On Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 12:55:05PM -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> 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.

...and not just gone, but gone into the hands of the company Jack just
abandoned, Commodore!

Wow, this is a piece of Amiga history I was unaware of...thanks for 
sharing it!  I was never quite clear about why Jack abandoned Commodore
at the "peak" of its success so suddenly...

I still have ancient computer magazines that mention the "Lorraine", the
former codename for the first Amiga.  Of course these same magazines 
make mention of the Amiga "Joyboard", one of the original peripherals
designed by the team that made the first Amiga.  Rumour has it that
the Joyboard was the inspiration for the infamous "Guru Meditation" error
(the joyboard shipped with a  game called "Zen Meditation").

Ah...memories...  I always wanted a version of Smalltalk for my old Amiga.
I'm not aware that a version was ever made available though.

> 
> 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
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
>