This is not a graphics shop or a music studio.
It's the San Jose Police Department.
The officers here wanted a computer system that could not only handle the routine business
applications but one that could also help them recreate the scene of an accident or
the scene of a crime to help them in their investigations.
They ended up not with a PC compatible or a Macintosh but with an Atari ST.
You know people have stereotypes and sometimes we have stereotypes about computers.
Today we're going to try to help you break at least one stereotype as we look at the
power and the versatility of the Atari ST on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by McGraw-Hill, publishers of Byte Magazine
and Bix, the Byte Information Exchange.
In print and online, Byte and Bix serve computer professionals worldwide with detailed information
on new hardware, software and technologies.
Welcome to the Computer Chronicles.
I'm Stuart Shafae and this is Gary Kildall.
And Gary what we have here is no ordinary flight simulator.
This particular input device is the actual remote radio controller you use to run these
radio controlled model airplanes and helicopters.
So before you go out and crash your $2,000 model, you can do the identical moves to run
the same plane here on the screen.
Well you know I crashed one of his little helicopters a couple years ago so I think
I'm a good customer for this product.
199 bucks.
It's called Aero Chopper Gary.
It's cheaper.
The interesting thing is this takes a lot of horsepower to run this kind of simulation.
It was written first for an Atari ST.
The question I have for you though has to do with the Atari we saw at the very beginning
of the program at the San Jose Police Department.
That Atari was set up to read not only Atari software but it could read Mac disks, MS-DOS
disks.
Is it possible to be able to buy a nice low cost machine like the Atari and run any software?
Well I think it's a good idea in principle of course but even though this is a 68K processor
in here, it's not a Mac and so there's going to be some hardware considerations that some
of the software is going to expect.
And so we can't expect that all software is going to run.
It also depends on the kind of simulation you're doing.
Whether it's a coprocessor which means it's going to run at high speed or whether it's
a software emulation where each instruction is interpreted.
That can be four or five times slower than the real thing.
The Atari ST has an advantage.
The disks get themselves however, are IBM compatible in the sense that the data format
is the same.
Thanks to DRI's gem system.
Gary, we're going to focus on the Atari ST today.
We'll see some new applications for it, paint programs, high end desktop publishing CAD
applications and we'll see how the ST can run Mac software.
Now when you talk about the Atari ST, of course you have to talk about music.
We begin by visiting a college where you can get a degree in music engineering thanks to
the Atari ST.
While the personal computer has become a favorite tool of the business world, its talents extend
well beyond dreary spreadsheets and color coded pie charts.
With a little additional hardware, it's also becoming a tool of choice for artists, musicians
and composers.
At Cogswell College, a technical school about 40 miles south of San Francisco, students
are using the Atari ST to learn a new way to compose and perform music with the help
of a hardware interface called MIDI or Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
The most important features that MIDI brings is it allows you to record just the performance
separate of sounds.
So I can record a performance and then decide after the fact, would I want that to be a
flute, would I want that to be a violin.
Another thing that MIDI makes it possible to do is wholesale editing.
You can just go in and take whole blocks of material and move it around and reposition
it in different kinds of ways.
The musical studio at Cogswell has stacks of familiar hardware such as electronic keyboards
and synthesizers.
But the musical output is composed through the software which assembles and modifies
the different tracks.
Cogswell uses a software package called Notator from Digidesign to create and edit the musical
scores in real time.
The program permits changes in key, tempo or instrument to be inserted and played back
immediately.
And the user can choose between a variety of real time data displays.
Cogswell also uses MasterTracks Pro from Passport Designs, a sequencer that provides 64 multi-channel
recording tracks and familiar looking tape recorder type controls.
To a composer with a traditional education, the electronics might seem overwhelming.
But the school's instructor doesn't see that as a problem.
We aren't throwing musical theory out the window.
We're using music theory.
We're employing these things as tools.
And business I think is a lot like the computers were about five years ago.
This is a new program.
And education's scrambling to keep up with technology.
With us in the studio now is Vincent DeFilippo.
He's an Atari specialist from the Winter Circle Computer Store in Berkeley, California.
And sitting next to Vincent, Jim Kent, the author of Cyberpaint.
Gary?
Jim, I think everybody likes the philosophy of Commodore and Atari as far as pricing.
You get a lot of computing bang for your buck.
What else is it about the Atari that led you to choose that as a platform for your Cyberpaint
program?
There were two main things.
The 68,000 processor so I didn't have to deal with strange memory segmentations.
And its color.
Okay.
Yeah.
So color's important.
Okay.
So what is Cyberpaint?
What does Cyberpaint do?
Cyberpaint is a program useful for animation, video sort of work.
It's basically a paint program that lets you paint over lots and lots of frames.
With some special effects on top of that.
Okay.
We're going to take a look at that.
Show us what you can do with Cyberpaint.
I should explain here real quickly.
We have two Ataris here.
We don't need all this equipment.
We're on Cyberpaint.
Right.
It's two separate systems for what's going to come up later.
Go ahead, Jim.
Okay.
First I'd just like to show you something someone's done with it.
This is an animation some people did in France.
That's pretty spectacular.
Sort of a robot monster coming out from under the sea, huh?
Yeah.
He walks behind the branch there, too.
Yeah.
Here your titles come again.
That's a real popular use of Cyberpaint, titling.
So this might be like a movie opening or something like that.
Yes.
Yeah.
Great.
So here you've seen it.
These are your basic Cyberpaint controls.
It's a little bit like a VCR.
You can go pop to the first frame, pop to the last.
You can go backwards fast, forwards fast.
Or what's really fun is you can just sort of wiggle this guy and control it directly.
That shows you the frame number there at the bottom.
Yes, it does.
It's our famous number on the knob slider.
So anyway, this is basically a paint system.
Let me do a little bit of painting with it.
I've got a pretty big brush.
Make sure I'm in draw.
Yes.
And let's see.
Let's add some waves to the water.
Really silly.
That's all right.
So you're doing some real-time work here.
Yeah.
And you're going to give us a little oil spill there, isn't it?
Hopefully not.
Okay.
So the red showed you the last frame then?
Yes.
And you can kind of use that as a basis for your...
Okay, so that's your reference point.
You're laying on frame after frame.
Uh-huh.
And of course it would take a while to do 151 frames.
Right.
But anyways.
Let's pollute.
Now this could have also been a sequence that you brought in that you prepared using Cyberpaint
at another time also.
Yeah, if you'd like to see that.
That's one of the main uses of this actually.
And I've got a really amusing animation I wanted to show you.
Just go here.
Go load overlay.
It brings up the standard Atari file requester.
And this is Cyber B done by Maurice Molinot.
This was done in a 3D system.
You can see...
So you're merging two animations, isn't it?
Yes.
So you have a little bee that's flapping its wings, rolling around its eyeballs, and going
on top of the other one.
So Jim, this is like traditional animation techniques where you paint one frame after
the next in sequence, is that correct?
You can do that, but you're not restricted to that.
There's a lot of stuff built in to make it much easier for you.
One is just this compositing thing.
Let me show you something else.
I'm going to cut out a little clip and rotate this.
That's for sure.
That could be a set of frames that you'd store in there.
Yeah, certainly.
So say make it go over 180.
It takes it a little bit while to compute it right now.
Jim, going back to Gary's question, what are the benefits of doing something like CyberPaint
on the Atari ST?
We think of the Amiga in a similar vein, or even compared to the Macintosh, for example.
Well, the main advantage over a Mac is it's in color and it's cheap.
The major benefit over an Amiga is that it tends to be a lot more reliable.
I've lost so many floppy disks running on an Amiga, I've sort of gotten depressed about
it.
Well, Vincent, there's a little cartridge right here that says Spectre 128 stuck to
the side of this 1040.
And also, it looks like a Mac screen on that Atari.
Can you tell us a little bit about what's going on here?
Sure.
This is a Spectre 128.
This is our Macintosh emulation for the Atari.
I'm in a popular application called HyperCard right now.
HyperCard is kind of like a launcher, among other things.
It's kind of a language, multiple use.
So I can just simply click on an item and voila, I'm in that application.
Like this one happens to be a periodical table.
So I can look up whatever.
We're familiar with HyperCard.
Why don't you tell us about how you're running HyperCard inside the Atari.
What's the Spectre 128 doing here?
Okay, the Spectre 128 offers you to hold the Macintosh ROMs, which is the basic Macintosh
operating system.
And since the Atari and Macintosh are basically the same style processor and whatnot, it was
not easily, but easily to do and to make a conversion for it.
And since the Atari had the cartridge port, that's what they used to bring the Macintosh
ROMs to the Atari operating system.
Are there any restrictions on the use?
Some programs don't run?
Yes.
The programs that tend to run are what are called well-behaved programs.
The ones that go through the toolbox.
Ones that will not run are usually like games or something like that where the authors try
to go to the hardware to try to get faster screens or better sound, something like that.
Those kind of programs will not run.
When you talk about emulation too, how's the performance of something like HyperCard running
on the Atari compared to running it on the Mac in the first place?
How about 20% faster?
Really?
Yes.
Why?
Because the Atari is a faster processor than the Mac Plus.
Well, the price is a lot better too.
You bet.
Now, are there any problems with copyrights and so forth?
We know all over that Apple is very careful about releasing these things.
Do you have any problems with that?
No, because we actually use an actual Mac product.
We're not cloning them or copying them or anything like this.
There are actual Mac ROMs in the expected cartridge.
Is there a product out there that can do the same thing with the MS-DOS software on the
Atari?
Yes, there is.
There's a program called PC Ditto.
It's coming out with a hardware version to actually bring it running up at IBM speeds.
In that case, it is a software emulation currently.
Currently, it's a software emulation.
And how's the performance of that?
The performance on PC Ditto currently right now is like running a 1 megahertz IBM.
You can sleep between some things.
Four times slower than the earliest PCs.
Well, gentlemen, thank you very much.
There's a very interesting research project going on at the Steinhardt Aquarium in San
Francisco trying to get dolphins and human beings to communicate.
And the computer system they're using to support that experiment is an Atari ST.
Wendy Woods has the report.
Two dolphins named Thetis and Amphi and three seals, Reno, Geraldine and Missy, have for
the last three years been able to communicate with researchers with the help of a computer.
At the Steinhardt Aquarium in San Francisco, researchers have provided them with a series
of underwater pipes, each of which, when pressed, sounds a different tone.
Each tone represents a different object.
Fish is the most popular, but they can also request a ball, a ring, hands-on petting or
a spray of water.
An Atari ST computer perched in a hut built above the aquarium records every key the animals
press and the exact time the request is made.
The researchers call this environmental enhancement or a way of improving life for those stuck
in the proverbial pool.
But more than just entertain the animals, the Atari ST is gathering important data.
I think we are seeing interesting patterns.
The fact that the seal is the most consistent at the apparatus I think was something that
maybe we didn't expect originally.
Other patterns will emerge as the researchers analyze the data.
Eric Carlson, a University of San Francisco graduate student, wrote the program which
controls the pipes using GFA Basic from Mictron.
I think it's an ideal computer for this.
The access to the ports is very good.
And additionally, the language that I chose to use here was basic.
The sound generating capabilities of the Atari were very helpful.
And also, it's nice to have a graphical interface.
The graphical interface allows the researcher to immediately see which key an animal pressed,
allowing them to concentrate more on their observations.
In addition to the ST, researchers record the animals' reactions using a barcode reader
interfaced to a Tandy portable, and record their own observations on audio tape.
The next step of the project will be to allow the creatures to play music.
The ST will be interfaced to three audio tape decks.
At the Steinhardt Aquarium in San Francisco for the Computer Chronicles, I'm Wendy Woods.
With us in the studio now is Nathan Pettation.
He's president of ISD Marketing in Toronto.
And sitting next to Nathan, Andrew Rees, editor of Start Magazine.
Stuart, it seems like whenever anybody says Atari, they think of the game machine.
We've got a stack of machines.
Over here we've got a stack of machines that certainly isn't the standard Atari setup.
Andrew, could you tell us a little bit about what this hardware configuration is?
We've got a laser printer and so forth.
This is all Atari hardware except for the monitor, the Viking monitor.
What we have is a Mega 4 ST4, 4 megabytes of memory, 68,000 processor.
Under it is a 30 meg hard drive, Megafile 30.
This is the SLM 804 printer from Atari and in between is the interface board.
Now what would the hardware configuration cost for something like this?
Excluding the monitor, it's $39.95.
Which would be less than you might pay for just a laser printer.
That's right.
Now Andrew, tell us a little bit about Dynacad, your product.
Dynacad is a product of ISD and that's again Nathan's company.
It's a professional solution on the Atari and it is as good as any CAD program I've
ever seen.
Well, let's take a look at it.
You have the choices of the gem drop down menus.
There are keyboard equivalents plus there's a very nice set of nested icon menus.
Right now we have a frame up with a grid.
You can see the dot pattern.
That's the grid set at quarter inch intervals.
Let's just first of all zoom in on a portion of it by zoom window.
Let's just grab a corner of the screen and I can see the dot pattern is larger.
Now I'm on the insert menu and we'll just put in a box somewhere around there.
Now, one of the nice features of Dynacad is that it has built in Bezier and B-splines.
So what we can do now is add tabs to this box as if we were going to be doing a mounting
plate.
First of all, it has entity snap which means you can choose an entity.
At this point we're choosing to place a point at the end.
Now we'll go to the location and we can put, you can see the rubber band line.
And go back, excuse me, see where I am.
And go to entity snap.
Now right click.
Yeah.
How would Dynacad compare say to AutoCAD most people are familiar with as a kind of standard
CAD package?
It is faster and it has a much better interface.
It's the equivalent of AutoCAD version 10.
It has the 3D.
And price wise how does it compare?
This package is $695.
Do you have any opposition to the sale because of Atari, brand name Atari?
People look at the equipment and say well it's doing the job.
There's always that but the price comparison makes this much the better.
How about reliability?
I've owned an Atari 520 myself that I've improved to 2.5 meg and I've had it for two years and
I've never had any downtime except when I burned out my sound chip.
And I did that myself.
Can I ask you to kind of get out of Dynacad right now?
We want to take a look at Calamus which is the other Atari program which Nathan's company
has.
And while we do that, Nathan tell us a bit about Calamus which is desktop publishing,
right?
Yes.
Calamus was our entry into professional desktop publishing based on the Atari platform.
You can sort of grab the mouse there and put it on your right hand side.
I'm just going to load it up now.
Go ahead.
Okay.
We've, it was, this was intended as a professional level entry.
It has something over 350 separate features and it works quite well.
Different icons, again nested icons, in the top right hand corner is a help area that
indicates exactly what I'm pointing at, rotated text, group frames, etc.
If I go in and I open a frame, one of the better features of Calamus is it has its own
built in text editor.
I can type in anything that I want fairly quickly and easily and you can see it in the
editor as you see.
I can even see my mistakes if I make any.
If I double click on the style, I can very easily change the point size and send it back
in there to something that we can see.
Okay.
Loading in, it's fairly simple, highlight, change it, center the text, anything like
that.
You can create, I haven't loaded in other fonts but it's very simple to go in and load
a font.
It takes literally seconds.
Okay.
I can go and say highlight COM, go into our font preview and you can see it gives you
a good representation of the font itself and change the point size to let's say 70 for
this, not 7, 10.
It goes up to 999 and as simple as that I've changed it and you can see the representation
on the screen.
If I go in this quickly and easily, I can create a macro for that particular style.
Let's just call it A and we'll just save that style.
You got that macro.
If I put the cursor here and hit control A, I change the style of the following document.
I created beforehand a little more sophisticated layout.
It has three columns, it has headlines, vector graphic image, et cetera, something that for
a more professional application.
And I want to bring it in so that I can show you exactly what it's capable of and how fast
it prints on the Atari laser printer.
It's just going to bring up the print document.
I think there's 12 frames in there and we'll just send it over to the printer.
It's going to take dramatically less time than it would with PostScript printers that
we're used to.
So if there's a graphic in the middle of this, can you handle both vector graphics and image?
That's correct.
We handle pretty much every major picture format and vector graphic, Calamus' own and
vector graphic files, gem meta files, et cetera.
In terms of fonts, you're talking about fonts.
How many different kinds of fonts do you have?
We have our own fonts that we ship the package with.
We have a couple of families available.
We also have a font editor that has six more families with it.
These are all outline vector fonts, same technology as these.
And as well, we signed a license agreement with CompuGraphics Corporation and we originally
have converted 31 of their font families as well.
And your hard copy is already here, by the way.
And that's what we're using.
These are CompuGraphics fonts.
And if I just hold that up to the screen, get the OK out of the way, you can see it's
what you see is what you get.
What I was going to ask you about the speed factor, now tell me, compare this to say using
Postgres, using PageMaker, and so on.
It's dramatically, because of the DMA output on the Atari laser printer, I believe it outputs
at 9,600,000 bits per second through the DMA port.
So there's really no comparison to the parallel or serial port that the printers have been
using before.
We have just about a minute left.
Andy, this whole thing we've been seeing during this whole program is the power of the Atari
package here and a lot of the software that's so competitive and yet so much less expensive.
Is this going to turn around?
Are people in the United States going to see the Atari the way they seem to see it in Europe?
I think so.
Part of the problem has been that Atari was short of DRAMs and directed what output they
had to Europe.
Also 1989 is Atari's year, according to them.
And they are going to make a major push into this market.
And there's already been mass advertising and pricing bargains.
On price, what's the price of Calamus?
Calamus retails for $299.
So again, on the Atari platform as a professional solution, there's nothing that comes close
in the market today.
Gentlemen, thank you very much.
That's our updated look at the Atari ST.
We'll be back in just a minute with this week's computer news.
In the random access file this week, reports that Apple will release a new Macintosh next
month dubbed the 2C-I.
It'll be an improvement on the 2C-X using the same 68030 CPU, but running at 25 megahertz
rather than 16.
The new 2C-I also will reportedly have video capabilities on the main board.
The retail price expected to be around $8,000.
This is the week of the Macworld Expo in Boston, and word there is that the Mac laptop will
be introduced next month.
Among the new Mac products announced at the Macworld Expo was an accelerator board for
the Mac 2 and Mac 2X that will triple its speed to 50 megahertz.
Also Keytronics has introduced its first professional series keyboard for the Mac.
The Mac Pro keyboard comes bundled with Macro software.
A British software firm says it has discovered a new MS-DOS virus called Datacrime.
It warns that the virus is triggered to damage hard disks on October 12th by attaching itself
to com files.
The virus was apparently released in March of this year, and may be sitting around silently
waiting to attack in October.
First Lotus started shipping 123 release 3.
Now it has followed up with release 2.2 for users having only 512K of RAM or less.
The new version of 123 comes with the Always add-in.
It features file linking and better support for networks and add-ins.
Lotus users can upgrade for $150.
If you bought 123 within the past year, you're entitled to a free upgrade.
IBM has announced the first product using its new 4 megabit memory chip.
The chip will be on a new memory expansion card for the PS2 models 70 and 80.
K Pro has come out with a new low-cost 286 computer called the KC2.
It will retail for $1,195, including 640K, monochrome monitor, 8 slots, and 12 megahertz
speed with zero wait state design.
The federal courts have said that AT&T is now free to enter the electronic publishing
business, lifting the ban on Ma Bell that was imposed in 1982.
No word yet from AT&T about their first move, though electronic yellow pages is a likely
first step.
Meanwhile, Prodigy has moved into Houston as it continues to expand its user base.
The Prodigy goal is to access 40% of the nation's PC users by mid-1990.
More details came out this week about the new NEC Color laptop.
It's a 286 machine with a 40 megabyte hard drive and two floppy drives.
It's a hefty 19 pounds.
It'll sell for about $5,000, but at the moment is being released only in Japan.
Finally, if you like to watch your diet, there's a new program out called Well Aware.
It was designed by a doctor and it features a database of over 3,000 foods and their ingredients
and additives.
It's designed primarily to help people suffering from food-related allergies to identify the
particular foods that are causing the problem.
Well Aware runs on a PC and sells for $99.
That's it for this week's Chronicles.
We'll see you next time.
The Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by McGraw-Hill, publishers of Byte magazine
and Bix, the Byte Information Exchange.
In print and online, Byte and Bix serve computer professionals worldwide with detailed information
on new hardware, software, and technologies.
For a transcript of this week's Computer Chronicles, send $4 to PTV Publications, Post Office Box
701, Kent, Ohio, 44240.
Please indicate program date.