🏀 🎅🏼 🏆 How Atari Challenged Apple to the 1980s Home PC Field 🛅 🕉️ 👩🏼‍💻

The Atari 400 and 800 computers had some of the advanced technology of their time, and some of the best games were created for them. And forty years after their release, they are still worthy of respect.

Forty years ago, Atari launched its first personal computers: the Atari 400 and 800. They appeared in the fall of 1979 after a pre-release marketing campaign that began in January of that year — from the moment the company showed off its machines at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Fair.

Then the Atari brand was also associated with video games, and the new machines contained more technical potential than any other game console of their time - their own chips for graphics and sound, support for up to four joysticks or eight “ wheel ” manipulators , the ability to run games with cartridge, cassette or disc. After launching the console, one of its first games, Star Raiders , became an icon of advanced home entertainment.

Yet, Atari initially touted the 800th model, and its cheaper counterpart, Atari 400, as the “second-generation PC” - productivity machines with improved graphics and sound that surpass the holy trinity of 1977 personal computers: Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80. The company assumed that calculating the family budget of their cars would be no less than simulating space battles.

Atari machines of the Home Computer System class (home computer system, or DCS) had fool protection, increased durability, and became a significant leap in the field of consumer-friendly PCs. Unlike many PCs of the time, Atari computers did not have any electronic elements visible to the user. Unique connectors meant that all ports, modules and cartridges of the machine could not be connected in the wrong place or upside down. The 400th even had a flat keyboard with protection against spilled drinks - specifically stipulating that eating children would sit behind it.

Due to the stringent requirements of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has banned open slots for extensions on Apple II, Atari has developed a set of smart plug-and-play peripherals that communicate with each other over a serial bus that predicts the ease of use of USB, appeared much later.

In a sense, Atari PCs surpassed the company's gaming machines: in 1979, most Atari arcade games came with black and white monitors with translucent gel overlays to simulate pseudo-colors. Atari computers supported color games from the start - naturally, if the consumer had a color TV

Immediately after launching retail, Atari 800s with 16K of memory sold for $ 999 (this is about $ 3387 for today's money), and Atari 400s with 8K for $ 549 ($ 1861 adjusted for inflation). Compared to an Atari VCS-type gaming console for $ 190, it was expensive, but it was cheaper than the Apple II with 16K, which sold for $ 1,195 in 1979.

A fashionable retail kiosk told consumers about Atari computers - and even let you play Pac-Man

I crossed paths with Atari computers in 1981, when my father bought the Atari 800 to my older brother, Jimmy, who is five years older than me. I grew up and watched him erase joysticks to the ground, honing his skills in games such as Asteroids, Dig Dug and Archon. But for him, Atari was not just a gaming machine. He had a cartridge for programming in BASIC, thanks to which Atari showed that programs can be changed and configured as you wish. It was on the Atari 800 that my brother amazed me, showing BASIC simulations of combat on airplanes and other things that my 4-year-old brain could hardly understand, but still adored. Later he began to work as a programmer.

The author’s brother and neighbor guy have fun with the Atari 800, approx. 1983

And many decades later, I still play the Atari 800 with my children. This is my option for a soothing meal in the home entertainment area - a way to spend time that is best for rooms with a fireplace and wood trim. Atari's home computers were designed for home entertainment, and I can't find any other sensation like that from them. Games like MULE, The Seven Cities of Gold, and Star Raiders take me back to the golden era of PC games and remind me that technology can create timeless classics.

The author’s brother programs Atari 800 on BASIC.

I often thought about what elements of culture and business came together to create this breakthrough platform - this best electronic friend of my childhood. And, rummaging, recently found out.

The genesis of video games

In 1977, Atari released the first game console with replaceable cartridges - Video Computer System, VCS (later it renamed it “Atari 2600”, by model number, CX-2600). A team of Atari engineers, led by Jay Miner, suggested that the 2600th, with only 128 bytes of memory on board, would last three years on the market (for comparison, the Nintendo Switch has 30 million times more memory).

In the same year, the Atari computer platform began to take the form of a powerful follower of the 2600th. Regarding the new generation car, many questions arose. Could it be compatible with VCS, and still offer new features? Or is it better to break away from the roots and run a more advanced computer?

“I was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club electronics club when Steve Wozniakintroduced Apple I in the winter of 1976, ”says Joe Decure, one of the Atari 800 chipset architects, a 2600 team veteran. Decure began working on Atari in 1975 when he was hired to help design the VCS. “One of the reasons why I accepted the invitation to work is because I thought that the next project after the gaming machine would be a computer,” he explains.

Atari engineers noticed what was happening around them in Silicon Valley. Cross-pollination of ideas between companies took place through social networks, local interest groups, and employees moving from one company to another. One of the most interesting technological and social movements of the 20th century, the birth of a personal computer, gained momentum. The PC was a new cool thing, and Atari engineers wanted to join in.

Decure says: “Many colleagues shared ideas about what a computer could do while we were developing the 2600th. And as the core of the machine grows, Jay Miner and I and the company became the core of the computer design group, a much larger project. ”

The group included such talented Atari engineers as Steve Meyer, Francois Michel, George MacLeod, Doug Newbauer, Marc Shue, and others. Later, Doug Hardy and Kevin McKinsey took up industrial design. After conducting several brainstorming sessions, the group chose a simple goal to start: take the TIA video chip from the 2600th and integrate computer capabilities, such as text generation, into it.

After many approaches, a new chip appeared, CTIA, the graphic integrated circuit underlying the new home computer. Then the team developed a chip that relieves the load from the main CPU through separate graphics processing - this is how ANTIC, a special microprocessor, came about. Engineers also added a chip for keyboard maintenance, input from the “wheel” and four-channel sound - POKEY. Three of these special chips along with 6502 CPUs will form the core of Atari's computer architecture.

As a result of many meetings held from 1977 to 1978, Atari engineers converged on three retail versions of the computer. There should have been a cheap car, nicknamed Candy [“candy”], working as a game console with the ability to connect a keyboard; nicknamed Colleen, a high-speed car with advanced built-in capabilities and an expansion bus; and a machine with a built-in monitor. As a result, the engineers refused to integrate the monitor and concentrated on the Candy and Colleen projects. They turned into models 400 and 800.

To compete with the Apple II, the more powerful 800th model needed peripherals. And then the FCC intervened. All electronic circuits emit radio waves when current flows - this is one of the fundamental properties of electronics. To ensure that television-related electronics do not degrade the television reception signal, the FCC tightly regulates its radio emission.

During the development of Atari HCS, the FCC had very strict rules regarding radio waves. Atari wanted to make a radio wave transmitter, which would allow using the 800th model with a conventional TV as a display, but this would limit the potential scalability of the system. Atari engineers developed a thick metal shielding inside the shells of the set-top boxes, which blocked the electromagnetic radiation coming from the electronics.

Because of this, Atari was unable to release an “open” system similar to Apple II, when users could plug in any expansion card by default. Apple II escaped FCC issues by not connecting directly to the TV; Apple allowed a third-party company to release this option as an option. And Apple II, being a machine for hobbyists, could afford it. TI-99/4, released in 1979, circumvented the radiation problem by selling a computer along with a monitor, which was a television that was stripped to a minimum.

Texas Instruments lobbied for the relaxation of the rules regarding radio emissions, and the FCC accepted conditional exceptions to the rules in 1979 (and then altered them altogether in 1983), but by then Atari was already too late to simplify the scheme of its machines before being put on sale.

MULE, one of the first games from the Electronic Arts game, combined fights, strategy and economic theory on the planet Irat

Space killer program

Having finished designing the POKEY chip, engineer Doug Newbauer began writing a game for a new computer system in development. It was supposed to be an interpretation of his favorite space strategy, Star Trek, performed in the first person - at that time this game worked on powerful mainframes. In his game, Star Raiders, there was a three-dimensional universe, developing in real time, and filled with alien ships, space ports and meteors. The unique design of the game began to attract attention within the company.

“On the first day I came to Atari, one of the programmers called me and said: Look, look at it! Then you handed me Star Raiders,” recalls Chris Crawford, who came to Atari as a developer for VCS, who will be prepared to become one of the leading game developers and an ardent supporter of the HCS platform. “And I just blew the roof. In the world of staffing, there was nothing at all like that at all. It went beyond all that anyone could have expected. ”

Star Raiders was the coolest game ever

Newbauer tried to realistically simulate three-dimensional space, as a result of which he included advanced graphic functions that until then had not been on PCs or home consoles. After the explosion of an enemy ship, the game engine counted the trajectories of all the fragments in the form of a point cloud in three-dimensional space, which could be seen from any angle, including the stern of the ship flying through the wreckage. Rich sound effects so successfully complemented the visual chic of the game that home PCs or game consoles of that time did not have the opportunity to compete with this.

When playing Star Raiders, you used the joystick to steer the spaceship from the perspective of a pilot sitting in the wheelhouse. Star cover realistically revolved around you with the movement of the joystick, however, the entire range of control turned out to be too complicated for working with just one joystick with one button. Players could call up a detailed map of the galaxy on the screen, change the flight speed, turn on the protective field or other features using the keys on the keyboard. When you went into hyperspace, pressing the H key, the ship's engines began to roar, and the stars dashed by, just like in the scenes with the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.

“Star Raiders just blew the roof for Atari co-founder and CEO Nolan Bushnell and the entire management team,” says Decure (Bushnell was involved in the initial planning of the new computers, but was later ousted from the company by Atari, Warner Communications, about a year before the computers were released). “They said: You can’t sell a gaming machine without a keyboard. So they came up with a membrane keyboard for the 400th. It was our first gaming machine, but in the end it became a minimally functional, but still a useful computer. And in order to play Star Raiders, you needed a keyboard. ”

Soon after, the cheap Home Computer System model, Candy, turned into the Atari 400, a thin beige machine with a flat built-in keyboard. She looked good, but it wasn’t very typing. However, she allowed everyone to try Star Raiders. The expensive car of the 800th model boasted an ordinary, full-fledged mechanical keyboard, better designed for things such as typing.

Even the cheap 400 model had amazing multimedia capabilities compared to the Apple II and other first-generation home PCs

Atari separated the production of the 400th and 800th models from other projects within the company. Her VCS game console was just starting to gain popularity, and some were worried that the 400/800 would gobble up its sales if the ad was too focused on the gaming capabilities of computers. And the revolutionary nature of Star Raiders completely ruined this plan.

In an era warmed up by the 1977 Star Wars blockbuster, the new space game provided an exciting mix of battles, strategy and simulation, unlike anything else. Shortly after their release, people began to buy Atari 400 and 800 solely to play them in Star Raiders. The game has become a killer application for Atari computers.

In 1981, Mike Moffit, a journalist from a Pennsylvania-based newspaper, described Star Raiders as "Cadillac in the world of home video games," and as "the most difficult of all home video games." He also noted the high cost of the systems needed to play it, but decided that the game was worth it.

While Atari 400/800 sales were skyrocketing with Star Raiders, the rival Apple II, Atari’s primary marketing goal, has been astonishingly successful with business applications such as VisiCalc. For some time, Atari tried to occupy the niche of serious PCs for entrepreneurs, not trying to publicly accept and recognize the platform’s deep gaming capabilities. This approach created an unusual dissonance, which was noticed by both journalists and consumers.

“Atari struggled with its identity all the way,” said former Atari employee Dale Yokum in an interview with the ANTIC podcast in 2014. - Atari was a gaming company, and people thought it was one. But at the same time, Atari really wanted to become a personal computer company. It was quite difficult to convince any Fortune 1000 office that she needed to buy a carriage of Atari computers and put them on the table for every employee. ”

Despite the gaming image, many brand supporters actually used the Atari 800 as serious computers to perform tasks related to productivity and data transfer. However, with a 40-column monitor, slow serial peripherals and limited extensibility, the Atari 800 was not the most efficient machine for such tasks. In the mid-1980s, my father kept an Apple IIc and an Atari 800 on the table. Atari was better suited for gaming, and IIc served as an 80-column word processor and spreadsheet machine.

Crawford says Atari wasn’t really upset about the cool attitude to the new product as a serious car - she was bathed in money received from the sale of video games. Having saved the 2600th model on the video chip scheme, the company's creative programmers were able to extend the console's lifespan much further than engineers expected, which led to the creation of more complex games and increased sales by 1979.

“VCS was so successful that Christmas that all programmers got huge bonuses,” said Crawford. “It seemed to everyone that we were on the right track.”

The Golden Age of Independent Programs

After the launch of the 400th and 800th, computer-savvy users, shocked by the game of Star Raiders, enthusiastically tried to expand the advanced capabilities of the machine. However, Atari, having released the 2600, has never sought to reveal the secrets of the HCS architecture to anyone but its contracted contractors. Crawford recalls: "Fifty of my friends constantly demanded that I disclose this information, and I told them: No, I can’t tell you anything."

Atari 400 flat keyboard infuriated typists, but did not prevent the computer from becoming an excellent game console

HCS software appeared slowly. Atari initially had one department that created programs for both lines, VCS and HCS. At the same time, the breadwinner of the company, VCS, had an advantage. “It was forbidden to do anything on HCS until you write one game for VCS,” says Crawford. However, HCS was easy to program, and therefore an attractive target. “The mood in the programming department was: We want to switch to HCS as soon as possible.”

The company's management put the 2600th priority, stifling the development of programs for the Atari 400/800, especially games - the company management did not really like the games. Crawford recalls his presentation to the Atari advertising department showing a new educational simulator on energy policy (later called Energy Czar). “I got to the end of the presentation, and after that the vice president of marketing nailed me a cold look, and asked: Is this a game? I quickly answered - no, no, no, this is an educational simulator. He looked tiredly at me, and said: Well, I don’t know, it seems to me that this is some kind of entertainment. ”

Chris Crawford in a humorous production shot taken by his wife related to the World Front Eastern Front game.

Until then, all Atari 2600 game console software was published by Atari. But times in the gaming industry have begun to change. In 1979, a group of disgruntled Atari top programmers left the company to found Activision, which would soon become famous for releasing blockbuster games for VCS. Some of these programmers, for example, David Crane and Al Miller, were responsible not only for the most hit toys from the Atari 2600 repertoire, but also for writing the OSes and several games and applications for the new 400/800 platform. Although Atari has left a lot of talented programmers, the loss of the best game developers has significantly worsened the company's ability to develop software.

Everything began to change in 1980. Having evaluated the requests of independent developers, the outcome of the Activision team, the success of the large and dynamic Apple software market from third-party developers, Atari management has changed the policy of closed PC platform. Crawford gladly met the news and contacted the developers. “I got on the phone, started calling them and saying: Guess what? What address should I send development documentation to? ”

Atari lost time in the computer market to increase productivity, having in its hands a frivolous set of primitive applications (which were mainly developed within the company), although the platform had its own version of VisiCalc spreadsheets by the end of 1980. By the beginning of 1981, the size of the HCS software library looked very pale compared to Apple and Radio Shack. In a 1981 review of the Atari 800 in InfoWorld magazine, a year and a half after the launch of HCS, there was a clear lack of the right software for Atari, and the platform was called "an impressive machine until it reached its full computing potential."

Atari quickly needed to get programs. To help developers, Chris Crawford has created a program development support group. As a first project, a user-friendly developer Bible called De Re Atari (that is, “all about Atari”) was made, which became the actual guide for programming Atari computers. Crawford also began flying around the country with two-day workshops on how the Atari 800 works and how it is programmed.

On another innovative front, Atari employee Dale Yokum begged Atari management to set up a new division that would take programs written by third-party developers and publish them in the Atari Program Exchange (APX), a simple and inexpensive program store.

As part of APX, program authors submitted their creations to Atari. If the company accepted the program, the authors received a percentage of the sales of their product in the quarterly catalog published by the company. Looking back, this scheme is very similar to the early version of the iOS App Store with mail-ordering programs.

Due to the fact that people like Crawford and Yokum relied on the creation of programs, after 1981, the Atari 800 library has grown dramatically, both in volume and in quality. Some hits of that golden era among PC games come from Atari. In addition to the breakthrough Star Raiders game, Atari's HCS has featured such fruitful masterpieces as MULE, The Seven Cities of Gold (both written by Dani Banten Bury and Ozark Softscape) and Archon (Free Fall Associates) - all works of the young Electronic Arts company at that time. . Text adventure games like Infocom's Zork have also taken root on Atari computers.

Atari APX has published games such as Chris Crawford's ambitious Eastern Front 1941

Around the Atari 800, an independent software market has emerged, similar to what flourished around the Apple II. Some of APX's early products, such as Caverns of Mars and Eastern Front 1941 - a war game from Crawford himself with a revolutionary map-scrolling system - were breakthrough hits selling for tens of thousands (huge runs at the time).

Legend of the gaming industry Sid Meyer, creator of Civilization, began his career as a professional home developer with Atari. “When I got my 800th, the first games I wrote had something similar to Space Invaders,” Meyer told me in 2007. “I took it to my local computer store, which sold very few programs. I wrote it on a cassette and put it in a plastic bag. I remember I bought 5-10 copies of this game. "

By the end of the decade, thousands of small developers had written games for Atari home computers.

End of an era

Although interesting programs flourished on Atari's home computers in the early 1980s, the platform’s business fundamentals weren’t so clearly defined. The Atari home computer division was, by and large, not very profitable, and lived off of the success of slot machines and home gaming consoles. And at the worst possible moment for Atari, competitors began to emerge in the field of home computers - Texas Instruments TI-99 / 4A and Commodore VIC-20 - along with other factors that began to threaten the future of the company.

By mid-1982, the Atari 2600 gaming market was like a gold rush. The stunning financial success of Activision has inspired dozens of companies, including food manufacturers and the media, to create their own programs for VCS. The market is flooded with games of poor and medium quality. Around the time, American consumers tried inexpensive home PCs as gaming devices.

Archon from Electronic Arts was a chess-like game with arcade elements.

When sales of hardware and software for the 2600th started to fall, in November 1982 Atari released the long-awaited VCS successor, Atari 5200 SuperSystem. Despite the fact that the HCS architecture has been over five years old, it was still advanced enough to become the basis of the 5200th, which in terms of graphics could compete with such competing consoles as Intellivision and ColecoVision. However, Atari was wrong. Most of the games for the 5200th came in the form of slightly improved versions of games released on the 400 / 800s, and on larger cartridges without backward compatibility. Horrible controllers and software incompatibilities with the 2600th and 800th hurt the sales of the 5200th, and the sudden turn in the video game market that took place the following year forever decided the fate of the console.

Problems loomed on the horizon. In August 1982, Commodore launched the Commodore 64, a low-cost home computer with 64K memory and advanced graphics that borrowed a lot from Atari. The computer also took advantage of cheaper materials (due to the relaxation of the rules, FCC no longer required such a serious isolation of radio waves) and chips. The C64, like the Atari 800, had a keyboard, it downloaded games from a cartridge or disk, used joysticks similar to Atari, and it even had a serial I / O bus for disk drives and other accessories.

To defeat Texas Instruments and Atari, Commodore launched a dumping war that lowered the cost of home PCs from $ 500- $ 1,000 to unprofitable $ 50- $ 200 by mid-1983. In the same year, Atari launched the Atari 1200XL, a stylish and fashionable computer, for the most part compatible with Atari 400/800 programs, but with 64K memory. Since it cost $ 899, and could not offer any significant new products compared to the cheap 800th model, the 1200XL earned the contempt of both critics and consumers.

Atari 1200XL had an updated look, but there were no technical advantages over the 800th model

In the summer of 1983, Atari released a couple more iterations of the HCS platform in the form of 600XL and 800XL computers, replacing the aging 400 and 800 models. The press praised them much more (and they sold pretty well after production increased next year). However, they could not compete in price with the Commodore 64. The

64th model at Commodore was a hit, but its success was reached at too high a price for the industry surrounding it. TI left this market, Atari suffered losses that coincided with losses in the home video games division. Commodore had its problems, resulting in the dismissal of company founder Jack Tramiel. The market eventually recovered, but the short-term damage was terrible.

Atari's problems accelerated the onset of panic among investors in its parent company, Warner Communications, and Warner soon began offering Atari consumer electronics divisions for sale. In 1984, the founder of Commodore, Tramiel, assembled a group of investors and bought Atari consumer units for $ 200 million.

Seven Cities of Gold was the first open-world game - and for its time had surprisingly good graphics.

When the dust subsided and Atari's consumer departments changed hands, the new Atari Corporation released several other variants of the same 400/800 architecture from 1977 in 1985: the Atari 65XE and Atari 130XE (the latter had 128K RAM, the first of the whole platform). Atari's 8-bit machines were introduced in parallel with the more powerful model based on the Motorola 68000, Atari 520ST, and continued to target the segment of low-cost home computers and game consoles.

The last chance of HCS technology from 1979 appeared in the form of the Atari XE Game System, released in 1987, but it was too late - the ingenious games from Nintendo for NES completely overshadowed the pale toys for XEGS.

In the 1980s, Atari home computers remained relatively popular entry-level PCs, but they never managed to outperform Commodore's market share in the US. Despite some XE success in Eastern Europe, formally Atari stopped releasing 8-bit products on January 1, 1992. Tramiel’s Atari version lasted a bit longer, selling newer computers and video consoles, but came to an end in 1996.

Rich heritage

Although the Atari world collapsed in the 1980s, my brother and I did not know anything about the dream or the spirit. I did not find out about the “great collapse of American video games” until the 1990s. Our Atari 800 was still working, and we enjoyed the entertainment it provided. The endless parties at Archon and Salmon Run have enriched our lives. She remained our main game console until in 1988 we bought NES, and even then we did not completely abandon it. Usually she got it every Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Author's family friends play atari

Even today, 35 years after I first played the Atari 800, I am still opening up exciting new games for this platform. The catalog is vast and full of unique game ideas that could rarely be found in later two-dimensional console games, and nostalgic amateurs are still developing new games for this platform. Although I have a PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam for PC, the Atari 800 XL takes pride of place on the table in my family’s game room. My children adore him.

Before sending this article to the editors, I suddenly found an old letter from my father, printed on a binding of my notes for Atari. He left this world in 2013, but ten years before I was interested in his game story of our family. “We bought the Atari 800 around the time you were born,” he wrote. “It cost $ 1,000 (plus $ 450 for the disk drive, which we bought later), which is too expensive for us, which is why my mom didn’t like that I spent money on a computer.”

“Looking back, I would say that it would be more profitable to invest in Apple II. However, you still had to spend money on a computer, because it helped you and your brother get skills that turned out to be more valuable than money. Mom knew about this, of course, and was no longer offended because of these purchases. ”

Some success turns out to be more than just a business. Atari's home computers were a cultural phenomenon that brought joy to a generation. Thanks, Dad - and happy birthday, Atari 800.