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.
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
"""
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.
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.
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.
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.
They could have just called up iD and asked John Carmack how it worked. He loved the Jaguar (Atari's last console) and I'm sure he would have loved to talk and maybe even give them some insight on it's development.
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.
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.
It has been brought to my attention that some stolen Atari computer software may now be residing on one or more of our VAXes.
This is intolerable.
We are a company whose existance depends on software sales, and every ATARI game that was in a cartridge and has been put on disc and then on the VAX is a potential leak to the outside world that can impact sales. Any competitors' games that might be on the system could substantially weaken Atari's cases against piracy in court. People who participate in stealing software are risking their jobs and the company's future.
Please delete all questionable files immediately!!!
Main cause - the hardware on offer was not upgraded - they just tried to sell last years model, for several years in a row. Lack of understanding. Eventually everyone had a (old) console and no one wanted to buy another.
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:
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!
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.
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!