Re: Jack Tramiel failed to save Atari.

In article 
<bruce#fanboy.net-45D5A0.09435431102007@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 Bruce Tomlin <bruce#fanboy.net@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> Except for one thing. They put in very little CPU RAM (256 bytes!), and 
> used the VDP RAM for storing BASIC programs. This made for very slow 
> performance without having an expansion unit. (Once in a Best catalog 
> store, I found a TI 99/4A sitting at the READY prompt. I hit the ENTER 
> key. It took a whole freaking second for it to do *nothing*!) It didn't 
> help performance any that the "registers" were kept in RAM. And while it

> used a 16-bit CPU, it still had a 16-bit address bus and had the same 
> memory limitations as 8-bit computers in a day when a full 64K of DRAM 
> was becoming affordable.

Again, more of the litany of product errors that TI saddled itself with.  
Had they employed more of an engineering design, and the internal 
politics hadn't dictated what the 99/4(a) was, the machine itself could 
have been so terribly much more.

> TI's insistence on the PEB being the only official expansion option made

> it unlikely that anyone would experience it in any other way than its 
> basic configuration, with tapes and cartridges. (There were third-party 
> options, but most TI owners wouldn't have known about them.) Even if it 
> was with IMHO a much less than perfect design, Commodore did make it 
> possible to hook up an affordable floppy disk drive without having to 
> buy a boat anchor first.

Which shows why in the final analysis, the C=64 campaign was successful, 
and the TI campaign was ultimately self-destructive.

jt