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

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.