Falcon Designer

[Mathias]

from the closed thread.

I already ask this question many times before but without answer

Who design Falcon?? I can not find one person name.

We know that Shiraz Shivji was main engineer behind ST and TT (they share lot of common); Shiraz left Atari before TT hit market.

Falcon is quite different than ST/TT. Who design it, who led project? Is Falcon Videl derivate of Transputer Blossom ?

If we can belive the very latest ST-Computer magazine from 2003, page 11, it was "Richard Miller" who "later designed the Falcon, and founded the company NuON". The funny part is the picture of Richard Miller here is with a Transputer-Board.

Seems to fit with this informations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_Labs

[calimero]

ok, first I will make one BIG OFFTOPIC post in Ted Nelson style:

- what we have today is CRAP, CRAP, CRAP. we have internet but it is:


it's cabbage (aka serbian slang for MESS!)

"HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management." by Ted Nelson


There is so much info on net but it is very hard to check what info is correct, to find what is original origin of information... wikipedia is closest to ultimate goal:
- classified everything, bring order to chaos
but it is not enought.

---

I search for lot of history articles about Atari and all people and companies related to Atari and I have huge database in my mind but I do not have proper tool to be able to share with other.

Ted Nelsons ZIGZAG could be answer, but implementation of his idea is really mess:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj9vqVvHPc


my idea is to make (btw THIS IS *first, smallest step*) some kind of visualization of Wikipedia data.

something like this:



From this overview you can easily see that e.g. John Mathieson start working in Sinclair, was responsible for Jaguar and now works on Tegra chips.

It would be great if I could see what everything Richard Miller do in few seconds.

BUT usually you will need bunch of time to dig all over internet to collect all information. Even on wikipedia you need to open dozen of pages to "get a picture".



OK, now let me explain in more detail how this visualization should work.

1. it should look like timeline in OS X TimeMachine - every year should be one layer (you will see future or past events in dimm)
2. there are only to kinds of data: subjects (white circles) and verbs (grey circles)
3. every verbs must have time
4. subjects and verbs can have reference, links.. and bunch of different data behind them

5. thats it


btw I think that Google had something similar - visual representation of your search with circle and lines but I can not find any trace of that. It was somewhere in 2004-5.

THANK YOU FOT YOURS PATION

[Mathias]

Häh?
Sorry I do not understand.

[calimero]

It was my rant about internet

Internet hold all information but it is very hard to find some facts (like who design Falcon).

And that was my idea how we could improve it


Return to topic: do you have any links about Richard M. and Falcon?

[Dal]

Just stumbled across this site:
http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/interactive.html

[DarkLord]

Just stumbled across this site:
http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/interactive.html

Michael does a good job on this stuff. He also maintains a lot of the
8bit lists, vendors, FAQs, ect, and posts them monthly in the newsgroups.

Dang it, I still want a thorough book covering the Tramiel era (8bits thru the
Jaguar) similar to how the Commodore stuff was covered in "On The Edge".

Or a DVD series.

[Mathias]

do you have any links about Richard M. and Falcon?

No, I don´t. It was the following article with an picture of Richard Miller (like the first one with Uwe Bärtels), not connecte to the text itselve, and just a sentence below the picture. http://stcarchiv.de/stc2003/06_rueckblick.php

I just wanted to give you that "offline information" as it is nowhere else written.

[calimero]

not exactly Falcon but TT father:

Roy Good

"1989 February: Atari Manager of Product Development Roy Good would now be Atari VP Product Engineering (replacing Shiraz Shivji)."

http://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/interactive.html

"VP Product Engineering
Atari Corporation
Public Company; 501-1000 employees; ATA; Computer Games industry
January 1987 – March 1989 (2 years 3 months) Sunnyvale, California

Hired to lead development of 32-bit successor to Atari ST, ultimately named the Atari TT. Included emulation of Atari ST as well as a VME bus slot and a port of UNIX System V in conjunction with Unisoft. Supervised vendor relationships for custom ASICs, Motorola 32-bit components, UNIX and applications.
Also involved with the Atari ABAQ ATW800 Transputer workstation."

http://www.linkedin.com/in/royjgood

10x Dal

...still searching for Falcon hardware designers...

[wongck]

Roy Good

"1989 February: Atari Manager of Product Development Roy Good would now be Atari VP Product Engineering (replacing Shiraz Shivji)."

Drop him an email. may be he knows?

[calimero]

email sent :

Hello,
my name is Milan Kovač and I am Atari user since 1986. I grow up with Atari

I am trying to find out who are designers behind Atari Falcon and I found that you replace Shiraz Shivji (father of ST) at Atari.

It would be very interesting if you would have time to wrote some stories from Atari. There is lot of people that would like to read anything you have to say

Recently Landon Dyer wrote story about porting and finishing GEMDOS for ST back in 1985. http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=995

and beside, Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg writing book about Atari (first part will be pre-Tramield), maybe you could contribute for second part (16/32 bit era)?



Sorry for taking your time, hope you will find some spare to share some inside stories from Atari

AND THANK YOU FOR ATARI TT - it's beautiful machine!

Best regards,
Milan Kovač

[wongck]

Good luck. Hope you get an reply

[calimero]

Here is answer

"Subject: Falcon 030 Released #4--Boston
Date: Sat Sep 26 13:05:01 1992

...

Richard Miller, Vice President of Research and Development was the
next to speak. [I noted his British accent and asked him if he was from Atari
UK when I spoke to him after the presentation. He came from Perihelion, which
was involved in the Atari Transputer Workstation OS, and then did a brief
stint at Atari UK. By the way, he said the ATW is a dead project.] Mr. Miller
led the development of the Falcon 030 system architechture, and he envisioned
a computer that his mother could utilize."

http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet ... le.php?318

[calimero]

more infos...

"...
In 1988, Shiraz Shivji left ST, the lead developer of the successful Atari, the company. He was replaced by Roy Good, who should be mainly concerned with the development of TT. Due to an error by Atari Germany reached its specifications for the TT to the press, and as a result of any Atari magazine reported in detail about the plans for this new flag ship. Back at CeBIT 1989, the experts expected the new Atari TT, Atari introduced its first laptop but instead STacy the removable disk drive 44 and the Mega File version of the TOS .4 l for its ST-series before. The TT was followed as mentioned before on the Atari Fair in August, with the six prototypes were shown still far from a final version, then worked as the high resolution mode Monochröm still not satisfactory.

Good Roy had left the company several weeks before the show again. His position was Richard Miller, who later would become known as the father of the Falcon and now developed a super-secret chip for the company VMLabs. By Richard Miller, the further development of the Atari-UNIX was promoted. Atari did not want just another UNIX variant to the market, but also improve the usability of the system up to that very cryptic. So, for example, the entire system administration with a graphical user interface more intuitive. To develop these tools, used the development department SUN workstations.

..."

http://www.stcarchiv.de/stc1999/12_ataristory.php

----

"As with Apple's UNIX port of the UNIX kernel for the Atari of the British company Unisoft has been delivered."

I always found very interesting that Atari few times outperform Apple!
like ST vs Mac: ST was 2.5x cheaper, faster, had better ports, bigger resolution, colors, more memory...
or in modernization of OS: MiNT vs Mac OS. Atari manage to bring unix like OS, but still TOS compatible while Apple fail! (after failing, they bought NeXT)
or STbook vs PowerBook ...

[wongck]

Interesting reads. Good finds.

[calimero]

Interesting reads. Good finds.

ah... yes : "Good finds" (spent hours and hours on digging)

I hate internet! I only now understand Ted Nelson:

"HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.[5]"


...now back to digging ...

[wongck]

...now back to digging ...

"Don’t bail. The best of the gold’s at the bottom of barrels of crap."
Dr Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture

[calimero]

THE FALCON 030 / ATARI CORPORATION REALTIME CONFERENCE
FEATURING SAM TRAMIEL, PRESIDENT OF ATARI CORPORATION
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 1992

...

<[SteveJ] S.JACOBS6> Would you please name some of Falcon's designers?

<STRAMIEL> You mean our engineers?

<[SteveJ] S.JACOBS6> Yes.

<STRAMIEL> The Atari Falcon was totally designed in house at Atari, and it
is not our practice to give out individuals names. So many people are,
and were involved in the project. They all worked very hard to bring this
to a reality!

... http://www.programmersheaven.com/downlo ... pView.aspx

[calimero]

some more infos about TT and Roy Good:

"The CeBit 1989 came and went without anything we would have seen the Atari TT or Unix. Only months later, on the Atari Fair in Dusseldorf, the TT has been shown. But no Unix. Only some of the Unix developers were there and talked about it. Very unproductive. The reason was that the new boss Roy Good Hardware Atari had already left and been replaced by Richard Miller was. In September 1989, still working on TT and on Unix. ..."

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... 4Q7gEwBDge

it is look like that Roy left Atari before TT was finished.

and it is look like that Atari bet on UNIX and not TOS.


EDIT: this is translation of upper link: http://wiki.tanalorn.ath.cx/oswiki/oper ... ders.story (or german version is translation of this )

"Roy Good came from a company called Fortune Systems, which was an early bird in the UNIX workstation market. A few people followed him from there: Ralph Rodrigues and Henry Plummer, who was the manager of the UNIX group. Other people in the group were Alan Char, Michael Nowicki and Bob Hudson, who was responsible for the X Windows port."

[calimero]

this is also interesting:

"At the (last) Atari Fair in Duesseldorf in the summer of ’92, Atari president Sam Tramiel showed the final version of the Falcon030 to the public. Mulitmedia for the masses was born. It was a very successful and exciting show. Unfortunately it would take until December for it to ship to the retailers. The first shake up of Atari happened that fall when shortly after Atari Germany moved from its old location in Raunheim to its newly built building in Schwalbach, Jack Tramiel himself asked Alwin Stumpf, the head of Atari Germany, to leave. Jack explained to the employees that he believed in the consumer marker while Alwin was trying to drive the company into the professional market. "

http://web.archive.org/web/200302141929 ... falcon.htm



later, Alwin said that Tramiels want to focus on Wintel (PC compatibles) while he want to focus on TOS machines.

[calimero]

and some more regarding ATW, Richard Miller and Blossom:

"So here are the specs:

- T800 transputer at 20 MHz (a T800 runs 10 MIPS, has 4K internal memory
and a 32 bit built-in floating point processor
- 4Mb RAM (120ns)
- Graphic modi: 0: 1280 x 960, 16 colours out of 4096 colours
1: 1024 x 768, 256 / 16 million
2: 640 x 480, 256 / 16 million
3: 512 x 480, 32 bits/pixel (true colour)
- High speed pipelined raster-op Blitter (Blossom), optimised for XWindows.
(Note 1)

...

Note 1; Blossom was a design of Richard Miller. Unfortually nobody was
able to take advantage of it since it was hard to understand and it was
not used for the XWindows inplementation. I did some tests with Blossom
and found out that it made pixel errors in some of the modi and some of
it's blitting functions didn't work correctly. Richard left the project
in an early stage and became Atari's VP Technology and was never able to
finish it. (No bad words about Richard, he is the best designer I ever
worked with and I found it an honour that I have been in the position to
work with him. In fact I see some of the ATW knowhow back in the Jaguar
of today).

Regards,

Wilfred F. Kilwinger"

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en& ... F2na_gqHrU

[calimero]

and some interview with Jeff Minter (October 20th 2002)

"<}Yak{> My best mate at school designed the Jaguar.

really? (getting back to the subject) what happened?

<}Yak{> Well, I mean he was instrumental in bringing it to market. he designed the Nuon... the Jag was of course mainly John M's work... (John Mathieson currently works for nVidia - ed) but Richard Miller is an old schoolmate. We were mates at school, and ended up coming into the biz from entirely different trajectories. One day I went in to Atari and there he was, having just designed the Falcon. I'm like "Hey Rich" and he's like "Hey Jeff" .

<}Yak{> I worked on John's previous designs too... he was part of "Flare 1" baack when they designed the guts of the Konix Nultisystem."


http://pt.emuunlim.com/interview.htm

[tresas]

Hi to all.
im now reading an article in an old Greek computer magazine (November 1987) titled : "Jobs + Tramiel =?".
-"There are strong rumours according to Atlantic association group, that Steve Jobs (former head of Apple and current head of Next) is not only in touch with Tramiel but there are all ready results of this co-operation! Specifically, if the rumours are true, there is all ready a graphics handling processor which both are going to use, each for his own product."

I wonder if the article is referring to the Atari sparrow (or Falcon later). Is it possible that the falcon was manufactured using Next technology?
I notice that some of Next computers used similar configurations to Atari Falcon!
Is this Possible?

[calimero]

Hi to all.
im now reading an article in an old Greek computer magazine (November 1987) titled : "Jobs + Tramiel =?".
-"There are strong rumours according to Atlantic association group, that Steve Jobs (former head of Apple and current head of Next) is not only in touch with Tramiel but there are all ready results of this co-operation! Specifically, if the rumours are true, there is all ready a graphics handling processor which both are going to use, each for his own product."

first thing that cross my mind is: "Blossom" - ATW800/ABAQ video card. and ATW was presented at Comdex, November 1987.
Kodak buy 100 pieces of ATW probably because of good graphic capabilities.

beside, there are infos that Falcon video is based on Blossom.

I wonder if the article is referring to the Atari sparrow (or Falcon later). Is it possible that the falcon was manufactured using Next technology?
I notice that some of Next computers used similar configurations to Atari Falcon!
Is this Possible?

similarities are: DSP and MC68xxx - that is it.

Falcon start life as a prototype 030 board inside ST.

---

off-topic: does anyone know when Shiraz S. start to work after he left Atari?
I remember that some of Atari engineering go to Cirrus Logic or Tseng Labs... (not sure which one, but that company made popular VGA card for PC).

EDIT: yes, it was Shiraz and Cirrus L.

there is lot information about Shiraz: http://www.zoominfo.com/#!search/profil ... id=profile

[bid]

I would like to know more about the Falcon 040 MicroBox ?

[calimero]

I would like to know more about the Falcon 040 MicroBox ?

Me too... :Df

I barely can wait fir book "Atari Corp. Bussines is war"