MediaWiki API result

{
    "batchcomplete": "",
    "continue": {
        "gapcontinue": "Scott_Adams",
        "continue": "gapcontinue||"
    },
    "warnings": {
        "main": {
            "*": "Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce> for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes."
        },
        "revisions": {
            "*": "Because \"rvslots\" was not specified, a legacy format has been used for the output. This format is deprecated, and in the future the new format will always be used."
        }
    },
    "query": {
        "pages": {
            "36": {
                "pageid": 36,
                "ns": 0,
                "title": "Rebecca Heineman",
                "revisions": [
                    {
                        "contentformat": "text/x-wiki",
                        "contentmodel": "wikitext",
                        "*": "This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.\n\nSource: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast\n\nSource URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-64-rebecca-heineman-racing-destruction-set-and-mindshadow\n\nInterviewer: Kevin Savetz\n\nKevin: I'm Kevin Savetz and this is an interview episode of Antic the Atari 8-bit Podcast. It's July 17th, 2015 and I am at KansasFest which is a show for the Apple II and the keynote speaker is Rebecca Heineman and she is responsible for lots of \"Appley\" goodness including Bard's Tale III and Dragon Wars and Tass Times in Tone Town and Borrowed Time and Mind Shadow and Out of this World for the SNES and dozens of Macintosh and Apple II GS conversions and Crystal Quest on the Mac which I love, love, love and which she gave her keynote which you should listen to there will be a link in the show notes so you can watch her Kansas Fest keynote she gave all sorts of wonderful \"Appley\" stories but there was hints, hints of a Atari  knowledge and goodness in there so I have invited her into this weird little chapel at Rockhurst University where it's quiet to do and interview and talk about Atari things. Hello Rebecca.\n\nRebecca: Hello there Kevin.\n\nKevin: So you started to tell a story tell a story about how you wanted an Atari 800 and you almost won one in a contest but then you didn't. Can you can we have a summary of that tale?\n\nRebecca: Well going back in time this was early 1980, I just bought an Apple II pretty much every penny I had and the only reason I was able to afford it was that somebody had bought it, had buyer's remorse and wanted to sell if for like half price. So had that not happened I would never have been able to afford and Apple, in this case it was just an Apple II, I had to get the other things to make into a plus, more memory, later. \n\nWell I also had and Atari 2600 and I was using my Apple II to help me copy the cartridges so that I could save money but I saw all the blurbs and all the ads from Atari about this new line of computers that came out with the 400 and the 800. I did what the 400 because a chicklet keyboards was like, what? But the 800, it's like oh my god , two cartridge slots ,Basic, all the color graphics and stuff I read about it's like, I want what one, I so want one and a contest came up in which the prize for the nationals was at Atari 800 fully loaded, I mean you got two floppy disks, you got a printer, the computer, a bunch of Apple, sorry Atari  game cartridges to go with it. I mean I was set if I got that thing. But of course at the time I didn't think I had a snowball's chance in hell to win but entered the Atari National Space Invaders tournament for the Atari 2600 in July 1980 and I won the Los Angeles regionals and then a few months later I ended up in New York City and I was then competing, and to note the Atari 800 was second place. The first place prize was an Asteroids stand up arcade video game which is worth like three thousand dollars where the Atari 800 fully loaded system was somewhere retail around fifteen hundred, so...,  but I was already thinking like, if I could just get that Atari. When we finally tabulated the score, after we played the game, the judges were tabulating the scores and they were announcing the winners and as they were calling out names that were not mine I was like oh my goodness there's only two names left, I'm going to get an Atari, I'm going to get an Atari, and then when they were calling up the second place winner and they announced the player from New York my reaction was ,damn!, oh no, and that's when it dawned on me. Does this mean I actually won the whole thing? And so endyth my adventure there with the Atari 2600 nationals which I won and I got my fifteen minutes of fame. But I didn't get an Atari 800. \n\nKevin: I'm sorry.\n\nRebecca: But I eventually got one. I mean about a year later I was able to finally scraped together enough money to buy it and I used it, the first thing I did was because at the time I knew the Atari the Apple II and I used a disassembler and so forth, I ported the code for the Apple II disassembler from an Apple II and I hand wrote all the hex bytes into an Atari, created a BIN file using a hex editor. Then I loaded it and it ran and I was able to disassemble code use the exact same commands an Apple II. \n\nWith that I then started learning how to play around with the registers, the POKEY, the Antic, many times I've watched my computer crashed because I would write something and have screen's un-legible and I have no way of restoring it. So that was, you know hit reset, loaded the thing back off disk cause I had an 810 floppy, I think I think was called 810, but loaded it up and then just made some demos and stuff like that on the Atari to learn how to program the system. \n\nAnd this came in handy because a year later, after we founded Interplay, a contract came in, in which Electronic Arts wanted us to convert Racing Destruction set from the Commodore 64 to the Atari 800. I was the only person at the company who had Atari experience of any kind. So I then using an Apple II to write all the code and I made across assembler, because I was really comfortable using an Apple II to write 6502 code, but I then hooked it up to the,  I made, I  hook up an 810 drive to my Apple II,  used it to create 810 disks then I would take the floppy put it into an Atari and B run it, or what was the command \n\nKevin: binary load, binary run...\n\nRebeccaa: yeah binary run, and it would load in the game. I would test it and sample it and run it that way. It was a Little tedious but I got the job done. Later on I did a game called Mind Shadow and ported it from the Apple II, actually I start with the C64 version and ported that to the Atari 800. Actually working both 400 and the 800 and that was tricky because there was, it used a mode in the Apple II and C64 were I had the four lines of text and the rest of the screen was graphics but if you hit return it made the whole screen just text, cause this is something you can easily do in the Apple II it's actually supported hardware. I wrote a custom command list , I think it was that TIA, there was a command list you could do \n\nKevin: with the display list..\n\nRebecca: yeah the display list, I created to two display lists one for the text only mode and the other one for the graphics and text and I just switch between the two depending which mode it was. And I even emulated the Apple II memory map using it to help facilitate that port.\n\nKevin: just to make the port as easy as \n\nRebecca: just to make the port as easy as possible.  But I still remember now how when I was loading up Mind Shadow I heard the \"beebeebeebeep\" when the Atari disk drive was reading sectors and I also remembered the fact the Atari sectors are 128 bytes was the only machine that had that, I was like, OK, I had to compensate for that. \n\nKevin: Was that more or less than..?\n\nRebecca: It was the smallest sector size I have ever worked with. Every other floppy disk of the time was either 256 bytes, that was the Commodore and the Apple. The PC was using 512. But yeah the Atari used 128 I think is part of the reasons why the discs had so little data on them I think wasn't the floppy like 90K? So which I thought was a little, darn. It made things challenging to get the game running on a floppy disk on the Atari because it's small size of the disk.\n \nKevin: Was there any talk of doing it on a cartridge, or just for ease...?\n\nRebecca: Oh, no. It was, at the time the game was being done it was like 1984, 85, floppies started becoming more normal and it was far cheaper to duplicate a floppy then it was to make a cartridge. \n\nKevin: So Racing Destruction Set, tell me little about that, you mentioned something last night about the pixel width 8-bit car looks dumb. \n\nRebecca: Well what happened was that the when I was doing the port for the from the C64 the Atari 800,  C64 version the game used text based graphics font which is something the Atari supports. So that went across one to one,  I lost no fidelity whatsoever, but the hang up was that the Commodore 64 uses very large sprites compared to what we had the Atari 800. One of the problems also is that the Commodore had three color sprites. You know there's a fourth color but that's invisible. So you have three colors, an invisible color, so the cars had detail to them. Well my problem was that on the Atari the sprites only had one color, and it was just eight bits wide, it's one color. So I ended up in order to get the cars to look good I had two sprites, one was color A the other sprite was color B, overlay on top and then because the cars were originally drawn about twelve pixel wide, I would have to cut off four pixels. You know that's about 50% of the cars width, I'm sorry 33% of the cars width I had to hack off make the cars look stupid and so I came with a hack in which I used the what they call the missiles on the Atari which are just one bit sprites and I use that and there was two of them and I put those one on each side of the car and that is where I got the details for like the edges of the car so when the car is turning and the bumpers are sticking out. I would have the pixels there on the left or the right but it gave the illusion that these cars were ten pixels wide and it allowed me to render these cars as sprites so I can retain most of the C64 code as is, but was able to get the initial fidelity I needed.\n\nKevin: How important was it to use a reuse code, I mean was that just like the ultimate goal in porting? Because in some games, not yours, you can tell they reuse all the code and, wow, this looks like crap on the Atari it looks like an Apple game. How much trade off was there. \n\nRebecca: Well the trade off is that the game logic should just run because it makes no assumptions of what it's running on it could be running on an Apple II, C64, Atari 800. Code that reads the joystick or something like that that are actually processes the joystick inputs not reads the actual joystick but, OK, you press left, what do I do? Oh you turn the tires or you do this, whatever, that doesn't change. But what does change is like I wrote this is what gave birth to the idea of me doing [????] which is a set of libraries where I say call the function to read the joystick. Well I substitute the Atari version, the Commodore version, the Apple II version to read the joystick but the data it returns the same data so that therefore if I read a Commodore joystick I read this bit pattern and I give it back, if the Atari I take that and move it around so it returns the exact same pattern. The Apple II I read the analog joystick turn it into bits like an Atari, return that. So the main code all that knows is, oh, you took your joystick press left. How it pressed left or what type of joystick you have, I didn't care, and this is what allowed me to take as much of the code as possible from the host game and have confidence that all do is assemble it, put it on the Atari and that codes going to run. The only thing I need to make sure works is the display code, the custom code that actually talks to the Atari hardware.\n\nKevin: During the [???] talk yesterday you said something about how many you sold.\n\nRebecca: Well one of the biggest [????] why Mind Shadow as well Racing Destruction Set we're like one of the few games on the Atari was biggest problems was that while everybody was asking for and demanding Atari games no one was buying them . And the problem is that because the 810...\n\nKevin: They didn't want to buy them, they just wanted to play them.\n\nRebecca: Yeah, you want to play them. And the problems the only way we actually found copy protection worked was cartridges, because you know you manufacture cartridge the casual user can't copy a cartridge. I mean yes there were some hackers figured out ways of duplicating ROMs but those are likes, so, not enough of them were doing that that make it consequential, but the 810 floppy drive was almost impossible to copy protect and as a result it was merely child's play to take any game, put in this disk drive, make a copy of it and now you have a copy of Racing Destruction Set. I don't know whether or not that was the sole reason. I've also heard even back then that the numbers of Atari consoles that were being sold was grossly inflated. Like we would ask Atari how many they sold they would say, oh year we sold a couple million, but then we look at the stores an the stores would say yeah we sold like a couple but these Commodore 64s are flying off the shelves and of course our software sales reflected it. The Atari version of  Racing Destruction Set, we sold maybe three thousand copies. M.U.L.E. didn't fare much better. It sold maybe four, five thousand copies and most where as on the Commodore it sold easily ten times this number, I'm talking about Racing Destruction Set, so on the Commodore they just prefer, who was, who was it Freefall, who was the actual group, Paul Reshee I think it was, that the group that did Racing Destruction Set made most of their royalties from the C64 version. We sold enough copies of the Atari version to just pay for the port, but there was no profits at all for the original developers, there was no royalties for me or Interplay, so as a result the enthusiasm for doing more ports, like after we get Mind Shadow for the Atari we sold a few thousand and that was it. Whereas again Apple II we sold something like about fifty thousand copies. So it made it so that putting all the money and effort and energy into developing a game it really didn't pay. Let's do some math here. We sold the game for like about thirty nine ninety five back then. Which means is that the developer might get fifteen dollars but if you only sell three thousand copies that's forty five thousand dollars. Sounds like a lot of money but really it costs about two hundred to three hundred thousand dollars to create a game, you just lost serious money on that so then why would someone want to make more games on your platform. \n\nNow I know we didn't charge that money to do a port. I believe we charge like twenty thousand ten to twenty thousand dollars somewhere in that range to convert the C64 to the Atari. Something like that number. I mean don't quote me on that because I don't really know the exact amount but I know it wasn't that much money, but you know when let's say EA paid twenty thousand to us to do the conversion. Of course I got my money from just being an employee and shareholder of Interplay, which was not that much, and then only getting a few thousand copies being sold then EA was like well you know our future games we're just not going to bother porting to the Atari. \n\nKevin: I knew Racing Destruction Set, I don't, I didn't really remember Mind Shadow and I looked it up on Atarimania, and like I remember why now because the cover freaked me out there's a face on it it's like ghostly face and there's the hand something about a hand being like trapped inside \n\nRebecca: Yeah that's actually inside the box \n\nKevin: That's why I saw that I saw that , that looks freaky scary I'm not playing that.\n\nRebecca: Actually the game  Mind Shadow is a, um, inspired by the Borne Identity. \n\nKevin: Really?\n\nRebecca: The game starts off you wash up on a beach with no idea of who you are or how you got there or anything . And as you, because it's a graphic text adventure you just enter commands kind of like an Infocom game with graphics, but as you solve puzzles and stuff you finally get off the deserted island you start remembering things and then you start realizing that somebody tried to kill you and then you realize why that person tried to kill you and they realize that the person is figuring out that you're alive and is coming to get you. All the while during the game you are slowly recovering your memories and of course at the end of the game you realize who you were and then confront the person who tried to kill you but that's the whole basis of the game is that you are someone who has complete amnesia hence Mind Shadow and we're getting but it's um. Back to the stuff about Atari is that there were several things that really went against it, one, there was no real good way to copy protect the games , B, piracy was rampant because of the fact there was no way to copy protect, and number three a cost issue because we either had a distribute our games on cartridge which is prohibitively expensive when you're comparing it to the cheapness of putting discs out on the Apple II and Commodore 64, but another problem was that because the Atari drives were so small, I mean it was like 90K\n\nKevin: I think it was 88K..\n\nRebecca: Yeah, 88K  it meant that we would have to pack in three or four more discs if it was a larger game.\n\nKevin: So it was cheaper on disc but then four times so cheaper but not. \n\nRebecca: Yeah because it's cheaper but not, because one of the problems with floppies is that they sometimes are go bad so that therefore we would put a game with let's say it's just one disk, well there's only one disk that can go bad so the sales are pretty good, returns are limited. But if you have to put four discs in the package, now you have four chances to go bad, because it only takes one disk to go bad when some has to send the package back. And you know that's when, and also all these games were that we would you know use lots and lots of data and you know it really hurt the experience we keep swapping floppies back and forth. Because remember Mind Shadow shipped on two floppy disks was original Apple II version shipped on one.  So those are a little problems we were having, and it's all compounded to it, like, high cost of goods, medium cost of developing the title because it was really not much different than developing on the Commodore but the lack of return on investment\n\nKevin: You think the rate of piracy on the Atari side was higher or the same as Commodore and Apple?\n\nRebecca: I think it was higher, I think was very hard,  mostly because it was so easy for anybody to pirate it. On the Commodore 64 there were copy protections and so forth which made it difficult to copy some there was some games there that would thwart the pirates for a while and when it finally was released, a broken version, you had to go to the BBS's, the bulletin boards. The trouble is that the casual user, which is the people who really care about, you know the mom and dads the kids who don't really have access to BBS.'s because they're not interested in BBS's. They try to take the disk and say \"hey can I get a copy\" sure , aw it doesn't copy oh well and stops right there. Or as the Atari the odds are pretty darn good that they'll be able just to copy this without any trouble and then of course they would just give it to their friend, not even thinking that it was hurting the developer.\n\nKevin: Any other Atari stories? \n\nRebecca: Atari stories, lets  see here. I do remember the fact that you know playing with the Atari and later on seeing the Atari 65XE in the 130XE and playing with them but at the time then it's like you know it's a little too little too late. I remember the resurgence of the Atari in the form of the Atari ST and it was a serious contender to the Amiga and I was actually looking into doing programming on that I mean I was working on some stuff for Bards Tale for the Atari ST, Tass Time in Tone Town for the ST. But even it was that they had this wacky development system and it was using that TOS Tramiel OS, which was a very crude implementation because at the time I was also using Apple II GS which was based on MAC OS. So it's all slick and professional looks pretty and the you look at the Amiga while it's hardware accelerated has some cute features even the graphics of the desktop really bite, the Tramiel operating system while it look prettier than the Amiga. It was still kind of clunky and just wasn't friendly to use and it crashed all the time at least in the model machine I had and I remember there was a time in which they tell me for my Atari ST that oh if your ST is broken which then just pick it up and drop it and it would push those chips back in and the Atari ST would work again and I'm like OK this is..\n\nKevin: I think maybe it's like some sort of lore , the Atari people hear that story about the Apple III. Maybe it was a common thing. \n\nRebecca: No it was a thing on a Atari ST I  remember there was times which the ST I had to push the keyboards, and every now and then I didn't actually drop the thing I just simply pushed the keyboard down and whatever chips were being loose and their sockets whatever just been wiggling out\n\nKevin: It was a common complaint about the way the Traimiel's did computers is that they went as cheap as possible so things went wrong because they didn't care.\n\nRebecca: And then later on a Atari shot themselves in the foot again because they released the Jaguar, the video game console. But the fact that they required you to use a Atari ST Falcon to do all of your development on. They refused to convert their development tools to run on a PC or any other machine like a MAC or PC mostly people were asking for PC and developers are saying why do you want me to develop your on your console using the Atari ST using this really crappy operating system that's buggy as all hell that you keep pushing in the keyboards and peripherals like hard drives are very hard to come by. So it really turned off a lot of potential developers. I know that the companies I was working with really did not like using that Atari ST as a development system and so I had no idea why Atari itself made these decisions but they really were I don't know maybe they were hell bent on destroying their own company. \n\nKevin: It seems that way. Do want to talk about your current project?\n\nRebecca: Well currently my project at this moment is I'm working on a updated version of Bard's Tale. I wrote the original trilogy on the IIgs, Bards' Tales One, Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight, Bard's Tale III Thief of Fate. The two disk version was never shipped, but I did work on it and I did create it. But I was a the one who wrote the Apple II, C64 versions of the Bard's Tale III, in fact I wrote pretty much every version of it because I created the game but the,  I got to a contract with InExile who's currently got the rights to do Bard's Tale IV and they did a successful Kickstarter and there were a lot of people who wanted me on the project so they said we want to play the trilogy so one thing led to another and now I have gotten a contract with the InExile in which I'm taking my original trilogy, converting them over to run on Windows native. So you get the all the IIgs  graphics, all the IIgs sound, it's not emulated, I'm actually recompiling the code getting it and then changing the gs specific code to Windows code and MAC code, the MAC version and hopefully in about a month or two I should have that out.\n\nKevin: Nice, You talked earlier about you were, yesterday, about you did some cracking on the Apple side of things. Did you ever experiment in that area with the Atari side of things?\n\nRebecca: That's why I know it was so easy , there was nothing for me to crack. I mean it was like on the Apple II it was literally, it was really a challenge to crack stuff on the Apple II in some cases most of them were like no challenge I would be cracked in ten seconds you know I think the fastest crack I did it was actually about three minutes. But the, you know someone would take me a couple of days, but they never took me more than three days. Never. The Atari 800 was one where like OK take the disk, put it in there, use the Atari copy program copy onto another disk, ran it, runs fine. My job is done, not that I did anything but my job was done. So I kind of actually didn't have any interest in hacking I think because there was nothing for me to do, as I understand there were disks that had copy protection but there were other hackers that did that you know like I think these was a laser hole one where you actually burn a hole in one of the sectors so the 810 if you try to write that sector would always fail and then they would test for that. \n\nKevin: So I heard a story about that saying there was a company that did that as a turnkey solution they would do put lasers and to use a laser to make a hole in the disk. They actually use drill bits it's just  a drill. They claimed one thing did another it worked sort of you know.\n\nRebecca: The problem of a lot of the places that were doing these copy protections were kind of fibbing mostly just so they could go and sell their wares to people. Like, I myself to this day get people contacting me saying, \"hey we got this DRM solution you can install in your game and no one will be able to crack it\" and the few times it actually come to my office to check it out I said \"great show me this it's been locked\". OK great. And I then put in my machine, pull up a debugger within twenty minutes tops this copy of the game. And so it's like you know if I could do this and there's some hacker Russia or China or some like that who's going to do this because they have nothing else better to do and it will end up on a bit torrent site which is in modern days it's trivial for you to distribute something, so therefore it's like what's the point  just make sure we give people the honor system to say like Good Old Games does, just say if you like my game buy it. I mean in fact if any waste me locking up the game is just really just giving invitation to some hacker just to hack it just for the sake of you know telling me to go away or screw you. \n\nKevin: Last question, if you could send a message to the Atari computer users that still exist, and you can right now what would you tell them?\n\nRebecca: Make stuff, makes new demos make new stuff, I mean the Atari was a really under-rated computer. To be honest had the Atari 800 was released around the time little bit later then the Apple II. But had the Atari 800's chipset been designed around a bus like an Apple II so you had expandability and then add something like ProDOS, make it like a business computer but still kept the graphics and sound. Well we would be all sitting here at Kansas Fest celebrating the Atari GS while Atari's coming out with the new Falcon 7 or whatever it is you know Intel machine making billions of dollars because of the machines out there the Atari hardware was the funnest and best I had to work with. It really broke my heart and to find out that despite the ease of use of the hardware of the Atari, the colors, remember of the three the Atari the C64, the Apple II, the Atari had the best colors, the best graphics, the best most powerful ability with the display list to do stuff, but the cheapness of the hardware, the operating system that was a joke. They took what was the best hardware applied the worst software and threw the market away. Make a better operating system, make something really really cool, especially make an affordable hard drive. I think that's probably one already out there. But other then that it is a really wonderful little toy and I love playing with it. \n\nKevin: Thank you very much.\n\nRebecca: Thank you very much for having me on your show."
                    }
                ]
            },
            "7": {
                "pageid": 7,
                "ns": 0,
                "title": "Rich Pasco",
                "revisions": [
                    {
                        "contentformat": "text/x-wiki",
                        "contentmodel": "wikitext",
                        "*": "This is a transcript of an audio interview. This transcript may contain errors - if you're using this material for research, etc. please verify with the original recorded interview.\n\nSource: ANTIC: The Atari 8-Bit Podcast\n\nSource URL: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-28-rich-pasco-atari\n\nInterviewer: Kevin Savetz\n\nThis interview is with Rich Pasco who was Atari's manager of VLSI Development, that's a very large scale integration development.\nWhere he worked on the FREDDIE memory management chip which was used in the Atari XL and XE series of computers. He worked at Atari from November 1982 through May 1983. He lobbied management to create some products for the Atari 8-bit line, including a mouse and an 80+ column display system, which were not developed. Prior to his time at Atari, he was a member of the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, PARC. This interview took place March 27, 2015.\n\nKevin Savetz: I'm mostly interested in talking to you about what you did in the LSI development at Atari, but before we get there I notice that you've started things off at Xerox PARC. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about that.\n\nRich Pasco: I was at Xerox PARC from 1878 to 1981. I had three years of work there. My research at Stanford had been in the subject of LSI design, Large Scale Integrative Circuit design, and I went to Xerox PARC with the idea, of extending the capability of LSI design to the masses.\nI worked with Lynn Conway, who in partnership with Carver Mead, had written a book called instruction to the LSI system design. It's interesting, back in those days there was a small scale of integration. Which means there was a chip that had a handful of transistors.\n\nThere was medium scale integration which would be a larger number of transistors. You're probably more familiar with TL, transistor logic, they have large scale of integration which had 2,000 transistors on that chip.\n\nAnd very large scale of integration which had tens of thousands of transistors on that chip. So most of the chips that are used today would be considered to be LSI by those standards.\n\nCarver Mead and Lynn Conway, Carver Mead of Kel Tec and Lynn Conway of Xerox PARC, had a belief that any electrical engineer can design their own integrated circuit chips. It's a matter of writing code and printing it out to a device.\n\nIt's not really that simple because it required some understanding of the physics of the device and electrical design rules to make the circuit work, physically.\n\nBut they had come up with a simplified set of design rules that could be taught to any engineer fairly quickly and developed a course around that. While I was working for Xerox PARC, I designed several, medium scale integration chips, an Ethernet controller for example.\n\nIt was interesting because I came at this not as a seasoned designer, but as an algorithm oriented guy. Yet it was possible to put devices on chips. The other thing I learned by working at Xerox PARC was how wonderful it was to have a mouse in my hand.\n\nI have at my desk an Alto, A-L-T-O, workstation, which was, by today's standards, about a PC. It had a 64K of RAM, it had a 608x808 pixel display, but what made it different than the average home computer of those days was that it had a mouse and a bitmap display.\n\nEvery pixel on the display corresponded to a location in memory that could be written directly under software control, which was a break from the traditional last-all type terminal that most computers had. It was at Xerox PARC that the whole concept of mice and menus overlapping windows was developed.\n\nIronically, one of my many assignments while I was there was to give a demonstration to a bunch of young whippersnappers from a start-up company called Apple, who then later took those ideas and went off and developed something...some Macintosh with it.\n\nSo I became not only an LSI designer, but I became enamored by the technology of the whole mice and menus thing. Since Xerox had developed the technology, given it away to the world, to Apple, Xerox had this thing that they said, \"We are not a computer company. We've been in that business before.\"\n\nThey had bought a mini-computer company and lost their shirts. \"We are an office-automation company.\" From a corporate point of view, Xerox was single-mindedly focused on making a better copier and, \"Maybe we can put this computer technology into a copier.\"\n\nThen they came into the idea of, \"Maybe we'll do desktop document publishing systems,\" but they never really wanted to get into the business of making computers. It's unfortunate, because Xerox's corporate disinterest in computer technology and yet having a laboratory.\n\nWork at Xerox Park, I often characterized it, \"It was the best graduate school I ever attended,\" and they brought together some of the finest computer scientists from around the world who were doing wonderful computer technology that the corporation didn't want, so it leaked out all over the industry.\n\nWith my background in LSI design based on working with Lynn Conway and Carver Mead, and my being enamored by the technology of the mice and menus and all of that.\n\nI went to Atari hoping to move Atari away from the video game business more into the personal computer business to develop something which would've looked a lot like a Macintosh.\n\nKevin: How did you get hired by Atari? How did that whole thing start?\nRich: Alan Kay was a researcher I had known, and I really respected his wisdom. When he went to work at Atari, I wanted to follow him. I really wanted to work with him. I wanted to work in his research lab.\nAt that time, there wasn't any position working directly with Alan, so I took a position in the home computer division development department instead. Alan was in the Atari labs, so it was different on a corporate level but at least I was in the same company, and I got to work with him.\n\nAlan Kay had, while working with Xerox, he was really developed a concept called the \"Dynabook.\" He was a man of great vision who had envisioned that someday everybody would have a home computer that they could use for everyday things like ordering stuff online and paying utility bills.\n\nStuff that we routinely do online today, and this is in the late 1970s, Alan is envisioning a machine, which we would call today's laptop, and he called it a Dynabook. We didn't have the technology at that time to make a machine that small.\n\nThe Dynabook was implemented at Xerox PARK and also a lot of the software was written that we'd find quite familiar today, but we're talking about a desktop machine.\n\nNot even a desktop machine, a desk machine the size of a portable dishwasher that would sit under your desk with a monitor on the desk and a mouse.\n\nThe idea was like envision that you're doing this on a laptop, and what can we do in that environment? Alan went to Atari hoping that Atari would be the company which would allow him to develop that, and I agreed with his vision and followed him.\n\nThat's why I came to Atari, why I looked at Atari. As I said, he was a man of great vision. He was looking 20 years into the future as to what would be there, and spot-on vision. I was a little more practically oriented.\n\nI wanted to get something done now. \"What can I do now?\" So I went into the home computer division with the idea of making a better home computer, and frankly the machine I had in mind would've looked a lot like a Macintosh.\n\nI got into the home computer division. \"What do we need? I'm here to work. What can we do?\" At that point, Atari was looking at the follow-on to the popular 400 and 800 series of home computers.\n\nKevin: You got there around November, 1982. Is that right?\nRich: I got to Atari in 1982, yeah.\nKevin: OK.\nRich: The machine that they were wanting to do, unfortunately, was not with the Dynabook. As I said, the Atari 400 and 800 had been a very popular line of home computers. One of the things that they did was that they had a few useful applications. But you could also play video games on them.\nThe controller for the video games was a four switch joystick. You could move it up, down, left or right and it was all or nothing. You were either pushing it or you weren't. There was no proportional control. The product under development.\n\nAs I said, was the Atari 1200 was supposed to be the next in that 400, 800 series. It was to provide a sleeker desktop machine that was slightly more business oriented, but still would be compatible with all the old existing games and be cheap enough so you could still sell it in Walmart.\n\nAt that point, the Atari 800 system, which I had one at my desk, I used it as my workstation, was $400 for the system unit. Another thing, they had an external hard drive, there was no internal, external disk drive.\n\nA floppy drive external and a printer and a this and a that. By the time you put together the whole system it was a couple of thousand dollars.\n\nKevin: Sure.\nRich: Atari had in mind that the way we ca sell more computers is to make this same machine cheaper, which I disagreed with. I thought we need to have something that has nice menus and windows. I don't mean the operating system windows, the overlapping windows on the screen.\nNevertheless, my assignment was to help with the development of this cheaper version of the 800. A little more memory, we went from 48K, up to 128K and reduced the price point from a $400 system unit to a $79.95 system unit and sell them in Walmart.\n\nThat is the way we are going to sell gazillions of these cheap computers. My assignment, because I had the LSI design, was to take the memory control options, which had been a bunch of separate small scale integration parts.\n\nAnd come up with a single VLSI chip which would do the entire memory management function. By the way, it was customary in Atari to name chips under development after the developer's girlfriend. Chips had various women's names on them. At the time, I was dating a woman whose name was Gay.\n\nThey started calling my chip the Gay chip. But people who were a bit homophobic objected to that name and it was nixed, that it could not go into production under the name the Gay chip.\n\nI was the one person who was not allowed to name the chip after my girlfriend, because her name triggered the ire of some homophobic individuals.\n\nKevin: What name did that chip ultimately have? Do you remember?\nRich: Freddy.\nKevin: Freddy.\nRich: It was named Freddy. Why? I asked my manager \"Well, what can we name it?\" He said \"Oh, call it Freddy.\" The name Freddy stuck. There wasn't any individual named Freddy at all. But that was...\nKevin: So...I am sorry, go ahead.\nRich: You were asking a question.\nKevin: How were you involved with developing Freddy? What did you do to it?\nRich: I commanded the team. It was the first management job I had. I didn't intend to be a manager. But it was more than one person could do. I commanded a team of about three chip designers.\nWe did the algological architecture for it and the gate, did it down to a gate-by-gate level. Gee, it was so much time I don't remember all the details. But we eventually moved the chip into production. It was developed into the computer.\n\nKevin: Cool.\nRich: From concept to a little bug with legs on it that you could plug into the PC board.\nKevin: So it's is a RAM addressed multiplexer. I assume that means that the 1200 was going to address RAM in a different way than the 400 and 800 did. You need to account for that?\nRich: Yeah, the problem was, and again, I am relying on technical memories from over 30 years ago, so excuse me if I am a little vague. The problem being solved was it had to be software compatible with the old 400 and 800. But it had to address more than 64K.\nWhich was the upper limit on the memory address capability of the old architecture. The old architecture, of that 64K, we reserved 16K for control functions, memory, math, IO and such things, only left 48K available. 48K was the maximum physical memory you could equip the old design with.\n\nThe intention was to address more than that. The machine shipped with 128K. It was a paging type memory system, not too different from the memory system that was used in the PC later, although not software compatible. The address space was divided into page and address within the page.\n\nThe page switching was all done transparently in the hardware. I don't know that I can say much more about it than that. Anyway, that was my official job responsibility. But I still never let go of the notion that we should have a machine that is a lot more capable of.\n\nI'll have to use the word, Macintosh-like functions. I still wanted to produce a machine with a mouse and menus and windows things. I should mention that the machine did eventually come out, I believe under the name 1040.But it was long after I left Atari.\n\nKevin: The FT machines, you are referring to, the 520 and the 1040FT?\nRich: Yeah, those.\nKevin: The 16 bit machines that were Mac-like in interface.\nRich: Those machines finally implemented what I had been arguing for. I don't know how much credit I can take for them because I had left Atari in frustration at my inability to do that some time before it came out.\nI didn't have any direct responsibility for those, other than perhaps some inspiration that this is what has got to be done.\n\nKevin: Yeah.\nRich: But I would like to share a couple of stories of my experiences along the way.\nKevin: Please.\nRich: Yeah. One of them was that the frustration I had with Terry was the corporate mindset that we are making low cost machines that plug into TV sets. It was common wisdom, something everybody knows, that you can't put text on a TV screen.\nThat when you're dealing with a TV set and your input to the TV set; and this was long before HD television, this was all (?) definition and DSV standards.\n\nWhen you are putting information into a TV set by going in through the antenna terminals with an RF signal, that you can't put more than 80 columns of text on a display and have it be legible. That was common wisdom that everybody knew, except that I didn't believe it. I didn't agree with it.\n\nWhat was wrong with that idea? Where that idea came from is the old west teletype model of rows and columns of text of fixed pitched characters. If you took a standard 40 column display and the IBM PC was coming in about this time, and connected that into a TV that it was perfectly legible.\n\nBut if you took an 80 Column display, which for example was seen on the old monochrome screen of the PC. If you put that 80 column type of video in through an RF modulator into the antenna terminals of the TV, it was illegible. The characters were too small or too blurry to read.\n\nSo, everybody knew that you can't put more than 40 columns on a screen, PC, on a computer and make it be legible. I didn't believe that. I made a bet with my boss.\n\nI said, \"I believe that I can produce a device which will put text on the screen of an unmodified TV connected only to the antenna terminals and I will invite you to read it and you will be able to read it perfectly well and it will have more than 80 characters per line.\"\n\nMy boss said, \"how long will that take?\" I said, \"Well I'm proposing that we develop a custom video controller chip which might take a year or so in development and thousands of dollars in expense.\n\nAs a proof of concept, if you allow me to make a mock up, a black box that will do that, I can do it in one day. As long as you don't constrain me on how big the box is or how much it cost, or how much is in it. I can make a mock up in one day.\n\nHe said, \"OK you're on.\" I went off to the lab and left him to go back to his administrative things. The next day I said, \"OK I want to show you my device, but first I want you to look at this TV.\"\n\nHe looked at the, I led him by the hand into the lab and he looks at the TV and I said, \"Now read what's on the screen.\" And what was on the screen was a page of the manual for the Atari computers.\n\nHe read it out loud. Read it fine. Like he was reading it out of a book. I said, \"OK, now go count the characters on each line.\" He's 1, 2, 3, 4 ...., 79, 80, 81, 82, 83. 83 characters on that line. I said, \"Great, now count the characters on the next line.\"\n\n1, 2, 3, 79. OK count the characters on the next line. 1, 2, 3, 86. So you see I'm getting an average of more than 80 characters per line. He said, \"OK now show me the device that's producing this.\" I opened the door of the next room and there was a video camera on a tripod focused on a printed book.\n\nKevin: [laugh.] OK.\nRich: That was my device. It was putting more than 80 characters per line. Why was it working? It was working because of several things. First of all, the text in the book was not in rigid matrix of rows and columns of fixed width characters.\nKevin: It was proportionally spaced.\nRich: Proportionally spaced. We weren't wasting a lot of space for little skinny letters like 'I' because we wanted to use the same space for big wide letters like 'M', we were proportionally spacing them as necessary.\nSecondly, and equally importantly, the camera in its optics was performing an automatic anti-aliasing function. That is to say it was blurring the text enough to keep the video signal within the bandwidth of what the video channel allows.\n\nThe blurring was not so bad as to interfere with reading, but it was enough to keep the bandwidth of the video signal compatible with what went into the TV. After all that's what the camera is made to do.\n\nSo, I said, \"All we have to do is develop a chip that does this. Instead of text print page, we will have characters in memory and instead of the video controller we now have we will have a new piece of silicon that turns these characters into video that looks like the camera produces.\"\n\nOh yeah, that sounds like a great idea and we should do that. By the way, I'll note for you now that there was a piece of software out there that was emerging on the market which did that on the IBM PC and the name of the software was Adobe Acrobat.\n\nAdobe Acrobat does, its software, exactly what I was saying. That it takes characters proportionally spaced if that's what the PDF document calls for. And uses it's display to produce a nicely looking display on the computer.\n\nAnother way I could have done that would have been to take an IBM PC and put an Acrobat on it and text on it. But again, I'm thinking in the mind of we build a chip for a low end massed produced computer.\n\nIt doesn't necessarily have a lot of computer CPU horse power, but we can do a display controller that does that stuff in hardware. The idea was a good idea but it never got to development. One little antidote.\n\nKevin: Why didn't it go to development? Political? It's always political, right?\nRich: Yeah political. I would say the main reason was that despite my compelling demo I couldn't really convince anybody in the management chain to put the resources it would take into developing that piece of silicon. It would have taken a staff of two or three engineers about a year to do it.\nOr maybe four or five engineers six months...\n\nKevin: Yeah.\nRich: The overall response I got whenever I proposed anything like that was, \"why would we want to do that we are a video game company. How will that make our games play any better. Very frustrating indeed.\nKevin: Right. It's like when you're working for a copy machine company.\nRich: When you're working for a copy machine company trying to make computers.\nKevin: Right.\nRich: OK, so we're a video game company. Let me hit the management where it makes business. Let me try to get them interested in using a mouse instead of this four function game switch, four function joy stick to control the video games.\nSo again, I've had a mouse in my hands for years working at Xerox. I go to my management at the time, and they say, \"What's a mouse? I took an IBM 800 home computer and I bought a Holly mouse which is the same mouse that Xerox is buying for use with the Alto from Jack Holly.\n\nJack Holly was a small home business but he got into the business of manufacturing mice for Xerox. His primary customer was Xerox. The Holly mouse was about the standard size of a mouse with a steal ball bearing on the bottom.\n\nInternally two shaft decoders. One for vertical and one for horizontal that can convert the motions of the ball into x and y coordinates through the computer. It also had three micro switches on the top for the three buttons on the mouse.\n\nAtari had a game product called Missile Command which was available for the 800 home computer. The game of Missile Command, you're in control of a world where there are aircraft dropping bombs on your city.\n\nKevin: Right. Could you let the listeners of this Podcast know what Missile Command is?\nRich: We know what missile command is. I found that playing missile command with a four-function joystick to be a most frustrating experience because the obstacle in playing the game was not the game itself but the difficulty communicating my intention by a switch that had only five positions.\nNeutral, up, down, left and right. How can I make this more user friendly? It turned out that the software for Missile Command already had it built in it. The controller for a trackball, which was available as an optional product for Atari home computers.\n\nI thought, If it can do trackball it can also do mouse, because after all trackball is a mouse turned upside down or a mouse with a trackball turned upside down.\n\nSo I built a small hardware interface to allow one to plug a Holly mouse into an 800 computer and put the 800 computer into its trackball mode and low and behold I can sit down and play Missile Command with a mouse.\n\nI immediately found within seconds after plugging in my mouse that my score in Missile Command doubled or tripled. Finally now it was a playable game. So excited about my new discovery, I ran back into the office 8of the Vice President who had said, \"What's a mouse?\"\n\nI said, \"Here try Missile Command with your joystick.\" And he did and he got an incredibly good score. And, I said, \"Now try it with this mouse.\" It was the first time he ever had a mouse in his hand. He was very awkward at it.\n\nDidn't know how to use it and ended up doing much worse with the mouse than he had done with the four-function joystick He said, \"Well, it's a nice toy, but I don't' see why we should sell that. End of class. So Atari was not going to release the mouse.\n\nThe Atari 800 home computer, or its successor the 12 hundred which is what I was going with. And based on that one experience where the VP had a strange and foreign experience with the mouse, after letting go of his comfortable four switch joystick, the company decided not to do mice.\n\nKevin: I feel frustration for you 30 years later, I'm sorry.\nRich: So around this time the market was leaving Atari. One of the reasons the market was leaving Atari...there was a great book called \"De Re Atari.\"\nKevin: Sure Chris Crawford.\nRich: That book was published for a while and then withdrawn because someone in cooperate manage got the idea that; \"You know we really want to have a monopoly on selling software for our computers. We don't want the whole world to sell software for our computers.\nBecause we want to have a monopoly on that business.\" So they withdrew \"De Re Atari\" and stopped supporting external developers in developing software because \"Why should we have a small percentage of the software for computers? We'll have it all.\"\n\nThe problem was while this was going on Apple came out with a book, called \"Inside Macintosh\", and they encouraged people to develop software for their computer. And I put \"Inside Macintosh\" right opposite \"De Re Atari.\"\n\nCaroline Rose who is the editor and chief technical writer for \"Anti-Macintosh\" and I are good personal friends so I have watched the whole business s go on as Apple opened their Mac to outside software and Atari said \"Nope, we're gonna have a monopoly on it.\n\nNobody else writes software four our Mac but us..for our 12 hundred Computer, sorry.\" And the software that Atari was offering was frankly inferior to that which could be obtained on the open market for the Macintosh, and that contributed to the death of Atari.\n\nSo the company which had been spending millions of dollars on great bashes a year earlier had to start tightening its belt. And they had to start making some layoffs and people were let go in waves. And I watched a phenomenon I have seen so many other times in Silicon Valley is that.\n\nWhen you say lay-offs, when you start reducing your staff by having waves of lay-offs the people who are really desperate for a job cling very tightly. The very best people, the key people, the people that you want most on your team; they're the ones that start circulating their resume.\n\nBecause they don't want to wait for the layoff, they want to move now when they can. And they do. So the threatening waves of layoffs meant we lost a lot of key players. And the team was dwindling, not so much by the layoffs which were happening.\n\nBut by the people who were leaving in fear of being layed-off. This got to be worse as time went on, and as key people left and the company lost more money they had more lay-offs and it became a sad situation.\n\nIn the spirit of dark humor I suppose you would call it, I made up a phony press release and stuck it to the door in my office. It said \"Sunnyvale Atari Incorporated announced today...\n\nSorry, former video game giant Atari Incorporated announced today from its Sunnyvale headquarters the layoff of approximately one third of its [inaudible 0:36:13] based workforce. Neither of the remaining employees were available for comment.\"\n\n[laughter]\n\nRich: That didn't get me in very good stead with the management but then again it was all falling apart. So it wasn't long to long after that that I ended up turning in my resume and getting a better job.\nTurned in my resignation and I went to, again, Hamilton Research Center in southern [inaudible 0:36:43] where I continued my work in per se design. So that's the next stage of my resume. So I'm concluded with the things I wanted to share with you but I'm sure you had some questions so please ask.\n\nKevin: No, I came in here with very few questions 'cause all I knew was that you were doing verify Atari, and you've answered a lot of my questions. So is there anything else that you can talk about the development of the Freddie Chip? Maybe features you wanted to add that didn't get added?\nRich: I don't remember to many of the technical details of the chip. It was fun. We did complete the development in a timely way and got it into the products. But the product itself was unfortunately a lame duck. It was too little too late when it landed in the marketplace.\nAnd most people saw it for exactly what it was: a cost reduced slightly feature enhanced version of an obsolete computer, and why would anyone want to buy that when they could buy a Macintosh?\n\nKevin: Right.\nRich: So that realization came too late, from a corporate point of view. I had already left and Atari went ahead and turned out the 1040 and 520 SG. I remember the 1040 because it was the number of a tax return and that was a deliberate choice of number.\nKevin: Huh, interesting.\nRich: I'm afraid if you want to have this conversation about the technical aspects of the Freddie Chip, I'm not really in a good position to do that because I don't remember too much about the details.\nKevin: No, that's fine. I getting to ask. If you could send a message to the Atari computer users who still exist, and you can right now, what would you tell them?\nRich: Oh, good question. Let's see. Atari was an interesting chapter in the development of Silicon Valley and the whole concept of home computers in general. If you look carefully at the Atari story there's a lot of lessons on how to run a computer company and how not to run a computer company.\nWhat both Xerox PARK and Atari have in common is they were both computer companies that had the world in their hands and let it escape because of some poor decisions. So if you have an Atari computer, even though it's hopelessly obsolete by today's standards, it's a bit of history.\n\nIt's a little bit like owning any other historical artifact, hold on to it and love it and treasure it because of what it tells about the history of the world.\n\nKevin: Good answer, thank you. I've heard so many stories, and different interviews, of Atari management just not getting it and doing the wrong thing. Every company messes up now and again but it seems like Atari management constantly would make the wrong choice, over and over again.\nRich: Yep, that is what they did. I wish I could have combined the best features of the Xerox Park environment and the Atari environment and maybe the result would have been a company that would have had a little better result than either one did.\nKevin: So what were the best features of both?\nRich: The best feature of Xerox Park was that the company poured money, big money, into a research center that they recruited world class computer scientists from around the world, gave them a budget and a lab, and left them alone.\nAnd as a result some of the best technology came out of that lab. The downside, which is the one that more people talk about, is that they gave away the technology and never developed it into a product.\n\nBut as far as the energy involved in so many highly confident computer researchers collaborating in an environment where they were pretty much left alone the results in the technology was awesome.\n\nIt made an incredible advantage if not for the company Xerox than certainly for the world of personal computing. That was the best thing about Xerox Park; is that it was a great grad school.\n\nRich: The best thing about Atari was that they had begun by capturing the attention and the mind of the general public for hundreds of thousands of American families, the original Atari 26 Hundred Game Machine was the original computer they had mapped.\nThey didn't think of it as a computer, they thought of it as a game machine, but it was in fact a computer. And because it was a computer people got to know the notion of you can have this thing, and you can put programs into it, and depending on the program you put into it you can do different things with it.\n\nThey had the public's attention with that and they came out with the home computer. Again, what they did with the home computer after that was pretty bad, but Atari had the potential of being where Apple is today and again they blew it.\n\nBut there was that potential and they positioned themselves very well in that market. They didn't have the product to follow through that the Apple Macintosh was.\n\nIf Atari had only done the 1040 machine a couple of years earlier, like during the time I was there, they might have taken a good a chunk of the market share that Apple took. But again, it was too little too late.\n\nRich: So I have another story which is not really about my work, it's about the video game machine, the 26 hundred.\nKevin: Great.\nRich: While all of this was going on I had a 26 hundred machine at home and my son, who was only five years old, loved to play it. He got to be a master of the four switch joystick. Again Atari had the same philosophy with it as they did later with the 800.\n\"We will have a monopoly on software for our machine.\" Their insistence on that led to them not being very kind to outside developers who wanted to develop software for it. Atari also had this image of; \"We are good, clean, wholesome, family fun.\"\n\nSo given these two cooperate stances, I'm sure you can imagine how negative the reaction was when the company came out with an adult video game for the 26 hundred.\n\nWhen I say an adult video game, the nature of the game was that you had a naked man and a naked woman and with the four stick joystick you moved the naked man around and made him jump on the naked woman.\n\nKevin: So maybe we are talking about \"Custer's Revenge\".\nRich: Yeah, that's the one. And Atari's response was to sue them and say; \"You can't make software for our machine without stealing our intellectual property. Besides that you are tarnishing our good, clean, wholesome, family fun image.\"\nThe lawsuit brought a lot of attention to Atari and a lot of attention to \"Custer's Revenge\"...and thank you for reminding me of the name. Because of all that attention sales of the Atari Game Machine skyrocketed, and so did sales of the \"Custer's Revenge\" software.\n\nAnd everybody was buying it, mostly to see what the hullabaloo was all about so Atari ended up making a bunch of money. The lawsuit sailed and Atari lost so they couldn't stop the company from making it but they achieved what they wanted to which they.\n\nOne, preserved their \"We stand for good, clean, wholesome, family fun\" and two, they boosted the sales of their machine to a market that they never intentionally got into anyway. So the whole thing was a win win for everybody.\n\nThe outside publisher got a lot of publicity for their product, Atari got opened a whole new market they never thought they to get into. Everyone was making a lots of money on the sales, it really didn't matter who won the lawsuit 'cause the outcome was best for everybody.\n\n[crosstalk]\n\nKevin: I've heard bits of it, sure, but never from that perspective of everyone wins. It's ironic that on one level Atari was right that part of the things that ended up hurting...when the video game world crashed was that there was so much crappy crappy software out there.\nTerrible games from companies that would pump out as many games as possible, no regard to quality. So Atari was right, to some level.\n\nRich: I disagree with that. Yes, there is crap out there and [inaudible 0:47:28] but what's the most popular operating system today? It's Windows. And why is it so popular? It's certainly not that Windows is technically good, but that everyone publishes stuff for it.\nIf Microsoft had held on to the ability to program the Windows like Atari held onto to their ability, Windows would have died a long time ago. Success comes from getting everybody else to play in your ball park.\n\nKevin: OK.\nRich: We may agree to disagree on that but that's my opinion.\nKevin: No, I see your point there. You're right. It's a common belief...knowledge in the retro game world is that part of the reason for the crash was that there was so much bad software.\nPeople would spend 40 bucks for a thing and would end up with a terrible game for their 26 hundred and got frustrated.\n\nRich: I don't believe that...I don't believe that for a minute.\nKevin: OK.\nRich: Yeah there was a lot of crap out there for the 26 hundred, there's a lot of crap out there for the 400 and 800. But that could have been managed better by Atari. Atari could put stuff they publish out there with a name like, Genuine Atari or whatever, somewhere on it.\nThere is crappy software for every platform. There's crappy software for windows, there's crappy software for Android. I have three machines in my everyday life, two run Windows and one runs Android. There's crap for both platforms and I'm sure there's crap for Macintosh as well.\n\nWhat happens in today's world is that the...there are lots of reviews, columnists review things and users reviews things, on pure review sites and the stuff that's good gets a good reputation and the stuff that's crappy gets a bad reputation and the market floats with their dollars and fate.\n\nThat's far better than having any company claim to be the monopoly of software for their own product. I don't do a moral judgment, if any company wants to be the sole source for software and they want to keep their architecture private so nobody can design...sure let them.\n\nBut I certainly wouldn't want to have stock in that company, I don't think that's a viable strategy today. What's the most popular mobile platform? It's android. And why is Android so popular? It's because Google's encouraging the world to write for it. And they are doing the right thing there.\n\nThe most popular desktop platform is still Windows, and why? It's because Microsoft encourages the world to write for it. And if I had any a computer product of my own I would encourage the world to write for it, that's the way you get it...what do I know I'm an engineer.\n\n[laughter]\n\nKevin: That was great, that's all I need. Thank you very much.\nRich: You are very welcome I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today. Bye Bye."
                    }
                ]
            }
        }
    }
}