JTSR

I used to be an Atari computer fan, having many Atari ST computers and writing articles for various magazines (remember ST Applications from the ST Club, and the S.T.E.N “magazine on a disk”!).  However, I never really got into computer games and games consoles.  By the time I got my first Atari ST, Atari had really said goodby to the games console market and it was hard to beleive that just in the 10 years previous Atari was the name in computer consoles.   Come over my house and play on the Atari, instead of come over my house and play on the Wii!

There is a great write up about the rise and fall of Atari in the games console market and like all computer stories from the 70s to 80s it reads with so many “what ifs” that it is fantastic.   I didn’t know, for instance, that Steve Jobs worked at Atari as a games programmer (creating Breakout with some bloke called Steve Wozniak) - I wonder if at the time he ever beleived in later life he would be taking Atari to court for appearently ripping off the Mac OS.

It is a fantastic read, every computer scientist musts read it - one of the forgotten companies that make up so much of today.

http://www.neatorama.com/2008/05/05/the-rise-and-fall-of-atari/

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I found this book the other week, On the Edge - the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall. I don’t often go out of my way to buy a book but in this case thought I would. Amazon have a 2-6 week delay, while ordering from the author is similar (using surface mail from the States) but is hopefully a lot more reliable than Amazon!

I don’t ever think of myself as a Commodore person, hey, I had an Atari ST after all. But of course I was really, using a Vic-20 and a C64 for years. Infact, the C64 broke and I was using the Vic-20 as part of my GCSE work, cassette tape player included. I played a lot of games on the C64, but really it is what got me into programming, firstly the Commodore BASIC and then really got into the way the memory was managed, peeking and poking. Writing small bits of machine code to do some strange and clever things.

Why did I defect over to Atari? The MIDI ports of course, I had been using Ataris at school in the music room and I wanted some of that at home too. Shame in a way as the Amiga was just something, it blew everyone away back then and aspects of it still blow the competition away even now.

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