Atari 1850XLD
Developer: Atari
Developed: 1983 |
The name Atari brings forth a number of mixed emotions for
people. Many former and current Amiga owners remember the brief
battle fought between Commodore and Atari for domination of the
16-bit computer market. A battle that Commodore eventually won. Now
imagine that your Amiga suddenly develops an Atari logo on the
casing and a bizarre green desktop. This may have come to pass if
Atari had bought the Amiga. On November 21, 1983 Atari and Amiga
signed an agreement that allowed Atari
complete access to the Amiga "Lorraine"" prototype that was
currently being developed. In exchange Atari would give an
undisclosed sum of money to assist development.
"Mickey"
As part of the agreement Atari would gain access to the Amiga
chipset and design its own version of the Amiga computer codenamed
"Mickey", after the Disney mouse, "Minnie" was the name given to a
256K memory card. As part of the agreement, Atari would sell
"Mickey" as a game console without the keyboard for 1 year. After
that, Atari could then sell a keyboard add-on and sell a full
computer "Mickey" system to the public. One ex-Atari Corp. also
discovered proposals for a Unix-style GUI kernel for the "Mickey"
project. How much of this was the original AmigaOS system is
unknown but it is likely that it contained information on the Amiga
EXEC and Intuition, with some kind of custom "AtariDOS" additions.
Until recently it has been assumed that Atari did not have time
to develop a system before Commodore bought Amiga, Inc. During 1984
rumours were abound on a new computer known as the Atari 1600XL.
Remarkably, the system coincides in many ways with some of the
features highlighted by Dave Haynie and Jay Minor in many
interviews. These include a built-in disk drive, Apple ][e
compatibility and the possibility of an Intel 8088 daughter
processor for IBM compatibility. As Amiga historians know, the
Lorraine featured a cartridge slot for a number of expansion boards
including an IBM PC-on-a-card. These puzzles have recently been
solved with the recovery of a number of logbooks by the Atari
Historical Society that suggest Atari were developing a system
derived from the original Lorraine prototype that would come to be
known as the Atari 1850XLD
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Last Update: 1/11/2001
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