Atari's Cyan Engineering – Splendor in the Grass (1982)

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.