| Title | Ex-Atari Employee Dumps Email Logs from 1982-1992 | |
| Date | Thursday November 26 2015, @07:04AM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the atari-history-safari dept. | ||
I worked for Atari and then one of its successor companies (Atari Games) for 13 years, designing hardware for coin-operated video games.
When I arrived in 1979, software for the games was cross-assembled on two DEC PDP-11/20 systems in batch mode. We had two computer operators who would take your marked-up listing, do the edits, and run the program. If it actually ran without any fatal errors, it would produce a listing and a paper tape.
Paper tape? (Well, at least it wasn't punched cards.)
On a good day the process would take less than an hour. On a bad day, when someone else's project had been designated as "hot" because it was about to go out on Field Test or be Released, you might get only two runs that day.
You then took the Paper Tape to your emulator which had a Paper Tape reader.
The emulators were home-made and were in a plywood cabinet painted black which is why they were called "Black Boxes." Programmers could load the program from paper tape, run it, set breakpoints, and examine memory as well as write to it. It was all done in Hex code, so people became adept at hand assembling small fragments of code. There was no way of saving the hand-patched program, so power interruptions were usually followed by much wailing, yelling, and gnashing of teeth. (To be fair, the few commercially available emulators weren't any better.)
Because the Black Box did not contain a built-in logic analyzer we had a few HP Logic Analyzers on carts that people dragged around from project to project.
It was common for a Programmer returning from lunch discovering that his analyzer had been hijacked. (The Programmers were all guys then.) The result was more wailing, yelling, and gnashing of teeth, "Who took my HP?"
Click through to the article to read the rest plus the email logs. If you ever wondered what is was like to work for one of the earliest successful console companies, here's your chance.
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