
Atari Vax Mail, Memos and Status Reports: 1982-1992 (2001) - erubin
http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/vmail.htm
======
zipperhead
Almost 30 years ago:

    
    
      From:	KIM::ALBAUGH      "Dr. Bizarro" 30-JUN-1986 08:42:44.50
      To:	@SYS$MAIL:JUNK
      CC:	
      Subj:	Paranoid on Soapbox with Product Idea
    
    
    	The National Security Agency has proposed that ALL encryption be
      done with devices designed by them, the internal workings of which will be
      not be divulged. They apparently didn't like the public debate on the last
      voluntary standard (for which SOME details were published), centering on
      whether it had been designed to allow them to easily read "private"
      communications. If this doesn't bother you, consider what your reaction would be
      to the U.S. Postal service ( which already  has a legal monopoly on carrying
      mail) proposing that, for effiency, only it could provide envelopes and these
      envelopes could only be sealed and opened by postal service employees.

------
lemevi
This is great:

    
    
        Due to a severe increase in demand, we are forced to state some
       kind of policy on private archival backup tapes.  Effective immediately,
       anyone can have a backup done on a BYOT (bring your own tape) basis.
    
        All of the above applies to floppies, as well as tape; floppies are
       a little more convenient to store, but don't hold as much.  Rough figures
       follow:
    
        Tape (2400 ft, 8KB block size) = 40MB storage, or 80,000 disk blocks
       (figure 75K blocks after backup adds its own overhead)
    
        Floppies (single density, our default) = .25MB, or 500 disk blocks.
    
        Floppies (double density, YOU MUST SPECIFY) = .5MB, or 1,000 disk
        blocks.  If you want double density, all of the floppies to be written on
        must be pre-initialized before the backup starts.      Therefore, you need to
        KNOW beforehand just how many floppies are to be used.
    

It makes me think about our company's 1MB web page download, as it would
require 60ft of Atari tape storage. XD

[0]
[http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/Vax83.txt](http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/Vax83.txt)

~~~
jacquesm
> as it would require 60ft of Atari tape storage.

More likely they were DEC VAX tapes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:9-track-
drive.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:9-track-drive.jpg)

At a guess running at 1600 bpi for 40M at 2400 ft.

(1600 x 12 x 2400 = 46M bytes and change, reserve some room for headers)

------
touseefliaqat
""" Everybody is (or should be) mad at Sales and Marketing for not selling
more games.

Well, Now We Have The Solution.

Let's contract everything out. We are already contracting out hardware and
game development.

By contracting out the hardware, Engineering Management finally has the
control it wants over costs, technology, and schedule. Of course, the hardware
may need a few finishing touches for Testability and Manufacture- ability, but
the Engineers will be happy to finish someone else's hardware, put it into
production, and thereby contribute to this someone else's royalties. This has
the added advantage that licensed product is not eligible for Bonus.

By contracting out the game development, and making Marketing the main
contact, Marketing can finally enforce their decisions on game play. (Do It My
Way If You Want To Get Paid.) Perhaps they can do for game play what they did
for Side Panel Graphics.

I don't think we should stop there.

Let's contract out Sound and Music so that the team (which is now Marketing)
will get what it wants. Dittos for I.D., Mechanical, Harness, PCB,
Publications, and Animation. Did I leave anyone out?

Let's contract out Manufacturing to eliminate overhead (and unused Production
Capacity). Or, we could deal with unused Production Capacity by having
Manufacturing become a Contract Manufacturer for other companies. (Outside
contracts always have priority over internal product, so internal product will
have to be contracted out, anyway.)

Finally, after having completed the total disintegration of the Company, we
can contract out Management.

Regards,

    
    
    	 Jedidiah (The Mad Prophet)

"""

------
kabdib
July-Aug 1984 is when Atari fell apart; the Tramiels bought the bits of Atari
they wanted, and coin-op went its separate way. Lots of layoffs. Soon after,
many people left both companies. I remember a lot of names in those emails.

One memorable message (which I didn't see in the archive) was along the lines
of:

    
    
        "Look! Two companies, one email system!"
    

... that situation didn't last very long.

For a while I decided to be a system admin type and took responsibility for
transferring the accounts of the folks in the Tramiel Atari to the Vaxes in
Sunnyvale. That was fun, and more comfortable because the Tramiels couldn't
turn off the air conditioning in the machine room in order to save money :-)

The keycard system in Sunnyvale controlled access to coin-op's building in
Milpitas. It would periodically run out of paper to log to, fail-off and then
folks in Milpitas couldn't get into their own building. That lasted maybe six
months before they got sick of it and bought their own access system.

------
kabdib
I'm also astonished how little we used email back then. Most email clients
were built around proprietary protocols and file formats, and had awful user
interfaces.

There were a lot of meetings. People tended to print stuff out a lot, on
really crappy printers. 80x25 line terminals were pretty standard, at least in
the DEC / Data General environments I was familiar with.

When I left Atari for Apple, if anything the state of email was _worse_ at
Apple. People would run QuickMail, our department's favored client, on a spare
Mac Plus because QuickMail would crash several times a day.

So I'm not surprised that archives like this are relatively rare, and don't
really capture what was going on at the company. Although you can get a very
real sense of the hostility between Engineering and Marketing at Atari, which
was the worst I've ever encountered.

------
percept
"While we're on the subject, I might mention that Ronald Wilson Reagan
anagrams into Insane Anglo Warlord. A public service message."

------
win_ini
Here's another funny bit:

    
    
      To: Rick Moncrief				1 of 4
      Fr: Jed Margolin
      Re: Status Report
      Dt: 15 June 1992
    

"... CUT ... "

    
    
      Texas Instruments
      -----------------
      Phil Davis, the TI guy they gave me so I wouldn't bother Thom Dempsey, came to
      see me without an appointment.
    
      When I went out to the lobbly he explained that he had actually come to see
      someone else and thought he might as well see me, too. (That me me feel
      really special.)
    
      I asked him if the 128Kx8 VRAMs had been production released yet. He said
      he didn't know anything about it but he would look into it and get back to
      me.
    
      I asked him if they had evaluated the dead P15s yet. He said they hadn't
      been able to work things out with Rich Moore because of his recent trip out
      of the country.
    
      I explained to him that we had been using the P15 for security and no longer
      had a use for it since it had been ripped. He expressed surprised because
      he seemed to think it was such a terrific part that we were using it to
      run the game.
    
      I wanted to see how much he actually knew about the part so I mentioned
      that it was difficult to interace anything to it because the address bus does 
      not go tristate except during Reset; unfortunately the internal Data RAM is 
      dynamic and does not get refreshed during Reset. I had, of course, developed
      several very successful techniques for interfacing to it.
    
      He said he didn't know anything about it but would look into it and get back
      to me.
    
      I informed him that I hadn't asked him a question, that instead, I had told
      him something.
    
      This guy doesn't know anything and he doesn't listen. He is an idiot.

~~~
ddingus
Awesome lesson there.

------
MattRogish
Beginning of the end. 10-SEP-1992

People have been curious about the new PC game Wolfenstein 3D. We have
wondered how the speed of the "real" 3D effect was accomplished. This
explanation came off the usenet from someone at SGI:

Wolfenstein 3D cheats. It's not really drawing 3D textured polygons. What it's
doing is sort of a cross between ray tracing and bitmap decimation. For each
column of pixels on the screen, they shoot a ray out and find which wall it
intersects with. From the length of the ray, they know the top and bottom
coordinates of the wall in screen space, and from the intersection point of
the ray with the wall, they know which column to use from that wall's texture.
By decimating or duplicating pixels from that column, they resize it to be the
correct height for the screen.

~~~
bluedino
They could have just called up iD and asked John Carmack how it worked. He
loved the Jaguar (Atari's last console) and I'm sure he would have loved to
talk and maybe even give them some insight on it's development.

------
intrasight
From Wikipedia: "By 1982, Atari had US$1.3 billion in annual sales and was the
fastest-growing company in the history of American business.[22] By 1984, the
company had crashed and was split into three pieces to be sold off."

I met Nolan Bushnell in 1986 during his Catalyst Technologies phase. I often
wonder what would have happened had he continued to lead Atari.

------
percept
Love these. Does anybody know a good central source for similar stories? They
(things like folklore.org, etc.) are scattered around the interwebz, and get
lost in the noise.

~~~
Aeolun
Not company related (or possibly they are), but
[http://textfiles.com/directory.html](http://textfiles.com/directory.html)

~~~
percept
That works, too. Wired traditionally had stories that were "damn interesting"
(another similar site), but these seem to be harder to find now.

------
sk5t
More good stuff from 1992:

I wanted to see how much he actually knew about the part so I mentioned that
it was difficult to interace anything to it because the address bus does not
go tristate except during Reset; unfortunately the internal Data RAM is
dynamic and does not get refreshed during Reset. I had, of course, developed
several very successful techniques for interfacing to it.

He said he didn't know anything about it but would look into it and get back
to me.

I informed him that I hadn't asked him a question, that instead, I had told
him something.

This guy doesn't know anything and he doesn't listen. He is an idiot.

------
i_know_him
From 22-JAN-1992, the winning 20 year anniversary slogan:

AND THE NUMBER 1 TOP SLOGAN FOR ATARI IS..

1) Atari Games, A good place to stay on your way to EA

~~~
jacquesm
The person who wrote that email later apologized for it.

------
CountHackulus
Fascinating stuff. I wonder if anyone's done some searching in those archives
for interesting or funny tidbits.

~~~
larrymcp
Here's a random one I noted from 1983:

    
    
      From:   KIM::CALFEE   16-DEC-1983 13:50
      To:     @SYS$MAIL:COINOP
      Subj:   Atari 800 Software Theft
    

It has been brought to my attention that some stolen Atari computer software
may now be residing on one or more of our VAXes.

This is intolerable.

We are a company whose existance depends on software sales, and every ATARI
game that was in a cartridge and has been put on disc and then on the VAX is a
potential leak to the outside world that can impact sales. Any competitors'
games that might be on the system could substantially weaken Atari's cases
against piracy in court. People who participate in stealing software are
risking their jobs and the company's future.

Please delete all questionable files immediately!!!

As Jed would say, Thank you or else. Steve Calfee

~~~
jacquesm
> Thank you or else

I'm so stealing that.

------
jacquesm
I really have to stop reading this and go to bed, it's 3:44 am and I can't
seem to get enough of it. Erubin, many thanks for posting this.

------
Steko
Don't miss status report on 22 May 1992.

~~~
stock_toaster
The "24 August 1992" one was good too.

------
nothis
Would this cover some insights into the videogame crash of 1983 (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983)
)?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Main cause - the hardware on offer was not upgraded - they just tried to sell
last years model, for several years in a row. Lack of understanding.
Eventually everyone had a (old) console and no one wanted to buy another.

------
jacquesm
This whole archive is a an absolutely priceless treasure, from the '92 status
reports:

    
    
         EYES ONLY			BURN BEFORE READING
    
      To: Rick    Moncrief							1 of 1
      Fr: Jed Margolin
      Re: Pirates
      Dt: 26 February 1992
    
    
      1. From the evidence, the Pirates have broken security on ASIC65. Guardians 
         has a problem because they use the same system. Consider the following:
    

read more at:
[http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/Stat92.txt](http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/Stat92.txt)
about when the 'war with the pirates' was hot.

Edit: they used a DSP32C I never knew that, that's a label I haven't seen in a
long long time. I had a board with one of those as a co-processor in a 286 and
it ran incredibly fast compared to the 286/287 combo, it also had a couple of
DAC/ADCs on board. That was my intro to signal processing, I used it for all
kinds of tricks and even adapted a raytracer to use it as a coprocessor. Fun
times!

(this was the board or something very close to it:
[http://www.symres.com/webpages/products/legacydsp.htm](http://www.symres.com/webpages/products/legacydsp.htm)
)

edit2: more goodies:

Don't you just HATE to talk to rude people on the phone? Well, SO DO THEY.
Yes, YOU can be just as rude as the people you despise.

Like the way this is going? Of course not. It's arrogant, it talks down to
you, and you feel like you know better. Unfortunately, sometimes we DO sound
like we are above dealing with people on the phone.

We can make this happen less often by avoiding certain trigger phrases. These
are things "nobody likes to hear--not a spouse, not a child, and least of all,
a customer."

I DON'T KNOW should be replaced with an offer to find out.

WE CAN'T DO THAT should come with a sincere apology, and only when there are
no alternatives to offer.

YOU'LL HAVE TO ... is a lie. The caller doesn't HAVE to do anything. It feels
much different to hear, "In order for that to happen, we need you to ..."

JUST A SECOND never is. If you feel the need to excuse yourself from the
conversation, ask if the caller is willing to hold for a minute or two. Don't
simply presume that they have nothing better to do than wait.

NO, at the beginning of a sentence. If you avoid saying NO as the first word,
you force yourself to project a positive image, and even if you must deny a
request, you put the caller in your camp by giving reasons or making the
caller feel like you didn't WANT to say no, even if you had to.

These changes can't happen overnight. It takes a while to affect speech
patterns; it takes a while just to realize you have them. When you hear
yourself utter one of these trigger phrases, simply think of how you could
have phrased things differently...and before too long, you'll use those speech
patterns instead.

And people will call you just to hear you talk...

Mail archive, Jan '92

------
mstade
I love this kind of stuff. Because of the meaty stuff being buried in a bunch
of meaningless chatter, it feels kind of like treasure hunting. Very
interesting stuff!

------
midnitewarrior
The plural of VAX is VAXen, not VAXes.

