Atari Vax Mail, Memos and Status Reports: 1982-1992 (2001)

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.

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

""" 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)

"""

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Don't miss status report on 22 May 1992.

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

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 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 )

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

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!

The plural of VAX is VAXen, not VAXes.