Why didn't Atari ST take off in the USA?

[Desty]

I only ever upgrade through absolute necessity and my current Mitac Mio 168 Pocket PC released in 2003/4 that I bought in May 2005, is now struggling to run the latest TomTom maps (well v7 maps).

The ultimate frustrating testament to throwaway deviceism is when you buy something like a printer/router/GPS device, then 2 years later when you need to upgrade the firmware or download a new map or something, the damn thing isn't even listed on the manufacturer's website so you can't get any support for it, or you end up digging on their Taiwanese site for archives of the drivers.
Just no. If you release a device, don't take down the supporting webpages/files when you release a successor 6 months later!!

Pehaps the only 'product' that will save them, is a good dose of 'real life'!! You know, it occoured to me that "once we get to computing power that mimics 3D reality perfectly" and its just like real life, will kids just put down the VR and go for a walk or run in the park instead. Why simulate, if its just like for like? Its just as realistic as the game, and you dont need hardware. Will things come full circle?

There's a great play on this in a Simpsons episode from 1998:

% Moments later, Bart and Lisa are dressed in their yard-working clothes.
% They soon get to work. But shortly after, they're both back inside lazing about.

Marge: [proceeding to yard] Kids, I made some lemonade for you.
Bart: [from living room couch, off-screen] Sounds great.
Lisa: Bring it in here.
Marge: [realizes they're inside] What the...? What are you doing in
here?
Bart: Work was hard, so we quit.
Marge: What?!
Lisa: Hard work made us quit.
Marge: I see. Well, then, no chores, no allowance.
Lisa: Okay. We get our room and board free anyways.

...later...

Homer: Ooh, ooh, I want to see Lobster Boy and Shrimp Girl!
Lisa: I want some fried sugar!
Bart: I want to go to the Yard Work Simulator.
Marge: But when I ask you to do yard work... [Marge sighs heavily]

[AtariFan]

That's what I call an interesting thread and discussion .

@bid + @ wood_jl: I totally agree with you.

[Kprince65]

5reasons

Amiga, IBM, Nintendo, Sega & turbo graphix 16

To top it off it was mostly European like the speccy. I didn't even hear about Spectrum or ST till around the mid nineties!

[jedidiah]

not really? until Windows came out PCee's were at a standstill! then they went backwards!

The STe was '89? after the great 88 thats a quick turnaround? megas addresed the business market and TT's dtp? they cannot really develop faster than the market? not being tied to Atari Games if you look at the hardware they were using in the arcades it was all new and unproven. DSP's were only released pre-90's and yet I have one in a Mega!

I think they needed to let people get more hands on? use the demo scene, I'm sure more Midi network games would have gone down a storm!

In 93, the Falcon was stuck at 16MHz & limited to VGA. Yes, it has a DSP but that was probably very limited use in commercial except niche market.
In contrast, Wintel was already on 66MHz on 486DX2, and Pentium was at 60MHz by mid 93. SVGA (800x600) was a norm in 93 and used heavily for the large spreadsheets for commercial.

...

Those numbers looked seductive but Windows couldn't get out of it's own way and it crippled what should have been much faster machines.

You had to have insane RAM by ST standards for Wintel to seem as fast.

[wongck]

Those numbers looked seductive but Windows couldn't get out of it's own way and it crippled what should have been much faster machines.

You had to have insane RAM by ST standards for Wintel to seem as fast.

It's not Windoze... it's the way the programming way was heading..... object 0riented which does it makes programming easier, seriously?
At what expense? Memory.

[danboid]

Perhaps one day there will be another Atari like period in computing discovery. This will probably be when a sea change in technology is developed by an innovative company, that attracts talent, innovation and risk. With the likes of Nolan Bushnell, Jay Miner, Gary Kildall, Shiraz Shivji, J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, and Ira Valenski making it beautiful to use. The addition alone of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST into the graphical typeset subsystem is clear enough that these designers were "free-thinkers" and innovators, breaking with convention. Discordianism in computing, and in some ways more innovating that Apple, although Apple had flair. Atari had hardware genius IMHO.

Praise "Bob"!

My first Linux distro was Slackware btw.

[Jinroh]

A lot of great reasons in the thread, I don't really have any additional info, but I just had a memory. Nick Arcade game show, from like 1991 on Nickelodeon. They were giving away Amiga 500s as prizes. Doesn't surprise me since they used Amigas to do the "Virtual Reality" part of the show's finale where kids would go into a video game.

Also I think on Clarissa Explains it all (old Nickelodeon teen sitcom show). She would make video games based on problems in the episodes. I think those were Amiga too.

Probably helped push some Amigas, though a shame they weren't STs.

[1st1]

I see a lot of personal views and history here and if we add all of that this already explains a small part of the unsuccess of Atari in the US. But I miss a big thing. From 1987 to 1989 Atari owned the Federated Group retail stores, Atari seems liked to have copied the success of Radio Shack with that. That time frame should have been important to Atari, the 8 Mhz design still was top notch, 1040ST and Mega ST was available for more professional formfactor, better than the homecomputer design of 260/520 with external drives. So they tried to concentrate their selling channels on that shop chain but it failed due to some problematic business. And other dealers got less to nothing to sell what we can read above, but anyhow the strategy with Federated Group failed and in 1989 what ended up in that they sold these stores. But at that time of 1989 the train of the cheap 286/386 PC with Windows 2.0 and 3.0 as the Solitaire and Minesweeper game platform already departed from the trainstation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Corporation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Group#Atari