ANTIC The Atari 8-bit Podcast

Pab Sungenis, developer   Hi, I’m Randy Kindig and this is an interview-only episode of Antic, The Atari 8-bit computer podcast.  Our guest for this show is Pab Sungenis, a long-time (and current) developer for the Atari 8-bits.  A long time ago, Pab wrote a popular piece of bulletin board software called AtariLink BBS.  He also developed an off-line mail reader.  He was also more recently involve...

John-Michael Battaglia   John-Michael Battaglia worked as a copywriter at Atari for about a year from 1981 through 1982, writing manuals and box copy for Atari 2600 and 5200 video games. He wrote the manuals for Atari 5200 Football, Space Dungeon, WaterWorld, Phoenix, and Adventure. He later worked at Catalyst, Nolan Bushnell’s incubator for technology startups.   This interview took place March 2...

Steve Molyneux, German Software Development Manager   Steve Molyneux was Atari’s Software Development Manager in Hamburg, Germany from 1981 through 1984. He was responsible for the European side of Atari Program Exchange, and launching games at European trade shows.   Parts of this interview discuss adult situations, and are not appropriate for children.   This interview occurred on April 13, 2015...

Fred D'Ignazio, prolific writer   Fred D'Ignazio wrote more than 20 computer books, including Atari in Wonderland and The Atari Playground. He hosted four television shows about computers and robots, and was the "gadget guru" on Good Morning America. He was an associate editor and columnist for Compute! magazine, where he wrote the columns World Inside The Computer and On The Road With Fred D'Igna...

Cassie Maas, Atari Marketing and Tech Support   Cassie Maas started at Atari as a sales order processing clerk; then as a member of the marketing team, she evaluated new product ideas; then she worked in technical support, where she was the high-end technical support for word processing, and managed a BBS for user groups. She contributed to the 1984 book "InfoWorld's Essential Guide to Atari" and...

Ken Balthaser, Atari Manager of Software Development   Ken Balthaser stated at Atari as part of a skunkworks group where he wrote software for speech hardware, then became manager of application software development. He oversaw the creation of the SWEAT system software, which were development tools for non-programmers to make graphics and sound assets; and the creation of arcade conversions such a...

Eunice Wlcek, Atari Quality Assurance   Eunice Wlcek started at Atari as a secretary in the sales and marketing department, then moved to quality assurance where she did software testing. Later, she worked as a QA tester at Mindset, the graphics workstation company which was founded by several former Atari employees.   This interview was conducted March 19, 2015.   Teaser quotes:   “‘You’d be a gr...

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...

Tom Hudson is a name familiar to readers of A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing magazine. He worked at A.N.A.L.O.G., where we wrote articles, games, maintained the A.N.A.L.O.G. TCS bulletin board system. His game credits include LiveWire, fire Bug, and Planetary Defense. He also wrote the popular DEGAS paint program for the Atari ST; and CAD-3D, a 3D graphics package, in conjunction with Gary Yost.   This inte...

David Kano, Hex-A-Bug   David Kano wrote the Hex-A-Bug debugger which was published by Atari Program Exchange. He also wrote two educational software titles for the Atari: Monkey See Monkey Spell, and Don’t Shoot That Word, which were both published by Hayden Software.   This interview was conducted March 24 2015.   Teaser quotes:   “I remember when I showed them the finished product they said ‘Th...

Nicholas Lefevre, Attorney for Commodore and Atari   Nicholas Lefevre was in-house counsel for Commodore under Jack Tramiel during the time of the Commodore 64, then in-house counsel for Atari after Jack Tramiel bought it.   This interview took place April 10, 2015.   Teaser quotes:   "Particularly with Jack Tramiel, he was willing to give you enough rope to hang yourself. He was not a micromanage...

Jason Scott, Internet Archive   Jason Scott is a digital historian and documentary filmmaker who for several years has worked for the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that has worked to save as much online - and offline - culture as possible. He is also known to attend the occasional vintage computer festival, so as luck would have it, ANTIC and Jason were in the same festival at the same time, and w...

Hello, and welcome to another interview edition of Antic, the Atari 8-bit Podcast.  I am Randy Kindig.  I am extremely honored to bring to you today an interview with one of the true pioneers of the personal computer, one of the primary designers of the Atari 400 & 800, Mr. Joe Decuir.  Joe worked closely with Jay Miner, Steve Mayer and others to design a computer in the days when personal compute...

David Heller, Dr. C. Wacko   David Heller may be better known to Atari users by his pen name - Dr. C. Wacko. As Dr. Wacko, David wrote the books "Dr. C. Wacko's Miracle Guide to Designing and Programing Your Own Atari Computer Arcade Games" and "Dr. C. Wacko Presents Atari BASIC" as well as similar books for other platforms. He also wrote the book "Free Software For Your Atari" (and similar books...

Steve Carden, RealDOS   Steve Carden maintains RealDOS, a free, command-line DOS that's multiplexer capable, and still being actively maintained to work with modern hardware.  He also works on a variety of hardware products, some of which are available to Atari hobbyists, and some of which aren't. Steve also helped take over maintenance of BBS Express from Keith Ledbetter.   This interview took pl...

On this episode of Antic, the Atari 8-bit podcast, AND Inverse ATASCII, the Atari 8-bit productivity podcast, we record live from Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 3.0!!   On this show we interview attendees with Atari stories, find out who's going to win the grand prize for our game show (hint: It's someone you may know!), and answer questions from the audience.  Come join us for the most fun-p...

Ron Bieber, SmartDOS   Ron Bieber was involved with the creation and marketing of SmartDOS, an alternative DOS that was bundled with disk drives from Rana and Astra, and also sold by Sears stores. SmartDOS'swas the first disk operating system to be "Density Smart" — automatically changing between the disk drive's density modes depending on the disk used.   This interview took place on March 4 2015...

Doug Carlston, Broderbund CEO   Doug Carlston was co-founder and CEO of the software publisher Broderbund.   Broderbund published many hits across several platforms, including Bank Street Writer, Print Shop, A.E., Choplifter, Lode Runner, Karateka, Spelunker, David's Midnight Magic, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.   This interview occurred March 5, 2015.   LINKS AtariMania.com's List of...

Victor Cross, Atari copywriter   Victor Cross was a freelance copywriter for Atari from 1982 through 1984. He wrote many press releases and product announcements for Atari 2600 and 5200 games. He also wrote the documentation for the Atari 5200 Baseball game; plus various catalog copy for Atari.  He also wrote game manuals for LucasArts, Spectrum Holobyte, Br0derbund, and other software companies....

Liza Loop,Technical Writer   Liza Loop wrote the first users manuals for the Atari 400 and 800 computers. She was a Consultant/Technical Writer for Atari from June 1979 through April 1980, sometimes writing documentation for interfaces that had not been designed yet -- so her description became the de facto interface specification.  Liza also worked for Personal Software, where she wrote the refer...

Hello, you are listening to Antic, the Atari 8-bit computer podcast.  I am Randy Kindig, one of the co-hosts, and I’m bringing to you today an interview episode with the author of one of the best games ever released for the Atari 8-bit computer line.  That would be David Fox, one of the authors of Rescue on Fractalus.  David shares his memories of developing that iconic game, working for LucasFilm...

Charles Ratcliff, son of MAT*RAT   Charles Ratcliff is the son of Matthew Ratcliff, the prolific writer for the Atari magazines. Matthew Ratcliff -- or MAT*RAT -- died in 1999.   Matthew wrote for Antic, STart, Compute!, A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing, and ST-LOG. In 1986 won Antic magazine's award for Outstanding Contributor. Here's what they wrote about him:   "In 1985, Missouri programmer Matthew Ratcl...

Michael Phillips, Atari Bench Tech   Michael Phillips worked as a bench technician at Atari from February 1981 to June 1984, doing component level repair of Atari video game systems, personal computers, and peripherals.   Because Michael is a lifelong stutterer, he didn’t want to do a voice interview — but he was willing to be interviewed by email. Because this is an audio podcast, I’ve enlisted R...

Ian Chadwick   Ian Chadwick is the author of Mapping The Atari, which was -- and remains -- the ultimate memory map for the Atari 8-bit computers. Mapping was published in two editions: the original was for the 400/800 computers, then an updated version was later released for the XL and XE machines. Ian also did a lot of documentation writing behind the scenes, including many of Antic's software m...

Louis Massucci, Atari Bench Tech   Lou Massucci was a bench technician for the Atari 800 line, repairing 8-bit computers and peripherals in Somerset, New Jersey. Later, he was was promoted to field service representative for the southwest territory.   This interview was conducted on March 2, 2015.   Teaser Quotes "Actually, that's what was causing some of the failure modes because the debris left...