Subject: RE: ST Falcon Goes high on eBay

From: "Hills, Paul" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri May 16 11:02:33 2003

Similarly, there are also sound cards now where the DSP is accessible. The
first sound cards that came out with DSPs on weren't
downloadable/programmable, but later ones were. $75 is a great price for an
experimental platform!

The good thing about the Atari Falcon at the time (a long time before DSPs
appeared on sound cards and before softmodems existed) was that there was a
public domain assembler for the MC56001, plus, thanks to Motorola's
commendable policy of selling silicon but giving away supporting software
(to a certain extent anyway), there was a huge library of public domain
libraries for the 56K DSP series.

There was also a commercial assembler/debugger for the MC56001 which was
only about £60. That allowed all the standard debugger facilities - single
stepping, register & memory view, breakpoints etc.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Dwight K. Elvey [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: 12 May 2003 18:03
To: [email-masked]
Subject: RE: ST Falcon Goes high on eBay

>From: "Hills, Paul" <[email-masked]>
>
>That's a lot - it's not really a vintage machine, nor a particularly rare
>one. I still use mine as a MC56000 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) testbed.
>At the time, the £500 I paid for it was a quarter of what I would have had
>to pay to get a DSP experimentation card for a PC, and since I didn't have
a
>PC at the time it was a bargain.
>
>In addition to that, I wrote a series of articles about DSP for the ST
>Format magazine in the UK, for which they paid me £500, recompensing the
>computer's cost! Ha!
>
>paul
>

Hi
 For my DSP experiments, I got one of those "SoftModems".
It had a A/D-D/A, ADSP2100 Analog Devices DSP and RAM to load
the programs into. It only cost me $75 when new.
Dwight

---

From: Martin Scott Goldberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun May 18 02:39:43 2003

>Windows 3.1...The Falcon flopped!

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