From: dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: A letter to Dave Baggett
Date: 30 Dec 1992 17:17:43 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.ai.mit.edu

In article <1hq32sINNsuv@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> aa399@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Len Stys) writes:
>Dave, why don't you just leave it alone?

Because people still say things like:

>I really own it because of people within the Atari Community.
>They just can't be beat.

Those people are leaving!  Your developers are jumping ship!  Your
shareware authors are getting sick of Atari and going to other
platforms.  Jeff Minter's done Llamatron for the PC -- that's a
bad sign for the community right there, isn't it?

The number of Atari owners is dwindling at a steady rate.  If those of
you who can still find it within your hearts to support Atari to the
death don't find any way to make Atari get a grip, you will see your
community shrink to almost nothing.

It's a lot less fun when no one's left to write ambitious new software.

>I have a lot of good friends that own Atari computers and I find them
>to be very spirited and enthusiastic.  I can't say the same for
>those that seem to think completely with logic saying, 
>
>"If Atari's management is getting themselves together, sell your
>computer and go with the flow--IBM compatibles."

See?  You ask why I contuinue to argue about this stuff, and then
write things that indicate you have an overly optimisitc view of
the situation.  The fate of Atari machines is in Atari's hands,
not yours.  If Atari allows themselves to self-destruct, there
won't be any commercial devlopers left.  What percantage of the
group is going to stick around once the Atari is REALLY an
orphan machine?

>If Atari had very GOOD management with a poor Atari Community, I'd sell,
>of course it would be nice for both...

You are typcasting.  Atari owners are as diverse a lot as PC owners.
Do you think all PC owners are mindless droids?  All Amiga owners are
childish brats?  These stereotypes whiz through this group
frighteningly often.

>I still think that clones are pretty damn boring.

With my 486 I can compile things really quickly, run a full Emacs
implementation that is considerably faster than Tempus, archive and
unarchive things blindingly quickly, and program it to put pretty
pictures on the screen and make neat sounds.

In short, I like it for the same reasons I like my ST, except that it's
a lot faster and you can buy 5,000 times as much software for it.  Not
only that, but there's some chance in hell I might actually be able to
make a living writing software for it.

Clones are not boring at all to me.  There's exciting new free,
shareware (Llamatron!), and commercial software coming out every day
that will run on my "boring clone."  There are hundreds of neato cards
I can put in it, like a studio quality sound board, an ethernet card, a
graphics accelerator that supports TIGA (a standard -- imagine that),
a RISC coprocessor board, etc. 

Atari can't just sit there and watch the world fall apart while their
devoted fans make excuses for them.  They need to start making
competitive machines again, and they need to start selling those
machines.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
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