I'm seething with jealousy. I had an 800, but when I got my 1040ST in high school, we gave the 800 to family friends. I really really regret that decision.
It's rubbish to suggest that the Warner made the 800 a closed system. From the launch, you could buy the technical reference manuals with much detail on programming it, commented OS listings and hardware diagrams. Armed with that you could - and many people did - produce your own cartridges etc with no need to get permission or pay royalties to anyone else.
The 800's big problem was regulations. The earlier Apple ][ was claimed not to be a consumer item, without a video output, so didn't have the shielding that the 800 needed. (That 99+% of Apple users immediately stuck a video card in it didn't matter.) This also meant Apple disk drives could be faster and they had a whole range of add-in cards. The Ataris were limited to hanging things off a 19200 baud serial link (although some people did get fancy with the joystick ports...)
By the time the C64 came along, the FCC had relaxed the regulations and so it got away with being basically unshielded too.
I've still got the 800 (though it's a PAL one, so no use to Americans) and a 65XE. I'd like to have 128XE.
I completely bow to your knowledge on this one, since I was 10 when I got my 800. I was a bit surprised by those comments in the interview, since I certainly remember lots of third-party software (especially once we got the disk drive).
That said, I also haven't read anything about the behind-the-scenes politics (i.e., did Epyx or Infocom have to pay a licensing fee, etc), and in the pre-Net days, I do wonder how much info was hidden. I'd love to see a good book really detailing that era -- most have been puff pieces on the videogame industry, or have been Apple or IBM-centric.
If you do a google, you should be able to find the manuals, which memory is telling me were available from the start. They go into such detail that the only thing that stopped you being able to build your own from them is that Atari (unlike Apple) designed four of their own VLSI chips and so they weren't available to anyone else! Nowhere is there anything about paying a licensing fee.
There's a very good presentation somewhere by one of the Atari staff on the lessons they learnt - usually too late - about the various designs: the 2600, 800 and ST families.
It is quite incredible that the IBM PC video cards never got to be as good with text as the 800 was, and it took years before some of them could do some of the graphics things that the 800 could do, never mind the Amiga.
Speaking of which, I think Atari's biggest computer mistake (as opposed to console mistakes) was not getting the benefits of the Amiga their ex-staff had developed with Atari's money, and preferably launching it two years earlier thanks to not bothering with a GUI.
To my shame I know one of the lawyers who helped establish that reverse engineering closed console systems (the Sega in this case) to release your own games without paying royalties was naughty in the UK.
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Date: 2005-03-16 01:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-16 01:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-16 07:09 pm (UTC)I'll never use the damned thing again. Evar.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-16 08:07 pm (UTC)The 800's big problem was regulations. The earlier Apple ][ was claimed not to be a consumer item, without a video output, so didn't have the shielding that the 800 needed. (That 99+% of Apple users immediately stuck a video card in it didn't matter.) This also meant Apple disk drives could be faster and they had a whole range of add-in cards. The Ataris were limited to hanging things off a 19200 baud serial link (although some people did get fancy with the joystick ports...)
By the time the C64 came along, the FCC had relaxed the regulations and so it got away with being basically unshielded too.
I've still got the 800 (though it's a PAL one, so no use to Americans) and a 65XE. I'd like to have 128XE.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-16 08:24 pm (UTC)That said, I also haven't read anything about the behind-the-scenes politics (i.e., did Epyx or Infocom have to pay a licensing fee, etc), and in the pre-Net days, I do wonder how much info was hidden. I'd love to see a good book really detailing that era -- most have been puff pieces on the videogame industry, or have been Apple or IBM-centric.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-16 10:37 pm (UTC)There's a very good presentation somewhere by one of the Atari staff on the lessons they learnt - usually too late - about the various designs: the 2600, 800 and ST families.
It is quite incredible that the IBM PC video cards never got to be as good with text as the 800 was, and it took years before some of them could do some of the graphics things that the 800 could do, never mind the Amiga.
Speaking of which, I think Atari's biggest computer mistake (as opposed to console mistakes) was not getting the benefits of the Amiga their ex-staff had developed with Atari's money, and preferably launching it two years earlier thanks to not bothering with a GUI.
To my shame I know one of the lawyers who helped establish that reverse engineering closed console systems (the Sega in this case) to release your own games without paying royalties was naughty in the UK.