checking our email with Atari computers and playing with our brand new Atari systems.... not getting excited every time we see the lastest Infogrames game with a Fuji on it. The Tramiels did nothing with Atari but liquidate the assets and bring about a few nifty computers and games along the way that they didnt support.

 

Anyways... I've spend enough breath in my life discussing these individuals. Now I wipe my @ss with them.

 

 

Just my 2 cents..

(sorry if this was rather unprofessional, but it needed to be said)

[Maury Markowitz]

Asthetics aside, the machine design was simple and did what it had to do, but nothing more.

 

You're right I think, it is primarily asthetics. However I can't help but love my 8-bit for just those reasons. ONE port to the peripherals, a case built like a tank (I had a 400) and the overall coolness of the machine in general. The ST was "functional" and nothing more. I don't know, I guess I'm an art-iste! :-)

 

Something the Tramiels knew nothing about and didn't bother to continue to improve was the User Interface. [snip]   well the same was true for the GEM GUI, while an excellent start for 85' it grew long in the tooth by 87' and nothing true MAJOR was done until many years later, meanwhile the Apple Finder and MS's Windows would continue to evolve and heavily improve.

 

For sure. More annoying, perhaps, was all of the great GEM and TOS replacements that kicked butt. They could have bought any one of them at any time, offering a massive upgrade.

 

But Atari was always bad on software. Look at the original BASIC. Slowest BASIC of all the home computers (a Sinclair was faster, sigh), buggy and feature light. They could have easily dropped a new version into the XL's.

 

Maury

[atarian1]

Atari has bad software? Tell me about it! It seemed like after finishing TOS, their brains were too fried to write good programs.

 

Just look at GDOS - it was suppose to be Atari's answer to Adobe Type Manager. What a joke! Loading GDOS slllooowwwwed down the system. I remember modifying the ASSIGN.SYS file to load fonts into the system and spending hours trying to get it right. Never succeeded. Pain in the a**! Luckily, 3rd party software came to the rescue again (G+Plus). This also resulted in every word processing/DTP program using their own custom type manager program which were all incompatible with each other. Atari FINALLY got it right with SpeedoGDOS.

 

The worst example of bad Atari software has got to be Deskset II. Utter crap. Slow, not nearly enough features and overpriced. Calamus and Pagestream (the 2 main DTP programs on the ST) were light years ahead of Deskset, and at 1/3 the price!

 

These are only the beginning. But the real stickler was that Leonard Tramiel (Head of Software Development) said that the 3rd party software *sucked*! And even in the programmers' faces! (I remember this happened to the ICD people) Just goes to show how much of a doofus L.T. is.....

 

Oh, also I'd like to stick out in the crowd again. I LOVE the ST casing (expect the 1040). I thought the cases were beautiful to look at and complemented every piece of furniture I ever placed it on.

 

It's just me I guess....

[Maury Markowitz]

Oh, also I'd like to stick out in the crowd again.    I LOVE the ST casing (expect the 1040).  I thought the cases were beautiful to look at and complemented every piece of furniture I ever placed it on.  

 

Oh it looked fine, no complaint there. My complaint is that it was physically junk. My 520 was so feeble that it would droop a couple of degrees if you held it in the air by one end or the other. It creaked and groaned when you typed on it, and would work its way apart if it was moved a few times -- requiring me to open it up to re-seat the ROMs.

 

I think the best machine they ever did was the Mega. Tough,, good looking, reasonably good keyboard on a cable... I liked most everything about the Mega and thought it should be the basis for all future machines. But I guess it cost an extra 50 cents to make it, so that was that.

 

And frankly, the TT's case *sucked*. YMMV, as always.

 

Maury

[Joey Kay]

The only Atari software I owned aside from games and Operating Systems was Atari Planetarium for the XE/XL.

 

Although I can't speak for the other programs (which I believe many were shoddy) I thought Atari Planetarium was a wonderful little program!

 

Oh - I guess I can speak for DOS XE... that was a great program. I was always torn between that and DOS 2.5. In fact, I'm gonna start a seperate thread about that...

 

Cheers!

 

Joey