Timeline:1982

1982

Video Games Boom at its height, home video games industry worth 3.8 billion, and the arcade industry is worth 8 billion. By 1985 the industry is down to being worth just 100million.

January - The Commodore Ultimax also known as the MAX machine goes on sale in Japan for around $150. Commodore Japan engineer Yashi Terakura (Terr-ah-koo-rah) created a games console using most of the C64s design hardware, ahead of the C64's actual release in August 1982. Despite boasting a VIC-II with 320x200 16 colour display, a SID chip, and a MOS 6510 CPU running at 1mhz, the MAX originally had 4K of memory. The software team demanded at least 8K in order to have a fully bitmapped screen. Jack Tramiel wanted to hold all of the RAM back for the C64 and instead offered a compromise of 6K. In the end, the unit sold with 2.5k, 2k RAM and 0.5k Video RAM, with no internal ROM - meaning everything had to be loaded from cartridge. Two operating systems were released ; Mini Basic I - which left the user with 510 bytes programmable space, and no load or save function, and Max Basic, which gave the programmer 2047 bytes of memory, and a save function. The machine was a massive flop, yet Commodore insisted all future machines must be backwardly compatible with this devices 22 Game cartridges. The Max was announced for Europe, sometimes listed as the VIC-10, but the project was closed within the year, and Commodore Japan headed by Jacks son Sam Tramiel, instead hacked the VIC-1001 and later hacked the C64, to create unique Japanese versions. Around the same time, at the Winter CES in Las Vegas, Commodore demonstrate a prototype of the Commodore 64.

January - Redwood City based Fortune Systems Corporation introduces the Fortune 32:16 XP computer system. It features a 6 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU and a daughtercard, with 256 kB RAM. The Fortune runs the latest Unix v7, and is the worlds first true multi-tasking computer. It has high-resolution graphics and different hard-disk storage options, with prices also costing a fortune starting at US$5000 for a very basic model up to $15,000 (37k today) for the top end machine with 512k of ram. Fortune would expand the range with the SX series in August of 1985, where it still cost $12,000 for a 1MB Fortune SX45.

February 1982 - Three senior managers from Texas Instruments, Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, design an idea for a new computer on the back of a paper place mat in a Houston pie shop. The name of their new portable computer was the Compaq, a much lighter version of the Osborne 1, but with full IBM compatibility. IBM stood in the way of the Compaq company using their Pre-operating system known as the BIOS, so the Compaq was designed by reverse engineering the IBM property, and redesigning it as their own, to perform the same functions. The Compaq Portable emerged in November of 1982, with shipping in March of 1983, with an Intel 8088 @ 4.77mhz, 128kb of ram, and a tiny 80 colour by 25 row monochrome text mode, and killed off any last hopes for Osborne, which filed for bankruptcy six months later.

March 82 Unveiled in March 1982 and Launched on the 21st April 1982 - The Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16K and 48k machines are released by Sinclair Research - with 16 KB of RAM for £125 and later reduced to £99, or 48k of RAM for £175, reduced later to just £129. The Spectrum features a Zilog Z80 processor, clocked 3.5mhz, with an image resolution of 256x192 pixels in 15 colours plus black. Sinclair ran an ad campaign where you could upgrade your 16K model for 48K, or customers could buy a 32kb ram expansion, which was made using faulty 64 kilobyte chips, with only half of their capacity being available. Around 60,000 issue 1 ZX spectrum computers are manufactured, with a second issue fixing a number of issues, and presented a darker blue grey rubber keyboard. A Plus model appeared in 1984, which was the exact same machine inside a new case design. And a 128k version called the ZX Spectrum 128 was launched in Spain in September of 1985, featuring a three channel AY-3-8912 sound chip, MIDI compatibility, an RS-232 serial and RGB monitor port and improved Basic, in an attempt to dodge a tax on all Spanish computers with 64KB Ram or less. The 128k Spectrum wasnt released to the rest of the world until January of 1986.

April 1982Trip Hawkins leaves his role as Director of Strategy and Marketing on the Apple Lisa project, with an Apple II under his arm and several friends from the company, to found Amazin' Games, or as it would become known, Electronic Arts. Trip wanted to credit the makers of the games and treat them like rock stars or artists, after Activation and new start-up Broderbund had proved successful. After working on a business plan for many months, Trip braved the Dragons Den of venture capitalist Don Valentine, securing office space and funding. They change their name in October to Electronic Arts, borrowing on the name and reputation of the United Artists film company. By the end of the year had moved into a new company headquarters at 1820 Gateway Drive, San Mateo, CA; where they produce and release their first game Archon in 1983.

Around April 82 Jay Miner receives a telephone call from Larry Kaplan (cap-lun) - a former colleague who left Atari to create Activision. Larry is bored waiting for Atari to release the 5200 machine. He wants to leave Activation, and wants to know if Jay would be interested in developing a new very simple computer with him. Jay immediately accepts, and sketches out a rough design. They take the design to Jays boss at ZyMOS Burt Braddock, who helps them create a marketing and business plan to impress ZyMOS main investor, a rich oil baron from Texas called O.W. Rollins.

May - Cyan Engineering 1982 - Atari's Picture Phones, Tab Mouse pointer controller, Dynabook briefcase computer, and Atari's E.R.I.C. POP, a Point Of Purchase store kiosk machine for which Cyan designed a laserdisc interface.

May - The highly popular and successful game Yars' Revenge is released for the Atari 2600. Howard Scott Warshaw, the game's designer, got the names "Yar" and "Razak" by spelling "Ray Kassar" backwards. The game saves Atari from financial ruin and Warshaw becomes Atari's hottest property.

May 82 Sun Microsystems releases the Sun-1 computer, with a 10mhz M68k, SunOS 0.9, Unix, 256k, Sun MMU, and Multi-tasking. The Sun was built by students at Stanford University and represents the future of the computer industry. It was inspired by the Alto but used far cheaper and smaller components, with Ethernet and UART 16-bit serial, and came as a desktop or a rackmount machine.

May - O.W. Rollins, owner of ZyMOS is very happy with the plan for a new computer. Rollins and three cardiologists had set up ZyMOS in order to design custom chips for pacemakers, which was funded by Intermedics. The enormous cost of high volume chip production forced the company to look for a way to use them beyond simple pacemakers, and they wanted to invest $7 million in the development of their own video games machine. Jay Miner would be Vice President designing the hardware and producing it at the Zymos Labs, and Larry Kaplan would be President, and would co-ordinate the software which the machine would use. Somewhere before this time, Jay Miner is introduced to a military flight simulator at Singer Link by his friend Al Pound. Jay gets to use the controls and experience the best flight experience which money could buy. Jay wants to bring this experience into the home, and using the power of the new Motorola 68K processor, it might be possible. He found an article about blitters in a computer magazine and this seemed an ideal way to move graphics around quickly without interupting the CPU, and would improve the smoothness of animation of flight simulators. Jay also thought it was important that games and flight sims should have 4 independent channels of stereo sound.

June 1982, O.W. Rollins begins a nationwide search for a new President of the company and recruits Dave Morse from Tonka Toys in Minnesota. David Shannon Morse is recruited as Chief Executive Officer, who leaves his role as vice-president of marketing at Tonka Toys. Dave is well connected, and starts looking after the investors involved with Amiga. The investors and Dave Morse think that a low cost heavily stripped down version of the computer should be available purely for running video games. Jay agrees, as long as a full spec home computer version is available with lots of expandability.

July 27, 1982 Ray Kassar calls Howard Scott Warshaw to commission him as developer of ET. Kassar informed him that Spielberg asked for Warshaw specifically to development the needed game, to be completed by September 1 to meet with the xmas schedule. Warshaw was offered $200,000 and a trip to Hawaii if he could do it, and Atari needed to secure the $21 million they paid for the licence.

August 1982 - Commodore launches C64 - listed in the Guinness World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time, officially selling over 17 million units, with units shipping in September. The Commodore Commodore 64, or the Commodore C64 as it was known, became a hit thanks to its 64kilobytes of ram, an unprecedented amount inside a hobbyist micro-computer at that time, allowing it to operate business applications and keep up with the big companies. Thanks to its 1mhz 6510, its 320x200 display in 16 colours, and ever increasingly lowering price point, the C64 found its way into homes and offices everywhere. Users could upgrade with a whole line of inflated priced peripherals, such as a monitor, printer and disk drive, and still have spare change from a thousand dollars. The basic 64 went on sale for $595 (which is still around 1500 in todays money), but Commodore lowered the price to $300 12 months later in June 1983. Third generation computers like the 64 with interface devices are now superseding their second generation cartridge cousins.

August - Coleco release the ColecoVision. This was a second generation rom cartridge system using the Zilog Z80 processor @ 3.58 mhz, a Texas Instruments video processor, 16KB of video ram, 1K of main ram, and everything booting from 8,16,24 or 32kb catridges. Initially the device had a copy protection system built in, which companies like Parker Bros and Activision bypassed in order to market games for the machine. 2 million ColecoVision units were sold before production stopped in 1985.September - Atari Corporate Research establishes a New York City Research Laboratory, headed by Atari VP research and product development Steven T. Mayer, which will continue his work in partnership with Warner Communications Inc. (WCI) to develop advanced products for the market. It will take another 8 months before the WCI/NY Lab is up to full speed.

September 1982 Cardiologist investors at Zymos are still keen on a new computer. so Larry Kaplan and Jay Miner and Dave Morse choose Hi-Toro as the company name (because it sounded both high-tech and Texan to impress their backer), and move into Building 7 , 3350 Scott Bvd, Santa Clara, CA 95051, which is leased by Braddock. The business plan was simple, to build a machine 10 years ahead of its time, and then spend the next 10 years developing its successor. The company also plan to release Atari 2600 games under the US trade name of Amiga in order to fund development of the first new machine. Later September - After recently securing a financial deal which would kickstart their new venture, Dave Morse heavily suggested they invite Nolan Bushnell in as part of the Amiga Board, as they had both worked with Bushnell before at Atari, Jay amd Larry think this is a good idea. So Larry Kaplan is asked to convince Nolan. Kaplan neets with Nolan, but gets talked into starting up a new venture with Nolan instead of Jay Miner. Larry Kaplan then leaves Amiga Inc. Dave Morse becomes the new President of Amiga.Inc. Dave offers the full-time position of vice president and Chief Engineer to Jay Miner, who was still working part-time for Zymos. Jay accepts to work on this full time as long as he gets to build his computer, his way.October, Larry Kaplan walks into Ray Kassars office and talks about his ideas and dreams for a new computer. Kassar talks him into working with their software department instead, so the whole idea of the new Atari computer with Larry Kaplan vanishes and never happens

October 1982- Hi Toro then split their company into two divisions; a joystick and peripheral section run by their third employee and new director of marketing, Don Reisinger; which would develop products for the existing console market. And a second project codenamed 'Lorraine', named after Dave Morse's wife, and the designers would begin work designing the new 16bit 4th generation computer. The ground floor offices of their building were decorated with posters and low-cost consumer add-on products, while the basement was transformed into a secret set of underground workshop areas. Dave Morse then hires a group of marketeers and manufacturers to support the Atari peripherals division, while Jay Miner gets busy hiring a technical team to design the Amiga. Ronald H. Nicholson was a hardware engineer over at Apple computers working on the new Macintosh project. Steve Jobs is handling the project personally, and insists every part and details should be manufactured in house. He refuses to entertain any possibility of colour or sound being introduced into the Mac design, and insists it should be monochrome and mute; which deeply depresses Ron Nicholson, who has been thinking about ways to design audio and graphics chips. Jobs demands a new custom clock chip, so Ron goes to Synertek, the guys at Synertek gave him Jay Miners phone number. After completing the clock chip for the Mac 128k computer, Jay talks about his dreams of a colour computer over lunch. Ron is very keen to test his new ideas; and promptly resigns from his job at Apple. Ron is employee number 11 at Amiga, and becomes Jay Miners first assistant as Director of Hardware Engineering. Another friend and system architect of the Atari 400/800 Joe Decuir then joins the team from Standard Technologies; a design company he formed after leaving Atari, and becomes the third designer of the Amiga chipset..

On November the 19th the three Amiga designers Jay Miner, Ron Nicholson and Joe Decuir meet to plan the new computer. Together, the three Amigos design almost the whole computer, except for a few small details.December: David Morse and Jay Miner change the company name to Amiga Corporation because the name Hi-Toro was already taken by a lawnmower manifacturer Toro. They decided they didnt want to use Letters or numbers in their name, as this might lead them to be associated as a computer company; which was an issue further down the line if they wanted to make other products. They also wanted the company name to start with the letter A in order to appear before Atari in the telephone books and yellow pages of that time. Apple was still a fledgling company compared to the mighty Atari and IBM. The name Amiga was chosen because it was spanish/portuguese for Girlfriend, and it had a nice sounding unique name with two AAs, which made it sound exciting and Going Places. The name was placed into italics to emphasise this movement.

December - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial adventure video game published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600, is published.. It was designed by Howard Scott Warshaw in six weeks, and causes an unsettling in the video games home consumer market, after many buyers return their cartridge and demand their money back, and this is the first sign that the video games industry, now worth billions, is about to implode.