Curt Vendel & Marty Goldberg, Atari Historians

Welcome to Antic, the Atari 8-bit podcast. I’m Randy Kindig, one of the hosts of the podcast, and your host for this episode. To give you a little background on this interview and where it came from, I also host another podcast on retrocomputing called Floppy Days, where I cover various vintage computers in the order that they were introduced. I recently covered the Atari 400 & 800 computers and had asked Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg, Atari historians, to help cover the history portion of the podcast. I used excerpts from that interview on the podcast, but only used a small portion of the interview for that. So, I thought I would air the entire interview, since it covers Atari computers, on Antic.

In this interview we discuss the history of the 400 & 800 in-depth, as well as discussing the passing of Steve Bristow, an Atari icon, the status of the Atari history books by Curt & Marty, and much more.

This interview was conducted February 25, 2015 via Skype.

Teaser Quotes:

“the whole idea was to make a more advanced Atari VCS, Atari 2600”

“when you bring a microprocessor in there, a 6507, and then you're trying to make them as intelligent a peripheral as possible, it can add to the expense”

“When Atari designed the 400/800, it really was designed as a consumer computer”

“there's an ad going around now, it's popular on Twitter, to make fun of how Atari says the computer will never become obsolete”

“they only viewed Atari as an entertainment asset”

Links:

Retro Gamer Magazine

RETRO Magazine

“Atari Inc: Business is Fun" at Amazon

Atari Book site

Atari Museum

Steve Bristow