VCF East 2019 -- Joe Decuir -- Atari 800 Series Computers: 40 Years
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- Опубліковано 28 лип 2024
- On the 40th anniversary of the release of the Atari 400 and 800 computers, Joe Decuir, co-designer of those computers, keynoted Vintage Computer Festival East to discuss the creation of those machines and what was learned.
Joe Decuir worked as an engineer at Atari from 1975-1979, where he helped develop the Atari VCS and Atari 800. He then worked at Amiga from 1982-1984 on the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer.
This talk took place May 5, 2019. Videography courtesy of @thegurumeditation (Facebook), @thegurumeditate (Twitter)
Vintage Computer Federation: vcfed.org
VCF Discord: / discord
0:00 Start of Video
0:36 Bill Lange - Introduction
2:14 Joe Decuir
4:48 Agenda
13:55 Racing the Beam
17:04 Saving $.50
30:28 Antic & Graphics
32:50 Games - "using this stuff"
36:00 Productivity
38:16 SIO and later USB
44:37 400 and 800 Computers
50:02 RF and the Atari
51:39 BIOS
56:51 Lessons Learned
1:02:11 Next Generation Machine
1:08:38 Modern Atari Hardware
1:12:58 Design Credits
1:18:10 Wrap up - Наука та технологія
What an honor to hear these giants speak that lived through such amazing times and took part in making them as well. Atari 800 was my second machine, and I gained a career from it. Thanks to all who made this possible.
Very interesting talk.
This system (Atari 800) deserves much more appreciation than it is getting or was getting back then.
It took nearly 3 years until comparable product (namely Commodore 64) entered the market. And still Atari 800 was much more elegant and thought through system design. It's almost like it was released too early and thus was a victim of a success of much more affordable Atari 2600.
Huge respect to Jay, Joe and rest of the team.
Amazing! The Atari 800 is 45 years old, I imagined the inventor to be really by now - or dead. This man seems very young, and alive, which is wonderful!
We are grateful that we were able to have him speak and tell his story while he is still alive and kicking!
I learned how to code on an Atari 800. We didn't have much money when I was a kid but my dad got a job selling what were essentially obsolete home computers so I got a TI-99/4 around 1986 and an Atari 800 a year or so later. I absolutely loved my 800, thanks for making it for us!
Awesome! Thank you for sharing your story!
Guys like Joe Decuir, Jay Miner, Doug Neubauer, and Chris Crawford were idols of mine. Next to AT&T, no other company has influenced me like Atari has. This is great!!
I remember Crawford's Eastern Front game 🙂
This is the kind of thing that inspired me to become an engineer. Thank you so much for sharing!
This is gold! I launched a 42 year career in software engineering on an Atari 400. Didn't have the money for an 800.
It's a great piece of hardware. It's always sad when I hear stories about not being able to afford a computer years ago.
Rest In Peace Jay Miner, who worked on both the Atari machines, and the Amiga co-processor chips.
Yes. He had some great accomplishment!
Amazing. I hope Joe gets that book complete.
Joe is an excellent orator - great talk!
Loving watching this, the privilege of wathing this so soon is like a big birthday present! Met Joe back in 2004 at NWCGE in Seattle, and at PRGE 2017. Can never get enough of listening to his great stories!
Amazing stuff! I'm happy Joe mentioned "my" Atari800 :-) Need to upload more binaries of the latest release ASAP, and possibly enable the R: emulation in the next release - perhaps it will work with the PLATOTerm?
Great camera work on this one.
One sadness I have is that 40 years from now, I doubt there will be someone on stage speaking as enthusiastically about 12th gen Intel or Ryzen platforms. You only get to be pioneers of a new industry once. After that, everyone else is just iterating. The stories aren’t nearly as interesting.
I agree. It was truly a unique time with such interesting stories.
Awesome quick turn, thanks!
Sweet jeebus! Posted The next day?! THAT'S A RECORD! :)
Bill Lange! Thanks to the people responsible for the great footage and audio.
When he gets to talking about the 1200XL, it seems like he's off by a year. The 1200XL came out in early '83. From what I've read, it sold for a few months, and then was discontinued. The reason I've read is that customers found out quickly that it was incompatible with software that ran on the 800. It also used a DOS that used a different format from DOS 2 disks (from the 800). So, not much ran on it. The fact that it was discontinued didn't seem to be from the company imploding, because later that same year, Atari released the 600XL and 800XL, with the 1050 disk drive and DOS 2.5. They retained some compatibility with the 800, and retained complete compatibility with its DOS format. Atari also released the Transformer disk, which emulated an 800 on an XL/XE machine, for some software that was incompatible with the XL/XE line. The implosion started soon after that, due to the collapse of the video game market.
He might be off. As one gets older the memory starts to fade and details get mixed up.
Thank you very much Joe for everything you did!
Oh my career started with z80 based TRS-80.
Great! It's nice to hear how people got stared with their careers. The Z80 and the TRS-80 was a popular machine.
Genius!!!
There are two items that are not accurate: 1. Star Master by Activision came out before Star Raiders *and* on the Atari 2600; 2. The Atari 800 came out in 48K and 16k. this is a great video. Thanks for sharing it!
Star Master from Activision on the Atari 2600 came out in 1982. Star Raiders on the Atari 800 came out in 1979/1980. (A kind of "killer app" that sold a lot of 400s and 800s, I've heard.)
Star Raiders for the _2600_ came out in 1982 as well. I'm guessing that's what you're thinking of?
@@billkendrick1 You are correct. I did not realize Star Raiders came out first. BTW- Star Master was probably one of the best Atari 2600 games. I never purchased Star Raiders for my Atari 800 as it looked so similar. Thanks for the info.
En na + Good + Thanks + Go on!
are/is there any video of Jay Miner and other Atari hardware guys?
Sadly the 800XL and 65XE saw no more improvements over the CTIA 128 color to GTIA 256 color upgrade of the early Atari 400/800 models.
Kinda. They had a contract with Miner for Lorraine which was 'Generation 3'. Too bad Commodore/Atari were basket-cases of business management.
@@rabidbigdog Been doing some magazine/leaked documents based research for an ST video I want to do. The Atari Mickey project running in parallel with the Rainbow chipset project was a fascinating time. Regardless of what Commodore or Atari did ultimately did in 1990 and beyond it's all those horrible arcade conversions that drove people to PC Engine/Megadrive/SNES. Who wants to save £25-30 on a game if it's a horrible conversion? Standards were pretty much non-existent, it was pot luck if you got a decent conversion for either. The only decent version of Chase HQ was on the FM Towns, Lotus II and other racing games on both Atari/Amiga prove it was possible to have something similar. We got some reskinned Continental Circus rubbish instead FAIL! Japanese console developers were not that disrespectful/lazy/talentless. Almost every 16bit console game makes the most of the hardware, if the machine has the chipset bandwidth to do a decent port then it happened 9/10 times. On ST/Amiga we got a crap port 9/10 times really. Almost all 520s and A500s were sold to gamers. Something had to give, it was sales of the machines after 1991 for both companies, sales figures for STFM/Amiga 500 computers prove that, the ST only really lost momentum during 1988 when the 520STFM had to go up £100 April 1988 and Commodore decided that was a good time to lower the A500 by £100 that Summer and there was no way an ST would continue to fly off the shelves at the same price, up to that point the £299 STFM was selling really well, not surprising when the 8bit competition with 128k (C128/Acorn/Amstrad) was more expensive just by adding a 3rd party mouse. 520ST sales never really recovered from the 1988 forced price increase do to DRAM supply problems worldwide. Amiga 500 sales never really recovered from Afterburner/SF2 rubbish ports and £399 for an A500/A600 up to 1992 was insanely overpriced. Irving Gould's greed is to blame for that :)
At @28:51 he mentions a book to read..."Day Ray Atari"?
It's called "De Re-Atari"
@@hanschung7563 YES! Thanks man!!
Yeah I have a copy from the early 80s.. Pretty sure you can find one on ebay.
Shouldn't Jim Clark (and Nvidia) be paying licensing fees to Jay Miner's estate?
If only!
10,000's? I had the privilege of helping to create PlayStation 2 @ Sony. Try 155,000,000.
at 6:53, my patience is wearing thin. Thinner as his attitude becomes more condescending.
I began watching this because I wanted behind-the-scenes commentary, not a lecture.
i cannot even imagine how you felt @ 48:45 when he basically had a small meltdown
It only sounds condescending I guess, to those who are condescending. I still don't see it when I go back to 6:53 or 48:45.
Are we watching the same video? You've got to be making some assumptions I'm not aware of for this to sound condescending.