Postby mikro » Wed Jul 05, 2017 8:38 am
Hi guys,
one day I was browsing some old Atari documents and noticed a name I had seen before -- Jerry Smith. Quick search has revealed it's one of the Atari's main guys after the Tramiels, i.e. a person who had to approve every hardware modification, PCB change, issue new revisions, talk to the HW/SW guys and the Tramiels, simply to make sure the production of the given Atari goes as planned.
One way or another I managed to get in touch with him and he agreed to participate in an interview (still not sure whether it will be written, via skype or both). So I'd like to brainstorm some questions, as the title suggests, he spent the worst and best times at Atari, during production of the TT/MegaSTE (perhaps only took over), Lynx, Falcon and Jaguar right to the bitter end.
So far I've been thinking about:
- the famous "how many Falcons is out there" :)
- what was the deal with C-Lab, did they really produce new units (I think so) or just bought old stock from Atari
- who was responsible for cancellation of the Falcon? Was it because of poor market performance, lack of developers (moved to Jaguar?)
- can you remember the Falcon hardware engineering team, who had designed it?
- can you think of some way to obtain ASICs, schematics etc for the Falcon ICs?
- were there any plans to stay in Jaguar business after the JTS merge?
- is it true that the Tramiels had ordered to destroy content on all developer machines after their demise?
As you can see, mine are mostly Falcon specific, so anything Lynx/Jaguar/Tramiel related is more than welcome. Remember it's stuff from 20 years ago so have mercy. :)
Last edited by
mikro on Wed Jul 05, 2017 9:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.