Don't Forget About Atari

A bunch of tech bloggers are talking about 80s home computer nostalgia, triggered by the release of a brand new Commodore 64. Among the Apple fans, there is an unsurprising amount of Commodore-hate. John Gruber, for example:

The Commodore 64 — which came out in 1982, when I was 9 — always struck me as cheap-feeling and inelegant. Like using some weird computer from the Soviet Union. Just look at its keyboard.

Or, as Jason Snell writes over on Six Colors:

If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street.

In the other corner, some equally passionate Commodore love from Drew Saur:

Commodore 64 fans were the original “Think Different” crowd. We knew that IBM PCs were junk. They didn’t even have the Apple II’s 6 colors (they had four!…or was it four…) or fun programming accessibility. They had no sprites. They had almost no sound. They were no fun, at all. And they still aren’t.

For being otherwise bright folks, it’s remarkable how completely wrong they all are. The Atari was the best computer to have.

Like any good schism (and as Drew notes) the Atari/Commodore crowd knew they were better than anyone else — Apple’s were the boring computer your school used to teach you Pascal, IBM PCs were what grownups used at work.

What Drew neglects to cover was the internecine warfare central to the relationship between Commodore and Atari users. Let’s be clear — they were very similar computers. They were both 8-bit, 6502-based with enough color, sound, and sprite capabilities to build competitive games. They both had thriving user communities (totally not hackers) which if you were lucky your mom would drop you off at on a Saturday afternoon to learn about the latest tech (totally not 4 hours of copying floppies and defeating copy protection).

What they didn’t have? Crossover. Nobody liked both. You were either an Atari kid or a Commodore kid. Supporting the other side was a crime against nature (even if we could agree to stand together to mock the Apple ][+ fans.)

Atari computers are where I learned to love, appreciate, and was hungry to make games.

I had to embrace the enemy platforms to really build skills in the profession. Apple Pascal for the foundations of computer science, Apple’s CALL -151 for the first forays into assembly and all manner of subversive programming (story for another day: Apple and quirky high school computer lab rules also quickly taught me the benefits of knowing more about computers than anyone else), and of course WinTel PCs for C, x86 assembly, and 3D.

But those early Atari games, are what built my taste in games. From the famous ones everyone knows like Star Raiders and Behind Jaggi Lines! (insiders will know why I chose that version of the name), but more importantly, the multiplayer games that made and broke friendships, consumed hours, and led many of us to California and arcade development, like Dog Daze and Rally Speedway.

Tech moves forward, of course. First the Amiga and then the Mac transformed what we thought was possible. SGI brought super computers to your desk only to get overwhelmed by PC + NVIDIA. I’m writing this on a Mac, because I like operating systems written by grownups. But really, the platform I’ve spent the most time developing on and thinking about for the last decade is the browser (and thus typescript) and the various iterations of AI you can connect to through it.

While we’re almost 30 years into the deep Apple vs. PC debate — and the related/parallel IE vs Firefox, Opera vs Everyone, and Apple vs. Android — I expect the next decade is going to be far more about what brand of AI you choose, especially as various politicians and tech leaders work so tirelessly to transform it into a political/identity decision.