

Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982) - sf56
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfFGrQLuY8s

======
bane
"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.

------
sf56
Another cool article about Cyan and the Stella/2600:
[http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/Atari_ca...](http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/Atari_case_history.html)

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mikek
I was not expecting the touchscreen.

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leoh
Interesting -- but it seems like it would have been rather lonely to be an
engineer out there

~~~
sf56
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.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Litton,_Sr](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Litton,_Sr).

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Valley_%28company%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Valley_%28company%29)

