19 Oct
1998
19 Oct
'98
4 p.m.
On 19 Oct 98 at 10:43, Hans Franke wrote:
Oh well another bit of folklore down the tubes. And I thought that
the Tramiels had at least done one thing right in their marketing.
This was the reason I heard for the excellence and number of Atari
programs coming out of Germany. But from what you're saying it
was driven by the SOHO market.
I'd love to have one but they're a bit expensive. A company here in
Canada was assembling Falcon clones for the N.A. market for a while
but they seem to have disappeared.
The influence
of schools on computers is interesting. Atari managed to crack
the German educational system and as a result the best programs for the Atari
ST have come from Germany.
I would like to agree, but the situation was quite a bit different.
First of all until the end of the 80s there was almost no official
state programm to put computers in every school - some schools did
it on their own, with city or parrent founding. Around 88/89 all
states had programms, but they soly founded IBM alikes.
In the early 80s, computers at school have been Comodore. almost
nothing else. PETs, CBM 3000's and 4000's. Later on also C64.
Some schools (especialy in Bavaria) switched later on for AMIGAs.
Atari never had a big hit (beside from single schools)
with their
STs in education. BUT the ST hits the private and small bussines
market in Germany like a Blitz. Low price, good performance and
especialy the superior b&w crt made it possible. Later on the SLM
widened the gap once more. Until Atari failed to offer real upgrade
machines (the Megas where just new cases) Atari has been the single
biggest PC manufacturer in the home/small buz market. And with
programms like Calamus they hit the DTP market from below (the
beautiful b&w crt was just like an invitation)- Apple could have
had learend a lesson, but they prefered to shrink their share.
Similiar to Canada but also a lot of 2600's were sold which in some cases
led to the other Atari 8-bitters and then to the STs. The similarities between
the GEOS desktop and the ST GEM would make for an easy transition too
but in NA it never really caught on except in music circles.
Programs such as Steinbergs Cubase and
E-logic's Notator started out on Ataris partly because of it's music
capabilities but mainly because of it beimg the machine so many Germans began
with. They were both ported to Wintel and Mac. Another example is Calamus the
desktop publishing program.
Jep, but the Musik thing was just insired by the build in MIDI
ports. Almost instantly after apearing, independant musicians
started to develop Software for the ST - lots of them never had
any programming experiance at all - just fascinated by the idea
to have a free programmable MIDI controler for less than 2000 Mark.
Still today, Atari is a must for music making.
Ataris 'power without the price' philosopy meets the market
completely right. They just failed to dig further for gold.
The AMIGA, later on, never catched the ST in the 'professional'
market, only in the home/games area - Here Commodore had the
advantage of the C64 and the fact that most students had an
Commodore (PET, CBM or C64) as first computer in school.
To this day
Germany is still the center for most
Atari ST activity and where the new clones are coming out of.
Jau - and I'm eagerly waiting for my Milan-060 :)
But don't forget about France where Atari is also still
strong - And Holland of course.
Gruss
H.
--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
lwalker(a)interlog.com