Atari/Commodore discussion

I don't want to completely discount Tramiel's involvement... I think probably the single biggest thing that he did to help Commodore was to vertically scale the company so that their designs relied little on third party suppliers. It probably didn't hurt that they had their own then state of the art chip fab. I think it's clear from eyewitness accounts (and indeed his own words) that he didn't completely understand the computer business. In fact, I think it's fair to say that a lot of other people in the home computer segment really didn't get it either. In the end it seems that, CP/M notwithstanding, Apple is the only company that in the end built a truly upwardly scaleable 8-bit system. But, they also sold a lot less of the whole Apple II line than Commodore did the C-64. ________________________________ From: "Curt @ Atari Museum" <curt at atarimuseum.com> To: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wed, January 27, 2010 1:42:49 PM Subject: Re: Atari/Commodore discussion I agree... Same with Atari - the design of the Atari 2600, not managements handling of it was what made it such a success. The Atari 800 computer and it is chip architecture, again, is what made is such an incredible computer, management had nothing to do with it, in fact, when you look at Warner-Atari handling of the company, they crippled Atari's efforts at making the home computers more serious in features, software and peripherals, on the video gaming side, more capable designs were created, but infighting caused Atari to pull back the reigns for fear that the game systems might conflict with the home computers. Atari stupidly went after cost reducing and price lowering their computers instead of dropping their low end computer - the Atari 400, making the Atari 800 the low end computer and then coming out with a higher end system (perhaps 80 columns, more memory and maybe in a different package with professional detachable keyboard) and then clearing the low end area to allow the video games - even an advanced system, to occupy and then there wouldn't have been overlap or conflict. Its the products, not necessarily the management that make them successful for the most part. Curt geoffrey oltmans wrote: