Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982)
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Re: Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982)
#2Another cool article about Cyan and the Stella/2600:
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/Atari_ca...
Re: Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982)
#3I was not expecting the touchscreen.
Re: Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982)
#4"the consumer is very mobile and we found this out in the hand calculator market"
I've been spending a bit of time studying pre-Tramiel Atari recently: Racing the Beam, Business if Fun, Antic Podcast, etc.
The Antic podcast in particular has been conducting a series of absolutely amazing interviews with people who worked at Atari during the 8-bit microcomputer era.
It's kind of amazing where Cyan Engineering (and Atari) was in their development. What's kind of interesting to me is not that they predicted future (often they didn't), but the kind of alternate future if they had been able to bring product to market. Atari's notoriously bad management killed all of this off.
One of the most interesting interviews I remember from Antic was with Rich Pasco, who came to Atari from Xerox PARC and wanted to take Atari computers into a direction that ultimately became the modern desktop OS, he was systematically shot down by Atari management until he was put in charge of building an iterative memory management chip for a mild revision of one of their 8-bit machines.
Atari could have been Apple.
Re: Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982)
#5Interesting -- but it seems like it would have been rather lonely to be an engineer out there
Re: Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982)
#6Interesting -- but it seems like it would have been rather lonely to be an engineer out there
It was (and still is) fairly quiet, but there were also Litton Engineering Group [1] and The Grass Valley Group [2] in the area. There are still a surprising number of engineers in the area due to the large number of high-end and broadcast video companies still in business. I think AJA is the biggest but there is also Sierra Video and Renegade Labs. Grass Valley is still here as well but it has changed hands a few times over the past few decades.