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I once read that IBM had contacted Atari about licensing their chipset, so they did actually care about gaming to some degree.

Also a lot of Apple users gamed on a monochrome monitor, so how many colors maybe wasn't the biggest concern, just 'has some'. The resolution was largely fixed by the tube technology.



Interesting. I hadn't heard that about Atari. The odd thing is that the Atari 400/800 chipset couldn't display 80 column text, which seems to have been a 'must have' for IBM due to word processing and terminal emulation being considered essential.

I wonder if may be it was when IBM was working on the PC Jr.


Yeah, the impression I have is the talks went nowhere, but Atari was obviously on top of the market on that point, so no surprise they made a call. Maybe IBM wanted to contract something out, but IIRC Jay Miner had already quit.


Atari's Sunnyvale Research Lab (SRL), run by Alan Kay, were working on some graphics chipset at that time. Probably why IBM came knocking.




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