"Hills, Paul" <Paul.HILLS_at_landisgyr.com> says:
>
>
>It just goes to show that technically good products never sell themselves.
>The Atari Falcon was a dual-processor (MC68030 + MC56001) GUI-based machine
>which had available a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (MiNT),
>built in SCSI port & MIDI, 50kHz-sampling stereo 16 bit ADC/DACs, at a time
>when PCs were twice the price with no sound card, no SCSI, and had just got
>Windows 3.1...The Falcon flopped!
>
>paul
>
Not all the Falcons were shipped with MultiTos (which was the OS you mean,
it was a derivitive of MiNT). There were three differen't OS's shipped.
Likewise, all the OS's (including MultiTos) were extensions to the TOS
already in the rom (4.04) which was single tasking, and essentially the
same as the previous TOS's. The Falcon has the privilege of being the
only Atari computer without it's intended OS in ROM because of the
shipping worries. There were other problems such as the 68030 only being
16 Mhz, and the fact they used a 16 bit data bus. The system ram also
used proprietary ram cards (expensive).
The Atari version of GEM itself had not evolved much since they first
licensed the code from DR, and they basicly just improved it with
improving the presentation a bit (colored icons and better windowing
effects). The built in hard disk controller was an IDE controller.
What caused the Falcon to not do well was the fact that the product was to
little to late. Besides adversely affecting the marketing, Atari Corp.
was not known for it's marketing prowess in the first place. In the
Falcon, Atari Corp. was giving people what they had been screaming for
since the first 520/1040ST series. That includes the multi-tasking, which
people had been complaining about for years that Amiga had and Atari
should have as well. Had the Falcon (or something compareable) been
released back around '87 when it should have (or some how been available
as some kind of upgrade back then), the market for Atari might have looked
very different by the early 90's. As it is in that period you had the
520ST, 1040STF, 520STF, 520 and 1040 STFM, 520 and 1040 STE's, Mega ST,
Mega ST 2, Mega ST 4, Megas STE, TT, and TT/X (leaving out the STACY
laptop and all the pc compatibles) all released prior to the Falcon in
that 6-7 year period. Much of that sending a message to consumers of
"buy a whole new computer to upgrade". Likewise, Atari had a genuine
desire to invest little in actual advertising, assuming that low prices
and word of mouth from the press would be enough. By the time the early
90's rolled around, Atari and Amiga (in the US) had been downgraded to
"alternative computers" in the market and survived by moving towards niche
markets (Atari relying more heavily on the "musician market" it had been a
part of because of the built in midi ports, and Amiga moving towards the
Video Toaster/video effects production market for major support here). By
the time the Falcon came out, about the only places you could come by
Atari's here was directly from Atari Corp. or in music stores (and most of
what I saw there were STE's or older). The Falcon was canned in a little
under a year, and Atari Corp. exited the computer industry and focused on
it's upcoming Jaguar console.
Again, I understand that the Atari computer market in Europe was different
where Atari and Amiga enjoyed much larger and longer shares of the market.
(Which can also easily be seen by the ammount of TT's, ST's, and Falcons
constantly up for auction on the European Ebay sites).
Marty
Received on Sun May 18 2003 - 02:39:43 BST