[ATARI] 3 Years With the ST: An exclusive look inside Tramiel's Atari

[Jesus Cea]

https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n1/threeyearsofst.html

Adjunto transcripción para los archivos de la lista:

"""
3 Years With the ST

An exclusive look inside Tramiel's Atari

by Jeffrey Daniels

When Warner Communications sold a failing Atari to Jack Tramiel, the
business community was amazed. When the new Atari demonstrated a
revolutionary new computer within six months after the takeover, the
computer industry was amazed. Now it's your turn to be amazed as Jeffrey
Daniels brings you the inside scoop on how Atari's flagship computer
came about--and what Atari is planning for the future.


On Monday, July 2, 1984, Jack Tramiel, his three sons, and a core band
of Tramiel loyalists stormed Atari Incorporated's headquarters and took
control of Warner Communications' bleeding, teetering Atari subsidiary.
A little over five months later, in January 1985, a radically
restructured Atari Corporation publicly unveiled its new computer at the
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. During the following spring,
they shipped approximately 100 custom ST units to third-party software
developers. And in June of that year, against all odds and amid
widespread, doomsaying prognostications from industry pundits, the first
production model Atari 520 ST computers rolled off the assembly line in
Taiwan.

It had been a wild, wild ride.

AN EXHILARATING FIRST YEAR

"I tell you, it was very exhilarating," recalls Shiraz Shivji, Atari's
Vice President for Research and Development. "During those days, I used
to get home at about ten o'clock at night, six days a week. Sunday was
about the only day we took off--sometimes we couldn't take off Sunday. I
remember New Year's Eve [as the company scrambled to meet its
self-imposed January 1985 CES deadline]. I was working that night when
the firecrackers started popping, then well on into the New Year."

"It was a miracle," says Richard Frick, one of a handful of Warner
veterans still at Atari and now Director of OEM (Original Equipment
Manufacturer) and VAR (Value Added Reseller) Sales. "You could come here
almost any day of the week and find people working very late at night,
then on weekends. The parking lot was always full."

THE MAKING OF THE ST

Contrary to popular myth, the ST did not exist in any shape or form at
Atari prior to the Tramiels' takeover. Planning for what was to become
the Atari ST began in late April and early May of 1984. The first step
was when Jack Tramiel formed a small company called Tramiel Technology,
Ltd. He then gradually began to bring together people from around the
world, all ex-Commodore employees, with the specific intention of
designing, manufacturing, then somehow marketing a new, popular-priced
computer. But in those first weeks, acquiring Atari was still just a dream.

By the end of May, Tramiel Technology had rented a room at an apartment
complex in Sunnyvale, and the core group of Tramiel recruits began to
plan their new machine and to seek out a way to market it. Shortly
thereafter, the negotiations with Warner Communications began to heat up.

"What the product was going to be and what it looked like was already
very clear in our minds," Shivji says in recalling that time. "The work
had already started. We knew what we wanted in a computing engine, what
we wanted in a user interface. There was going to be a windowing system,
it was going to have bit-mapped graphics, we knew roughly speaking what
the [screen] resolutions were going to be, and so on. All those
parameters were decided before the takeover. The idea was an advanced
computer, 16/32-bit, good graphics, good sound, MIDI, the whole thing--a
fun computer--but with the latest in software technology."

atari1.jpg
The "Monterey Group." In September 1984, Atari sent most of its software
engineers down to Digital
Research's facilities in Monterey, California to begin the port of GEM.
Their task was to translate
Digital's IBM PC assembly code into 68000 code.

THE ST TAKES SHAPE

Shivji soon had a block diagram of the machine on paper, but a detailed
schematic was still months away. At least three CPU chip sets were under
consideration, and the design engineers were still not sold on the
Motorola 68000, the microprocessor at the heart of today's ST.
Originally, the ST was intended to be a true 32-bit machine.

"We were hot on the 32016 and 32032," Shivji said. "We had a bunch of
meetings with National Semiconductor regarding the availability of the
chip, and when it was obvious that we could not have the number of chips
that we wanted and the pricing was not right, then the decision was made
to go with the 68000. Actually, what happened also was that eventually
we even built a unit based on the National 32032 and we were quite
disappointed."

Jack Tramiel's son Leonard flew out to Silicon Valley in May to meet
with his father, Shivji, and others to discuss the new machine. "At that
time we went through an awful lot of details about what should be in
where, how everything should work, and we had discussions with Digital
Research [the developers of GEM]--the whole bit," Leonard noted.

John Feagans, a software engineer who had recently departed Commodore,
was among the original strategists. "We went down to Digital Research,"
he said. "GEM wasn't called 'GEM' at that time. It was called 'Crystal.'
They showed it to us working on an Apple Lisa. Well, actually, it was
all smoke and mirrors. There was hardly anything of use in that demo,
because they had devoted their entire programming effort to putting it
on the IBM PC."

A GEM OF AN IDEA

The version of GEM first demonstrated to Tramiel Technology was actually
running on top of CP/M-68K. Indeed, GEM's CP/M-68K incarnation was the
only version of GEM available for the 68000 microprocessor at the time,
and Atari would continue to plan for it to be the ST's underlying
operating system in the months to come.
atari2.jpg
Shiraz Shivii, Atari's Vice Pres-
ident for Research and Develop-
ment. The "father" of Atari's
first 16-bit computer--the ST.

Though negotiations with Digital Research were going well by June, Jack
Tramiel had made no final decision, and system software was thus still
up in the air by the time of his Atari takeover. The company was
confronted with two obvious choices for the new machine's system
software: either adapt an "off-the-shelf" package (such as GEM) or write
a new operating system. Time was short, and programming personnel, both
late of Warner's Atari and those from Commodore, were still relative
unknowns to top company officials.

"Basically we had a bunch of programmers we knew nothing about," Leonard
said. "We did not know--we could not know--that we had the talent
in-house to design and write our own OS. With GEM we had something that
was already laid out and planned based on a previously existing product
[GEM on the IBM PC]."

Soon after the takeover, Microsoft began to court the new Atari in an
effort to sell Windows as the ST's operating system, and Leonard had
several meetings with them. But Microsoft's Windows was still almost two
years away, and Digital's GEM was much further along. The new Atari
decided to go with Digital Research.

In September 1984, Atari sent most of its software engineers down to
Digital Research's facilities in Monterey, California, to begin the port
of GEM. The software group lived there for most of the following four
months, some staying on longer. Their task was to translate Digital's
IBM PC assembly code, written for the 8086 microprocessor, into 68000
code, and also to rewrite and recompile Digital's C code on the ST system.

It was a monstrous task. Dave Staugas, who ported the text blit and
later wrote the ST's NEOchrome paint program, remembers that time: "The
killer was that Digital Research would give me this 8086 code and say,
'Translate this,' and then a week later they'd say, 'Oh, there were a
lot of bugs in that, here's the new one.' I never really had a spec. The
latest code was the spec."

Miraculously, by the beginning of January 1985 all the pieces began to
come together. Atari officials realized they would meet the CES
deadline, and they did: they shipped five STs to Las Vegas, with GEM
still running on top of CP/M-68K.

For Shivji, this was the climactic, energizing moment: "The really
exciting thing was that in five months we actually showed the product at
CES with real chips, with real PCBs, with real monitors, with real
plastic. Five months previous to that there was nothing that existed.
You're talking about tooling for plastic, you're talking about getting
an enormous software task done. And when we went to CES, 85 percent of
the machine was done. We had windows, we had all kinds of stuff. People
were looking for the VAX that was running all this stuff."

HARD CHOICES, HARD TIMES

Atari's first CES was an unequivocal success. Though product was not
ready to ship and Atari had not yet signed on great numbers of computer
retailers, the company had nonetheless brought off a tremendous public
relations coup. Doubters stood amazed, the faithful beamed, and Jack
Tramiel's oft-quoted comment to the naysayers at CES was "Oh ye of
little faith. "

Yet Atari still had much work ahead of them. In February, GEMDOS was
nearly complete and Atari had to make a crucial decision: should they
continue with CP/M 68K or to move on to GEMDOS? Leonard explains: "That
was an extremely difficult decision to make. CP/M-68K had been around
several years; it was a well-known, well-understood, relatively
well-accepted existing operating system. GEMDOS was a completely
brand-new, untried, untested, incomplete operating system. However, it
also offered significantly higher performance and gave the full
hierarchical file system that CP/M-68K simply did not have. It was quite
a difficult decision to make, but I think we went in the right direction
going with GEMDOS."

GEMDOS, while not written as an MS-DOS clone, nonetheless was modeled on
MS-DOS. There is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between GEMDOS
operating system calls and those of MS-DOS, and the mechanism for
storing files on disk is identical--which is why ST disk drives can read
IBM disks.

"It gave us a connection to the PC world," says Mike Schmal, software
engineer and one of the architects of the ST's system software "With
GEMDOS, programmers better understood our code. We gave them the
impression that they were already in their own world. They didn't have
to learn the ins and outs of a whole new OS, which would have happened
if we had written our own."

Throughout the spring of 1985, Atari shipped custom-built STs to
developers. But during that spring, even as the hard work and dedication
of so many was paying off, the corporation's health was at its most
critical stage. "At CES, the gods were smiling on us," recalls Neil
Harris, Director of Marketing Communications. "I think the most
interesting period of time really was the time right after CES, the next
few months. That's when we were really scraping the bottom of the barrel
in terms of how much cash we had available. Jack Tramiel had put $30
million in the company, and we were down to the point of: 'What's our
payroll this week, how much cash do we have in the bank, what can we do
to keep going?' We had sold everything there was to sell off. We had no
cash flow from new products. Here we are in March saying, 'Is Jack going
to pull the plug on us?' It was a scary time. Every body was really
slaving away--a major team effort--to try just to get through this until
we had products to ship."

Of course, Atari did finally begin shipping products, first in May with
the XE line, then in June with the new STs. The bleakest period was
over, and the company--along with its flagship 520 ST computer--began to
blossom.

atari3.jpg
Jack Tramiel. His July 1984
purchase of the ailing Atari
saved the company.

AN IMPORTANT GROWTH PERIOD

In its March 1986 issue, Byte magazine previewed the Atari 1040 ST,
hailing it as the first personal computer priced under one dollar per
kilobyte of memory. With the introduction of the 1040ST, Atari had once
again catapulted itself as the clear leader in offering high performance
computing without the high price.

Throughout that year sales steadily increased, and the company enjoyed
increased profitability and growth. Their bottom-line gains and an
aggressive, cost-cutting management team attracted Wall Street, and in
November of 1986 Tramiel took Atari public. At one point during the
summer of 1987, the stock was selling for nearly triple its offering price.

THE ST MARKET: U.S. VS. EUROPE

The Tramiels have accomplished much in the four years since they wrested
Atari from Warner Communications, but there's still room for further
successes and improvements. Company officials routinely concur that ST
sales in the U.S. must improve. The ST sells phenomenally well in
Europe, especially in Germany and the United Kingdom. But domestic sales
haven't grown as hoped, and the introduction of the Mega line--replete
with a new laser printer and hard disk drive--has not significantly
improved matters.

Why has the ST sold so well in Europe, yet not taken off in the United
States? Leonard Tramiel offers the following theory: "There are several
reasons. One is that the United States has this terrible disease called
IBM-itis, and the IBM PC had gotten a pretty good stranglehold on
business here. Plus, Apple had never gotten its stranglehold on Europe.
What you wound up with in Europe was the PC, Mac, and ST all arriving at
just about the same time. People had a fair, uniform comparison, 'Which
of these machines do you want?' and they looked at the price and
performance and people bought STs. In the U.S., we had to fight an
I-don't-know-how-many-hundred-million-dollar propaganda campaign from
Apple, and we didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on
propaganda. Finally, the phrase, 'No one was ever fired for buying an
IBM' I don't believe has ever been translated into German."

ATARI AND ITS PUBLIC

Atari has been criticized in the past for a less than robust developer
support program, although they're taking steps to improve their
technical support program. Roy Good, newly hired as Manager of Product
Development, outlines the plan:

"We're beefing up our own internal support capability. We're trying to
do it from the inside out, recognizing that there is certainly a
perceived problem out there. We're putting effort into developer
documentation and also into formalizing the support mechanism. We're
putting in place a problem tracking system, which will be a database,
and will contain all known bugs, reported bugs, and requests for
enhancements. That will be the sole database for any future products
[including the new TOS revision]. So we'll know for any particular
product what the problems are and what the requests are so we can
address them. We're putting that in now and it should be up by April.
Once we have it shaken down, we'll distribute it to subsidiaries
[worldwide]."
atari4.jpg
Sam and Leonard Tramiel. Leonard had several meetings with
Microsoft as they began to court the new Atari in an effort to sell
Windows as the ST's operating system.

The March 1986 Byte magazine article mentioned that critics of the ST
often bemoan the dearth of good software, and that many of the early
software packages were ports that did not take advantage of the ST's
capabilities. However, Atari is proud to point out that the ST software
scene has improved dramatically in the last two years, and that large
and popular software houses, such as Microsoft and WordPerfect, have now
jumped on the ST bandwagon. "You don't get much bigger names than
those," notes Leonard Tramiel.

ATARI'S CD-ROM AND THE LEGENDARY EST

With the introduction of the Mega line and Atari's CD-ROM well on its
way, Atari officials feel that the ST product line is poised for a major
breakthrough in this country.

"We've always said that we are going to have the ST computer as a family
of products," says Shivji. "There are many logical extensions of the ST.
We're trying to do it in such a way that the software investment you
have does not die. We have several enhancements planned."

The Atari CD ROM player is one of those enhancements, and is well on its
way. It uses the High Sierra data format and plays audio disks as well.
At about half the price of competing CD ROM decks (approximately $599),
it will be difficult for other companies to compete. The machine is
slated for release late in the second quarter of 1988.

The EST is another product ST users have been anxiously awaiting, and
provides yet another opportunity for Atari to revolutionize the world of
personal computing. At about the Mega price point, it will offer three
additional screen resolutions, including a 1280-by-960 full-page
monochrome mode. The attendant ease-of-use in word processing and
desktop publishing applications has the opportunity to tear the
competition to shreds. Comparable performance from an IBM or Macintosh
currently costs the user thousands of dollars more in additional
hardware and software. Although a prototype of the machine has been up
and running in Atari's R & D lab for awhile, a few of its custom parts
initially gave Atari's suppliers some trouble. Development, however, is
now in its final stages. (Editor's note: For additional information on
new Atari hardware, see "News, Notes and Quotes" elsewhere in this issue.)

LAST WORDS

It's safe to say that Atari remains fully and emphatically committed to
the ST line. There is a new consciousness at the company--and new
employees and money to back it up--that recognizes today's personal
computer market as an increasingly sophisticated one, and that users are
no longer looking for hardware per se, but are looking instead for
software solutions.

And Atari intends to install the ST and its children as the personal
computer of choice to deliver those solutions. If you'd like to see more
articles like this, circle 171 on the Reader Service Card.

Jeffrey Daniels is a freelance writer who specializes in software
documentation.


2 Years With START

The START Index

by Jon A. Bell and Heidi Brumbaugh

When the Atari 520 ST first became available to developers, Antic
Publishing was there. Our ST arrived in March 1985, and by August there
was a regular ST section every month in Antic magazine--with the catchy
title "ST Section." (By the following spring it had become Antic's ST
Resource.)

The ST Section's articles ranged from software reviews to examinations
of the ST's internals to type-in ST software. But Antic publisher James
Capparell knew ST owners wanted their own magazine, complete with
programs on disk--and thus, with its Summer 1986 issue, START was born.
START began as a resource for developers and hackers--the technically
sophisticated people who bought the earliest STs. Today, on our second
birthday, were the #1 resource for all ST users.

To make it easier for you to find your way through our three years of ST
coverage, START contributor Dave Plotkin has compiled the START Index.
It's a complete database of every article, review and program from
START, as well as Antic's ST Section and ST Resource.

Here's how to use it: First, copy the files INDEX.ARC and ARCX.TTP to a
freshly formatted disk. Double-click on ARCX.TTP and type INDEX.ARC,
then press Return. The disk will spin, your ST will tell you what files
it's creating, and when you return to the Desktop the uncompressed index
files will be on your disk.

There are two copies of the index. INDEX.TXT is a text file that you can
print out or show on the screen by double-clicking on it from the
Desktop. The index is in alphabetical order by title. INDEX.FRM has each
field of the index on a separate line. To help you create a format your
database manager will understand, we've included CONVERT, a GFA BASIC
program in both source code (CONVERT.LST) and a compiled version
(CONVERT PRO). Run CONVERT PRG, then click on Load Data under the File
menu and select INDEX.FRM. (The file CONVERT.RSC must be in the same
directory as CONVERT.PRG.) When the program has finished loading the
data, click on Save Data. If you are using CardSTak from START's
Business Applications special issue, simply click on CardSTak and the
File Converter will prompt you for an output file name and then write
the index to disk in CardSTak format.

If you are using another database manager, click on Delimit. A dialog
box will ask you for the delimited format values. These values tell
which character will delimit (set apart) the fields, and which character
will delimit the records. The default values are 44 (the ASCII value for
a comma) as a field delimiter and carriage return/linefeed as a record
delimiter. To change these values, enter the decimal value of the new
delimiter. If you want to enclose the fields in quotation marks
highlight the box next to this option; the default value is On. Some
database managers interpret anything in quotation marks to be text, so
if you want your numbers to be treated as numbers you will have to turn
this option off; the default value is Off. Most database managers can
read data in this default format; however, refer to your manual to be sure.

Before loading the index into your database, you will probably have to
create an index data file. The field definitions will be: Title (maximum
length 68), Author (maximum length 32), Magazine (maximum length 11),
Issue (maximum length 12), Page (numeric), Article type (maximum length
17), Language (maximum length 14) and four lines of comments (maximum
length 73 each). The last comment field is blank for each record, but
we've included it to be consistent with future updates of the index.

Here's hoping that you've enjoyed Antic Publishing's first three years
with the ST--and that there are many more to come!

Find it all! File INDEX.ARC on your START disk!
"""

-- 
Jesús Cea Avión                         _/_/      _/_/_/        _/_/_/
jcea at jcea.es - https://www.jcea.es/    _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
Twitter: @jcea                        _/_/    _/_/          _/_/_/_/_/
jabber / xmpp:jcea at jabber.org  _/_/  _/_/    _/_/          _/_/  _/_/
"Things are not so easy"      _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
"My name is Dump, Core Dump"   _/_/_/        _/_/_/      _/_/  _/_/
"El amor es poner tu felicidad en la felicidad de otro" - Leibniz

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