Tech Nostalgia: 8-Bit (Premium)

Credit Atari for realizing early on that it needed a sequel to the VCS video game system, one that could arrive before more technically sophisticated competitors did. Sadly, management screwed it up by jumping on the home computer bandwagon, delaying a true VCS sequel by several years.

I am referring, of course, to the Atari 400 and 800, 8-bit computer siblings that offered dramatic improvements over the so-called "trinity" of home computers---the Commodore PET 2001, Apple II, and Tandy TRS-80---released in 1977. Indeed, these Atari computers were in many ways more powerful than the more popular computers that succeeded it in the 1980s, including the Commodore 64, which would go on to win the home computer wars, and even the 16-bit Atari ST.

This is particularly impressive when you consider the lackluster nature of the VCS hardware that preceded these machines. The most successful of 1980s video game machines was "powered" by a cost-reduced version of the MOS Technologies 6502 processor, a Television Interface Adapter (TIA) chipset that handled display output, sound, and controller integration, a meager 128 bytes (yes, bytes) of RAM, and 2K or 4K of ROM. And it only came to market because Atari was bailed out by Warner Communications, which acquired the company and poured millions of dollars into the launch.

That investment paid off, big-time, but well before that, and right after the VCS launched, the engineering team responsible for it was already working on a sequel, codenamed "Oz," with the belief that the VCS would have a three-year life in the market. The goals for the next Atari video game machine were obvious enough: it should be more technically sophisticated, with better graphics, sound, and performance so that it could faithfully reproduce the arcade games that would ship in 1978.

But between inception and release, the "trinity" computers arrived, providing consumers and businesses with the first complete, packaged computers. And in early 1978, Atari's overlords at Warner Communications hired veteran fabrics industry executive Ray Kassar to be president of the Atari consumer division for reasons that remain unclear beyond professional parental oversight, I guess. And when the company fired Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell later that year, Warner made Kassar the CEO of Atari.

Kassar had no idea what he was doing, and he made two important blunders during his time running Atari. He didn't value the engineers inside the company who made its games, even going so far one time to refer to them as "high-strung prima donnas" in an interview with the Mercury News. And he ordered Atari's engineering team to turn the VCS sequel into a home computer instead of a video game machine.

That first blunder triggered the market for third-party video game publishers, as Atari's best and most disgruntled game makers would leave the company and form Activision, first, and then Imagic and other companies, taking crucial talent...