The Tramiels were notoriously tight with money, and would often just refuse to pay people when they thought they could get away with it. We had some Vax 11/780

The Tramiels were notoriously tight with money, and would often just refuse to pay people when they thought they could get away with it. We had some Vax 11/780s (for engineering and finance), and DEC's service technicians were instructed to collect a cashier's check at the door or walk away. I got handy with diagnostic software and a soldering iron. In one incident, we had some Motorola VME/10 68K-based workstations that kept failing and needing things like motherboard replacements (they were not well designed). About a year after we pivoted development to the Atari STs (hey, dogfood...) Sam Tramiel asked me if we were still using the VME/10s. "Hell no," I said, "They were pieces of junk. They're over there in a corner." I pointed to a corner where a couple of them were stacked up, gathering dust. "Okay, we won't pay them, then," said Sam. He was grinning. I felt a little sick. You really did not want Atari to owe you money, especially if you were a "little guy".