Atari Email Archive

[RickR]

Check out this site:  https://atariemailarchive.org/

 

 

 

It appears to be authentic and there's some interesting stuff here.  What do you guys think?  1983 - 1992 skips the early days, but we get a lot of later history. 

 

 

[Jinroh]

Very cool day to day minutia of Atari. 😄 Entertaining to see the culture going on through e-mails.

This one reminds me of when I bought a book on coding games in C for DOS around....1994 maybe. I did not have a C compiler or have access to a C compiler. 😅 Borland and Watcom were expensive at CompUSA, so...were off limits for me. At least Petrick had engineers she could mooch off of. 😛

Edited April 24 by Jinroh

[socrates63]

hahaha that reminds me of the time I was getting a developer to help me with my C++ homework. From 1997-2002, I was taking evening classes part-time at the university pursuing a second bachelor in computer science while working at Microsoft. Those weekly programming assignments were brutal. In case anyone is curious, I dropped out.

[MistaMaddog]

On 4/24/2024 at 12:00 AM, Jinroh said:

Very cool day to day minutia of Atari. 😄 Entertaining to see the culture going on through e-mails.

This one reminds me of when I bought a book on coding games in C for DOS around....1994 maybe. I did not have a C compiler or have access to a C compiler. 😅 Borland and Watcom were expensive at CompUSA, so...were off limits for me. At least Petrick had engineers she could mooch off of. 😛

I remember trying to teach myself C++ but couldn't afford to take classes at the time, so I bought a textbook from the community college.  It came with Borland C++ compiler but I didn't have a Windows PC b/c they were also expensive for me ATM.  I tried using GNU C++ off a dial-up UINIX account but it didn't work.

Once I was able to go back to school, and get a new PC, the teacher's used the same Borland Turbo C++ that came with my book...

Anyway, I'll check out that archive.

 

[Jinroh]

On 4/24/2024 at 1:45 AM, socrates63 said:

hahaha that reminds me of the time I was getting a developer to help me with my C++ homework. From 1997-2002, I was taking evening classes part-time at the university pursuing a second bachelor in computer science while working at Microsoft. Those weekly programming assignments were brutal. In case anyone is curious, I dropped out.

Oh bummer, glad you got to work at Microsoft though. 🙂 Understandable though, C++ is not the easiest, especially back then. 😅 Do you remember if the professor had you using Charles Petzold's book on WinAPI? Love that book. 🙂

 

10 hours ago, MistaMaddog said:

I remember trying to teach myself C++ but couldn't afford to take classes at the time, so I bought a textbook from the community college.  It came with Borland C++ compiler but I didn't have a Windows PC b/c they were also expensive for me ATM.  I tried using GNU C++ off a dial-up UINIX account but it didn't work.

Once I was able to go back to school, and get a new PC, the teacher's used the same Borland Turbo C++ that came with my book...

Anyway, I'll check out that archive.

 

A shame you could not use the Borland compiler back then. When Borland came out I had a Tandy 1000TX so I probably couldn't either. 😛 At least very well.

1995 we got a Pentium 166 MMX, what PC did you end up getting when you could finally snag one? 🙂

[socrates63]

15 hours ago, Jinroh said:

Oh bummer, glad you got to work at Microsoft though. 🙂 Understandable though, C++ is not the easiest, especially back then. 😅 Do you remember if the professor had you using Charles Petzold's book on WinAPI? Love that book. 🙂

I wish we had opportunity to learn the Win32 API as that would have helped me a lot with understanding the context of programming. The Petzold book was commonplace on the MS campus. The school text book was platform agnostic (I don't remember which book we used).

[RickR]

I always went with the O'Reilly books for software dev.  The ones with animals on the cover:

I have a decent collection of them up in the attic.  Sometimes I'll see one at a book store or used book sale and start salivating before talking myself out of it.  "You don't need this anymore, pops" is what my mind says.  "It's all available on the internet now".  "This isn't going to help you downsize to a smaller house, is it?" 

Still, they are almost irresistible.

[Jinroh]

1 hour ago, socrates63 said:

I wish we had opportunity to learn the Win32 API as that would have helped me a lot with understanding the context of programming. The Petzold book was commonplace on the MS campus. The school text book was platform agnostic (I don't remember which book we used).

Glad you saw that book around, though a shame you did not get to learn WinAPI. It was weird to me at first, I was pretty dense at first haha. Then became second nature once I wrapped my head around it. The Atari ST form/window handlers are pretty similar, so when I went backwards to the ST, it helped me. 😛 That makes sense, the agnostic C++ book would probably be better. I had the same thing, just terminal and running text programs.

1 hour ago, RickR said:

I always went with the O'Reilly books for software dev.  The ones with animals on the cover:

I have a decent collection of them up in the attic.  Sometimes I'll see one at a book store or used book sale and start salivating before talking myself out of it.  "You don't need this anymore, pops" is what my mind says.  "It's all available on the internet now".  "This isn't going to help you downsize to a smaller house, is it?" 

Still, they are almost irresistible.

Ah ok, yes I have one or two of these too. I think I have a mini-Javascript guide someone gave me years and years ago. 😛

I'm right there with you, tempted with programming books. My bookshelf is ready to collapse from all the heavy books so don't think I could fit any more. I am tempted to get older ones too, but I can find the PDFs on Archive, but nothing beats that paper feeling, so it's tough haha.

[MistaMaddog]

On 4/29/2024 at 12:10 AM, Jinroh said:

A shame you could not use the Borland compiler back then. When Borland came out I had a Tandy 1000TX so I probably couldn't either. 😛 At least very well.

1995 we got a Pentium 166 MMX, what PC did you end up getting when you could finally snag one? 🙂

I got a Pentium II PC back in 1998 when I went back to college because I really needed a Windows PC which was what the schools used.

In the eariler 90's you could get away with dialing into VAX or UNIX machines for programming courses while everything else used DOS PC's (with Macs in Writing Labs of course).

 

[Justin]

This is an incredibly cool perspective of Atari history from the inside as it was happening. Abominably awesome that this has made it to the net.