The "MindLink" Gee, it looked like a good idea... Atari Baby clip (90K WAV) from Sigue Sigue Sputnik's 1986 Flaunt It CD. If you find this tune kinda catchy - or just plain bizarre - you may want to buy it. I used to have a copy of it here but that was before Napster and Morpheus had come and gone - now everything has changed. Sigh. Atari Fashion Seems like it's fashionable to wear Atari T-sirts again. But Atari water? Atari Mario Bros. (316K WAV) Yup, Atari had those two little plumbers for the 2600 years before the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out. Guess who had a better marketing department? :) Here's a sound clip from a commerical I have on video. Atari Jaguar Ad (1.8MB MPEG) This may be one of the funniest ads I've ever seen! Data Age Mindscape (3.9MB MP3) "Space and time will deform into grotesque realities." This one gave me nightmares when I first heard it back in 1982. The Mindscape 33 1/3 RPM record was a free promotional item given out by Data Age for their then new line of Atari 2600 cartridges. It's truly one of the strangest things I've ever heard. It's bizarre and almost ridiculous while remaining somewhat eerie at the same time. A racy book on the Forth programming language Combining technology with Semi-clad women - hey, they were years ahead of Maxim on this one... Atari 1040ST Radio Commercial (766K MP3) Atari pits the ST against IBM's PC, Apple's Macintosh and Commodore's Amiga in this radio commercial. I accidentally taped this one off the radio. (Netscape users press shift while clicking on the link) Along Came Atari (490K WAV) One of Atari's cheesier ads - also off the radio. Apple Help Line (396K MP3) Think a Mac is the answer to Ellen Feiss' problems? Decide for yourself. Here's an Apple Macintosh Help Line call I downloaded from the web site of the Apple employee who took the call and posted it! I'll bet he's not working there anymore. Atari 2600 [Deleted] (2.6MB ZIP) Download your childhood here - or have another. What can you get in 2.6MB of memory these days? It's about the size required for a cheezy calculator program some kid wrote, or a screensaver that you'll get bored of after you've seen it once. What do you get when you download this file? An amazing Atari 2600 emulator for the PC which can run the actual game ROM images copied from real 2600 cartridges! But wait, there's more. You may be saying to yourself, "How am I going to get the games to play on it?" Good question, and there's a great answer - they're included! What's more, chances are that any game you can think of will be there. How can I be so sure? Because, they are almost ALL there! There are 552 ROMS included in the file - that's more than 95% of all Atari 2600 cartridges made between 1977 and today. Even rare prototypes are included. Also, this is probably the most efficient, tightly coded download you will ever make. Think of this - each game is an average of 6K in length (they ranged from 2K to 32K). It took an average of 6 months of full time work for a programmer to code a game back then. Doing the math, you are getting 226 man-years (person-years? There were female programmers too) of work condensed on the equivalent of 2 floppies! (after compression) Two hundred and twenty six years, and that's not including the work the programmer of the emulator put in! So don't just sit there, play Pitfall and River Raid again. Relive Space Invaders and Asteroids. Try out those pornographic 2600 games you never bought as a kid (really!) And check out those rare unreleased games like "Coke Wins" where you must shoot down Pepsi Invaders. Then come back and check out the rest of my site ;) [update: Sorry, I can't provide this file anymore, some of the games are still copyright, and I want this site to be above-board] Asteroids Halloween Costume OK, I can understand a kid wanting to dress up as an Arcade Videogame Console. Kind of a neat idea. And I can perhaps be persuaded to understand dressing up as the triangular vector spaceship from the game - it would be a bit of a minimalist artsy exercise, but kinda cool. Perhaps one could even dress as the never-seen, but implied-to-exist pilot of the little triangular spaceship. But how exactly can someone dress up as an "Atari Asteroids"? What does that even mean? Hi, I'm an Atari Asteroids. An Atari Asteroids what? By the look of the "shirt" the closest I can figure is that the kid is supposed to be dressed up as the panel art on the side of the arcade machine. Hi, I'm the panel art of an Atari Asteroids Machine. But what's that on your head? Some sort of fungas? Is this a moldy neglected Atari Asteroids machine from a someone's damp basement? I think that just might be a little too much realism for a kid. Are there cigarette burns on the console as well? Oh wait, I forgot, there is no console - just panel art with a grotesque head sticking out of it. Anyway, I always wanted to be an Atari Pong box cover art with grotesque head - but they were all out. Little Green Desktop If you miss your little green desktop (i.e. owned an Atari ST) All the information you'd ever want for emulating one on your PC may be found here. Pop Quiz: Test your Techno Quotient

Discuss Atari

My Stuff:

My Jaguar Collection Mostly an excuse to try out some Javascript database manipulation.

My 2600 Collection This list is somewhat longer and serves to demonstrate that Javascript is far too slow to sort anything of significance.

Atari Transputer motherboard Only 350 ATW-800 Transputer systems were ever made. Up to 16 Transputer modules could be plugged into the system for some serious parallel processing. Intel's dual Pentium architecture may be impressive, but it still hasn't matched the expandability, scalability and clean design of the Atari Transputer. The ATW-800 was released in 1987.

I've discovered that people into Atari are usually just a little bit, shall we say - interesting. Here are some examples:

Here's something you can do with a 48K 8-bit computer: The Atari 800 Web Server!

Some dude used an Atari 2600 for his PC case mod. I was actually thinking of doing something similar - guess I'm not alone :) You can see the CD tray at the bottom of the unit lest you have doubts there is anything modified about this 2600. Oh yeah, and all the crazy wires coming out of it - that would be another clue ;)

Now THIS would be a cool item to wear at an 80s retro party.

OK, here's an odd pic I came across one day.

And here is an even stranger video.

Now why, you may ask, would anyone be interested in an old video game comany? Well, for me, the simple answer is that it was part of my youth culture - it's rather like asking someone why they still like the Beatles when there are newer bands out there. If you experience something exciting in your formative years, you form an attachment. I'm sure that years from now, there'll be nostalgic web pages dedicated to Grunge Music. If you're not convinced then ask yourself this: why is it that almost everyone you know is "into" music that just happened to be popular when they were teenagers.

However, there is more to it than that. Just as the Beatles weren't just another band, Atari wasn't just another company. They somehow were able to draw very talented people into their fold as is evidenced by the number of products they introduced that were simply ahead of their time. You may be wondering what on earth I'm getting on about - they just made some old video game system with blocky graphics, right? Not quite. For one, they INVENTED the arcade video game concept. Computer Space was the first, and Pong was the second video arcade game ever. Their ads were pretty swingin' too :)

Atari also developed the first 3D holograhic video game system. What ever happened to it? Well, the little hologram on your credit cards is one result of this research and the only remnant of the system named Cosmos.

Atari introduced the first handheld colour video game system (much before Game Gear) as well as introducing the first 64 bit video game system 3 YEARS before Nintendo did. You can see how timing is important in marketing. When 16 bit gaming was becoming stale and 32 bit systems were just coming out - Atari's engineers finished a powerful true 64 bit game system. No small feat; you're still using a 32 bit computer to view this web page (unless this text has been archived somewhere and you're reading this at a time in which the Pentium III is looked back on as quaint memory.) Anyway, how did consumers respond to this leap in technology? Indifference mostly. Gamers kept buying the 16 bit Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. Years later, most switched over to the 32 bit Sony Playstation.

Who do you suppose invented the first palmtop PC? Yes, long before the Palm Pilot, Windows CE and HP95LX there was the Atari Portfolio. It ran DOS. This meant that it had a software library of tens of thousands of programs - much more than the Pilot or CE devices will probably ever have. Of course it also was equipped with organizer functions, spreadsheet, word processor and even a touch-tone dialer all built in. When was it introduced? More than a decade ago. Just a little early.

I owned the Atari ST personal computer in the mid eighties (1980's for all those who are viewing this text in the distant future). When people would visit my house, they would see this strange looking computer and ask what it could do. They were usually impressed when I told them it could run WordPerfect. However, when they saw it run, they just didn't get it. Why is it in colour they would ask? What's with all the windows - my PC doesn't have all that stuff. Why do you need that mouse-thing? Then they had it all figured out. Atari computers were for games and that's why it had all that usless fluff like colour and windows when a REAL computer like the PC used green on black text like God intended (or black and white if they were into Macs). Four megs of RAM? What's a meg? My computer has 640K, that's probably a lot more than your game computer. How much did you pay for it anyway? Whoa that's less than half of what I paid. You should save to get a real computer. Yes, I could go on about how it used 3 1/2 inch disks years before the PC adopted them, (you can't save much on those little things can you?), its built in sound capabilities before there even was such a thing as a Sound Blaster and its flawless Mac emulation (it actually ran faster and had a bigger screen than the state of the art Mac at the time), but you get the idea. If they had just waited a few more years to release this computer...

Windows 98 has finally caught up in most areas - ten years after Atari introduced it, Windows finally has proportional slider bars. Not a big deal, but I missed them. Lately I've seen the DMA (Direct Memory Access) feature being introduced in top of the line hard drives - it allows for information to flow directly between the hard drive to the RAM without bothering the CPU. Atari had it all along. How about the new video cards that actually allow you to use your system RAM for video memory for increased speed and flexibility - this is so new that you'll still have to search for motherboards to support it. The Atari ST was designed that way in the first place. Similar reasoning was used for their laser printers. All laser printers I know of today need built-in memory and processing power. If a document you are attempting to print is complex your printer may run out of memory and not be able to print it. The Atari laser printers needed NO memory and so never had that problem. That's one of the reasons they were selling for such an insanely low price at the time. Atari engineers reasoned that the computer was already calculating the page lay out so that it could display an image on the monitor, so why have the printer do it all over again? This, of course, results in TRUE WYSYWIG (What You See Is What You Get) which is ideal for desktop publishing - unlike the laser printers we use with our PCs today. I'm sure someone will "invent" this idea again soon.

How about those new "multimedia" monitors with built in speakers - Atari always had them. You could also hook up external speakers if you wanted to, of course. You could even hookup a MIDI device through the built-in MIDI ports. At least musicians appreciated this. By and large it was mainly musicians and Germans who bought the computer in droves. Go figure.

Ever wonder how America Online (AOL) got started? No, it wasn't with those disks that you now use as coasters. It actually began with their Gameline service for the Atari 2600. You would buy a large cartridge called the Gameline module, which was in fact a modem, and plug it into the 2600's cartridge slot. Once hooked into the phone line, one could download a certain number of "plays" of brand new games for about $1/set. Now you know how they could finance sending everyone in the world about 50 of those coasters.

Who made the first laptop able to run the MacOS? Apple? Afraid not. That honour goes to the Atari Stacy when running the popular Spectre GCR Mac Emulator. I remember Atari fanatics of the time would take their Stacys to Mac computer shows to gloat about what they could do. It was an interesting time in computing history. I remember reading an article in BYTE magazine stating how glad they were that these new computers had arrived as it seemed almost certain that computing would become boring with the popularity of the then few year old IBM PCs. Little did they know...

Speaking of PCs, I recently picked up an old 8088 based XT system that was actually manufactured by Atari I found at a thrift shop. On a whim, I decided to test its Y2K compliance and turned the clock to Dec 31, 1999 11:59pm - a dangerous thing to do to most XT computers. So, what happened? Not much. A minute later, it read Jan 1, 2000 12:00am. What else? :)

So whatever happened to Atari? The company that employed 10,000 employees at its peak, the company that Steve Jobs stole from to help build a little computer he called an Apple, the company that is often cited by former employees as having had the brightest and most creative programmers and engineers in the industry? That Atari is gone. On July 30, 1996, Atari Corp. merged with JTS - a floundering, poorly managed manufacturer of hard drives. What did JTS do with this property? Absolutly nothing. Well, there's a little more to it than that, but it's not a very satisfying story. JTS was strapped for cash and needed a quick way to generate stock. Atari, their neighbour in Sunnyvale California, had both cash and stocks - but no direction after they had focused all resources on the Jaguar 64 video game system and struck out in the marketplace. Instead of beating a dead horse and pouring more money into the Jaguar, Jack Tramiel, Atari's conteversial CEO at the time, decided to abandon ship and Atari merged with the hard drive maker. Atari stocks became JTS stocks and JTS was happy because they now had their much needed cash. Jack was happy too since he got out before the stock became worthless. Unfortunatly, JTS had little interest in the Atari technology they now owned and began to slowly sell off its intellectual property (Battlezone and Asteroids for example). Fortunately, Hasbro then swept in to save the day. They found success in updating the 80's classic Frogger recently and decided it would be great to do the same with many of the old Atari classics. Since Atari could be had for the bargain basement price of US$5 million dollars, they just went ahead and bought the company.

I remember watching Blade Runner and noticing the Atari Logo featured prominently in the backdrop of Ridley Scott's futuristic LA. Perhaps those scenes will not look ridiculous after all - like all the "Pan Am" logos on the space ships in 2001: A Space Oddesey.

Yet, there is another. Although Atari Corp. was the company most considered the real Atari, there actually exists another, called Atari Games, owned by Midway. Atari split into two in 1984 when Jack Tramiel bought the consumer division (computers and home video games), but wasn't interested in the coin-op division. That coin-op division became Atari Games. Interestingly, Atari Games spawned their own consumer division in 1987 and started selling home video games! Ironically, they could not use the Atari name in connection with the games because Atari Corp. owned the rights, so they called themselves Tengen. So for a while we had the odd situation in which Atari Corp. sold technologically advanced computers using the the "Atari" brand which most people associated with video games and Atari Games selling video games, but unable to use its own name. The Atari name was probably a liabilty for Atari Corp's line of computers since most people (with the already noted exception of Musicians and Germans) dismissed it as a toy. Atari would pit themselves against IBM as a serious business computer in commercials - and consumers would respond "Yeah, right!" Tengen games actually sold well, but probably would have had a boost with the name recognition factor of the Atari name. Oh well, business is a funny game.

Am I excited about any of today's technologies? Sure, PCs have finally caught up enough to make them worth using, a few programmers like John Carmac (of Doom and Quake fame) push PC technology to its limits as programmers once did for the Atari and Amiga. The Internet is DAMN exciting - with no sign of letting up. Microsoft apperently hires the brightest these days, but doesn't give their employees the freedom that once existed in the industry - nobody looks to Microsoft for innovation. I want to root for Netscape and Linux as technologically superior underdogs - but, alas, they're not. Netscape's Navigator is seriously buggy as new versions are released in haste to compete with Microsoft's offering - and it still manages to lag behind in usful features. Linux means well, but until they get non-computer geeks working on decent intuitve interfaces and installation programs, I won't bother. Give me an Atari ST any day - just turn it on and 3 seconds later you're booted. What the heck are Linux and Win95 doing when they boot up - calculating fluid dynamics? And Macs? Don't make me laugh.

So, what's the point of all of this? Well, I just wanted to get this off my chest :) I'm also procrastinating since I've got an essay to write all about the wonders of Microsoft COM - but this was more interesting. So, in a way, you can thank Bill Gates for this essay :) I guess I'm also thinking that I'd like to work somewhere interesting when I graduate with my Masters in Comp. Sci. Somewhere where innovation still matters. A place that isn't filled with second rate talent because the banks and insurance companies (and dare I say Microsoft again) could afford to hire away the best. Well, I'm not as cynical as all that. I'm sure there are companies getting ready to launch revolutionary new product years ahead of its time - and whether they fail spectacularly, or change everything - I want to be there.