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I once read that IBM had contacted Atari about licensing their chipset, so they did actually care about gaming to some degree. Also a lot of Apple users gamed
by flomo 1y ago
I once read that IBM had contacted Atari about licensing their chipset, so they did actually care about gaming to some degree.
Also a lot of Apple users gamed on a monochrome monitor, so how many colors maybe wasn't the biggest concern, just 'has some'. The resolution was largely fixed by the tube technology.
- mrandish 1y agoInteresting. I hadn't heard that about Atari. The odd thing is that the Atari 400/800 chipset couldn't display 80 column text, which seems to have been a 'must have' for IBM due to word processing and terminal emulation being considered essential. I wonder if may be it was when IBM was working on the PC Jr.
- flomo 1y agoYeah, the impression I have is the talks went nowhere, but Atari was obviously on top of the market on that point, so no surprise they made a call. Maybe IBM wanted to contract something out, but IIRC Jay Miner had already quit.
- jnaina 1y agoAtari's Sunnyvale Research Lab (SRL), run by Alan Kay, were working on some graphics chipset at that time. Probably why IBM came knocking.