What if Jack Tremiel stayed at Commodore in 84?

[tim99uk]

I have just read through the extreamly informative and well written "Faster than light: the 16 bit revolution" and "Once Apon Atari" as well as the "into the storm" on the commodore side of the isle...I can help but wonder..What if Jack Tremiel stayed at Commodore in 1984?

Would James Morgan, who was only on station from sept '83 to July '84, have been able to turn Atari around with more time?

Before He arrived the Kassar regime had mis manged Atari whose "new products" were the 1200XL and 5200 console.. but of which suffered from flawed design and launch. The ET cart did not help...

From what I can find Morgan oversaw the modernisation of the 400/800/1200XL from the Kassar regime to get the 600XL/800XL launched and attempted to get production costs under control by moving production overseas. What I am saying is that there were big changes under the surface with a rationalised product that cheaper to produce.

What else was he doing in his short stay? Would the promised chip designs from Amiga have morphed into a PC killing Atari Amiga?

Just wondering!

[Cyprian]

My two (three actually) cents:

1) Our lovely Atari ST would not have been released.

2) There were no any chance to release any Atari with Lorrain chipsets as Atari Inc was actually dead in 1984:
- 1982: Over $300 million profit
- 1983: $538 million losses
- 1984: $611.7 million losses
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/32450 ... nt-4897933

3) Lorrain chipsets weren't "PC killer", as they were dedicated to console segment. Even in that segment they did not successes:
- Amiga unit sold: 4,9 millions ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXCWYKSjHnI )
- MegaDrive unit sold: 30,75 millions
- NES unit sold: 61,01 millions
- SNES: 49 millions
- C64: 12 millions

[tim99uk]

1).
I could be way off base here
Back in 1983/4, from my understanding, Atari's two 16 bit projects was the M68000 Sierra project another was "16 bit games machine" pitched by Jay Milner that did get off the ground due to Atari's idiot management..so he quit and formed HiTorro aka Amiga corp to work on the Amiga Lorraine project. The original Atari agreement says that Atari would pay $500K to Amiga and in return Atari would get first dibs on the new chipset to sell as a games system for one year and after that as a computer system 1450XLD aka project Micky. So there might have been an Atari "Amiga" 16bit eventually.. but not the ST per se.

The real question is would the ST ever been born? Shiraz Shivji was in charge of the 16 bit Pet900/Z8000 that was being based on the M68000 and the ST. If Tremiel stayed at Commodore, who is to that that Shiraz would not have ended up with a Commodore ST? It seems plausible that the lessons learnt on the Pet900 at least provided an inspiration on the ST project as it was the same engineers on both.

Maybe both the ST and Amiga would have been built regardless of what JT did?

2). I agree that the financial performance of Atari was abysmal in 1983/4 but the main cause of that was removed with Ray Kassar ..my question remains.. could Morgan have turned it around? I suspect that it would have gone bust.

3). It was always intended that Lorraine would be a games console for 1 year and then be turned into a computer.

As I say, I could be way off base here and I only say the above based on what I read ( I was 13 years old and 3000 miles away from this when it happened )

#peace!