Founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California
Ceased operations as Atari in 1996
Atari
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Founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell |
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Twenty-nine-year-old Nolan Bushnell quit his job as an engineer at electronics manufacturer Ampex to design the very first commercial video arcade game, Computer Space (with a very futuristic-looking console), in 1970. Two years later, he founded Atari — named after the word for "checkmate" in the Japanese game Go — to produce and sell his next video arcade game. On November 29, 1972, he announced the legendary PONG.
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PONG was hopelessly simplistic by today's standards: Two white "paddles" (vertical bars) bounced a "ball" back and forth. If you missed, your opponent scored a point. The paddles were controlled with knobs you turned to move up or down.
But PONG was hugely popular, and soon copies sprouted up in bars and pinball arcades all over the country.
Atari released a series of other video arcade games over the next several years. Among those Bushnell hired to assemble the games were two young technical wizards named Steve Wozniak and Stephen Jobs — who offered to sell their design for an inexpensive home computer to Atari. Bushnell passed on their offer (as did Jobs' full-time employer, Hewlett-Packard), and Wozniak and Jobs went on to found Apple Computing to sell their new personal computer.
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After a series of variations on the home PONG game (including a motocross game with handlebars built into the game console), Atari came out with the Video Computer System, or VCS, later renamed the Atari 2600. This system followed Fairchild Semiconductor's Channel F in having different games stored on ROM (for Read Only Memory) cartridges that could then be plugged into the base unit.
But the already-stiff competition in the home videogame market (from Magnavox's latest Odyssey systems and Fairchild's Channel F) forced Bushnell to sell Atari to Warner Communications, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers Inc., for $28 million in 1976.
Atari entered the home computer market in 1978 with the Atari 400 and 800, which featured specialized video chipsets to give the computers better graphics and sound than the more popular Apple II. Bushnell, unhappy with the Warner corporate style, left the company that same year.
By 1980, Atari was one of the biggest success stories in the computer revolution, with revenues of $2 billion per year. Atari occupied 80 offices in Sunnyvale, its advertisements and jingles were all over the radio and TV, and the company seemingly could do no wrong.
But within a few years, Atari saw its dominance in the videogame market challenged by systems like the Intellevision and Colecovision (which could run Atari cartridges, in one of the earliest examples of mass-market emulation). Atari introduced a more powerful videogame system, the 5200, but it couldn't run existing 2600 cartridges or use the standard Atari and Commodore joysticks (which enjoyed the same popularity then that IBM-standard joysticks enjoy today), and never achieved the kind of sales the 2600 had.
In 1984, a major round of cost-cutting ensued as the company began to lose as much as $2 million per day. Warner split Atari in half, into a home products division (Atari Corp.) and an arcade game division (Atari Games).
Jack Tramiel, formerly owner and CEO of Commodore, purchased the homes division, Atari Corp., from Warner. Tramiel restructured Atari, with his chief focus the re-launch of the 8-bit line of Atari computer systems to compete with Commodore's extremely popular VIC-20 and C-64 models. While Atari's XL and later XE lines of 8-bit computers (600XL, 800XL and 1200XL, as well as 65XE, 130XE and XE game console) were capable machines, the introduction of Apple's 16-bit Macintosh and IBM's 16-bit PC made clear that the age of the 8-bit PC was coming to a close.
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Later versions of the ST line included the Mega, the TT030 and the Falcon030, the latter two of which were built around the Motorola 68030 CPU. The TT could address up to 26 megs of RAM, and was marketed as a high-end music editing system. The Falcon, which came out in the early '90s, was the last computer Atari developed and sold, and featured Motorola's 56001 digital signal processor (DSP) for digitizing audio.
In 1987, Atari delved briefly into the world of high-end desktop computing when it brought out the ATW800 transputer workstation. Running a version of Unix called Helios, the ATW800 was a capable machine for its day, although Atari's interest in it soon faded and only 350 were ever built.
In 1989, Atari brought out the Portfolio — the first palmtop computer compatible with Microsoft DOS (version 2.11), making it easy to share data with a desktop computer. Atari sold a RAM card reader for DOS and Windows computers to allow for easy transfer of data files from the Portfolio — a precursor to today's popular personal data assistants like the Palm Pilot. The Portfolio used a non-standard RAM card for storage, though, and was soon surpassed by similar palmtops from H-P, Casio and others that adhered to industry standards.
By 1989, Atari's focus on the personal computer had cost it its once-dominant position in the home videogame market, replaced by growing titans Sega and Nintendo. The late-'80s releases of the Atari 7800 and XE game systems had been too little, too late.
In an effort to regain a foothold in the lucrative videogame market it had pioneered, Atari bought the rights to the Lynx, a color hand-held computer that allowed players to hook their games up to each other (up to eight) competition years before Nintendo's GameBoy offered either feature.
In 1993, Atari introducted its final product — once again making history in the process. The Atari Jaguar was the first 64-bit home videogame, and Atari contracted to have IBM build the consoles. Atari didn't have the marketing muscle to make significant inroads into the videogame market, though, and the Jaguar — for all its stunning graphics and sound — never caught on the way Atari hoped or needed.
Three years later, Tramiel merged Atari into JTS, a start-up disk drive manufacturer, and the company pledged support for Jaguar and continuation of the Atari brand — support that failed to materialize. JTS ceased operations within a few years.
Hasbro Interactive purchased all properties and patents of Atari Corp. from JTS for $5 million in 1998, while Midway purchased the rights to the Atari Gaming arcade properties from Time-Warner. Hasbro released many Atari-branded titles from the back catalogue for the PC and the Sega and Sony game consoles, and issued a free public license to develop games for the Jaguar system after pleas from the loyal Jaguar user base. In 2001, Hasbro sold the Atari name to Infogrames — which is being even more aggressive in promoting the Atari brand.
Nolan Bushnell, who took his Atari wealth and used it to start the Chuck E. Cheese video and pizza restaurant chain (which he later sold after the company went bankrupt), remains active in the development of computer technology.
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Computer Space
PONG
PONG simulation
Atari 1040ST with external hard drive