Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

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Prior to the Warner / Tramiel sale, though, Atari management showed a stunning lack of foresight re: the lifecycle of their console platforms. If I recall properly, I've heard Al Alcorn (and / or perhaps Joe Decuir) talk about how the technical people pitched VCS as a short-lived platform, but management kept the product going far beyond its intended lifetime.

The 5200 was released in 1982, built on 1979 technology. The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983 but didn't make it to the United States until 1986. If Atari had made better controller decisions with the 5200, and perhaps included 2600 compatibility, I think Nintendo would have had a much harder row to hoe when they came to the US.

Then again, if Atari had taken Nintendo's offer to distribute the NES in the US...

(Some people write speculative fiction about world wars having different outcomes. My "The Man in the High Castle" is to wonder about what the world would have been like if Jack Tramiel hadn't been forced out of Commodore, if the Amiga went to Atari, etc.)

atari marketing was pretty f---ing terrible. objectively so

i had one of the home computer division marketing types come to my office one day, and was asked:

"can you print out all possible 8x8 bitmaps? we'd like to submit them to the copyright office so no one else can use them"

a stunning lack of knowledge of copyright law and basic exponential math. i didn't bother to point out that he really wanted all possible 8x8 _color_ bitmaps (there aren't enough atoms in the universe for this, by many orders of magnitude)

they didn't make very good decisions about consoles or computers, either

Atari made a lot of bad decisions, but what you were asked is not something you should expect someone in marketing to understand in general. There is only so much someone can get good at in their lifetime and so eventually you will have to give up understanding everything - and then look like an idiot when you ask for something that is obviously unreasonable to someone who does know.

What was asked for is a reasonable ask. It just isn't possible to create.

Agreed that a marketer can’t be expected to know the math. But is it really reasonable to attempt to copyright every possible 8x8 bitmap?

Asking if you can print all 8x8 bitmaps is very reasonable.

Wanting to copyright them to block competition is despicable.

I'm shocked at how "few" pages printing all 8x8 bitmaps would actually require. Assuming full page coverage of an 8.5 x 11 sheet at 600 dpi I'm only coming with a touch over 548 billion pages. I expected it to be more. Legal-size paper drops that to about 430.5 billion pages.

I think your math is a little off (or maybe mine is).

I'll take a short cut and imagine that you have an 8x8 square with no margins (68% of a borderless 8.5x11), then you have a grid of 600x600 bitmaps, which is 3.6e5. if each pixel is only black or white, than you have 1.8e19 possible bitmaps (64-bit), divide the two and you have 5e13, or about 50 trillion pages. Fix the equation, and you get a grid of 5.2e5, for 30 trillion pages instead of 50.

However, bring that up to 24-bit color or more (even 8-level greyscale is e154), and the exponentiality of the problem goes back to as described by the OP

> What was asked for is a reasonable ask.

No it isn't. You don't get any copyright protection on a volume of data produced by rules, such as "every possible 8x8 bitmap". Furthermore, you also don't get copyright protection against "copies" that were developed without reference to your work, as would always be the case for this idea. So there is no theoretical benefit from attempting it.

What's the reasonable part?

You are thinking as a lawyer, who for sure should have jumped in (if got that far - it appears to have went to engineering first who shut it down for engineering reasons). Someone in marketing should not be expected to know or think of those details about law. Maybe they will, but it isn't there job.

Specialization is a good thing. However it means you will have often ideas that because of something you don't know are bad even though within your lane they are good.

I got Atari 5200 when I was a kid, and the disappointment was immense, considering the marketing and hype that went into it. The controller made playing games very difficult. And the games were pretty bad as well. Later, I got a Commodore 64 and then also NES, which just revolutionized home gaming in general.

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