[OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL revisited again)

Stephen Pair spair at advantive.com
Thu Nov 1 21:36:34 UTC 2001


I loved my 520ST...when I got it (Xmas of '85 I think), it had 512k of
RAM when 64k was considered a lot on PCs.  I thought Mac users must have
all been color blind.  This was just before the Amiga hit the market I
think.  But, it was all downhill after that.  I never read a good thing
about Jack Tramiel, and from the outside, it was apparent that he was
running the company into the ground.  They never managed to get another
product out the door that was as far ahead of the competition as the
520, and they developed a bad habit of announcing things well in advance
of when they could actually deliver.  I sure had a lot of fun with that
computer though.

- Stephen

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.
> 
> 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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