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Domain: atari-explorer.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to atari-explorer.com.

Comments · 4

  1. Atari XE Game System by angQ · · Score: 1 · on What Was Your First Computer?
    Oh, yes, that's right. My first computer came with a light gun! From Atari's original press release about the XEGS:
    The cartridge for the XE game system can store over 256 Kilobytes of program, which is twice as great as any other comparable system, [Michael] Katz added. Atari is also selling a disk drive for players who prefer desk- based software. More on the XEGS and entire news release.
    That light gun is my only comfort, though, since no one ever bought me a disk drive to go with it, so I was unable to save any of my programs. I have very few memories of the games played on that system, but many, many memories of staying up late and typing away to create some game or screen effect. It lit some weird joy in me that I relive today doing the "dance of joy" when a web site comes out just perfectly on more than one OS, browser and/or display. ;)
  2. Not another 18 years dammit! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Solid State Memory on the Rise

    i have seen something like this RAM Drive back in the ISA-Bus days... it hasnt been quite successful

    ISA-Bus days..lmao! SCSI and PCI based RAM Drives were a key strategy for 68K developers on the Mac (22 years ago) and Amiga (21 years ago) platforms until the early 1990s. The huge number of header files needed to support the GUI frameworks and OS-kernel/Toolbox APIs with such slow (MFM/RLL) hard-drives and busses (60KB/s) of the era dictated this as an absolute necessity. Of course, the poor guys who were dealing with "ISA-Bus" just had to pull in stdio.h (to support DOS) and thought all all of us (3,000 or so) 68K developers were insain.

    [begin slowly-i-turn-step-by-step-inch-by-inch] If Irving Gould hadn't messed with Jack Tramiel and John Sculley hadn't messed with Steve Jobs, I don't think it would have taken 18 years and a few Dead Geniuses to prove them all wrong, either.[end slowly-i-turn-step-by-step-inch-by-inch]

    Back in the present, if you check the latest version of Apple's development tools (included FREE with every Mac, yo), you'll find that they are more than pretty syntax-aware editors with hyper-linking and documentation-lookup. Under the hood, these tools support Killer features that decrease the compile-link-debug turnaround using every trick in the book (except reaching into the page-table-entries --they'll realize that once they come up for air from Rosetta). These features, some 20 years in the making, afford developers more time to do trial-and-error tweaks and unit-testing (since changes in the source are "instantly" visible in the executable), so the quality of the code shipped to customers can be much better, even when using dog-slow CPU chips (thank you Motorola) or (4200-5400rpm) laptop drives. In fact, unless your (executable) App needs a lot of CPU or disk performance, it's really hard to justify buying a top-of-the-line Mac with 10,000 rpm RAID-1 drives just to support software engineering and certainly no need for PCI or SCSI based RAM drives --you can get by very nicely with a 17" laptop, an external monitor, firewire 7200rpm drive and an a couple of mini-macs to play "target practice" with.

    [begin lets-not-waste-another-18-years]Now, if Apple can only overcome the windfall its competitors (HP, DELL and Gateway) are in for as customers realize they really do need a new PC to support Windows Vista, then world domination is assured. Can you say to Apple, "Give me a $200 competitive upgrade discount off any IntelMac in exchange for my activated-copy of WinXP (which Apple can then tell the Microsoft-overseers to have Microsoft de-authorize some 30 days after your upgrade to OSX86)?"... If not, then Windows will likely continue its long history of "borg-ing" every other company's cool ideas and leveraging them to make money through that big market share they gained with exclusionary contracts at the end of the 1980s (when our anti-trust people were pre-occupied with IBM mainframes and Selectron typerwriters). Gates is no idiot and he just doomed PalmOS on the mobile platform (so when the PC is dethroned by cell-phones, those phones are likely going to be running Windows. Jobs is no idiot either and nobody cares about Windows Media 11 for a reason... Let's just hope he can make Gates lose as many customers as possible in the transition from XP to Vista! [end lets-not-waste-another-18-years]

  3. Re:Panther, Jaguar by tedDancin · · Score: 2, Funny · on Atari Panther Prototype Explored

    I'm hanging out for their next OS release.. Lynx!

  4. Re:Just curious by saladpuncher · · Score: 1 · on Infogrames Officially Changes Name To Atari

    The original name of Atari was Syzygy but the name was already taken. Bushnell and Dabney were both players of Go, a Japanese strategy game, so they took a list of words from that game: Sente(which means "the upper hand"), Atari(similar to "Check" in English) and Hanne(an overtaking move). Atari was the only one that was approved by the Office of the Secretary of State in California. Look here for more details.