I will admit to being the "Chief Scientist" of Atari during a 
turbulent few years from '81 through early '84. The machine now known 
as the AMIGA was orginally funded by Atari during this time through 
R&D (however, I had very little to do with the design which was done 
by an spinoff group). It was an attempt to do some of the things you 
could do with an Alto + some of the things people had learned to do 
with games HW. There were some funny stories connected with this 
machine during the Atari collapse in 1984. The designers managed to 
get the rights to the machine (they were a semiautonomous entity 
somewhat separate from Atari). Jack Tremiel (not a nice guy) bought 
Atari on the assumption that he was getting the AMIGA. As the legend 
goes, you could hear his scream of rage in Antarctica when he found 
out that the AMIGA was gone.

Cheers,

Alan

At 9:14 AM -0500 11/1/01, Stephen Pair wrote:
>Chris Reuter wrote:
>>  GEM was released under the GPL when Caldera
>>  bought Digital Research.  The Watcom C compiler is due to be
>>  released as open-source software as well, although the
>>  current maintainers are still trying to remove
>>  third-party-licensed code.
>
>Now that's a blast from the past.  The Atari ST (running GEM) was the
>computer on which I learned GUIs and event driven C programming  (with
>the Mark Williams C compiler) when I was a kid.  I recently got an Atari
>ST emulator running on my laptop and noticed something curious...there
>was a menu option on the desktop called "Blitter" which IIRC sped up the
>graphics display.  I wonder if anyone here knows if this has any
>relationship to BitBlt?
>
>- Stephen


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