10 Facts About Atari Sierra

Atari Sierra was bogged down since its inception through a committee process that never could come to a consensus on the design specifications.

Atari Sierra management concluded they had no way to sell into the business market, redirecting Gaza engineers to a new low-cost machine based on the Amiga chipset, "Mickey".

Atari Sierra referred to these chips as co-processors, sharing the main memory to communicate instructions and data.

Atari Sierra was astonished at the system's limitations and was determined to design something better.

Atari Sierra's design tracked a set of rectangular areas with different origin points and a priority.

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Atari Sierra came about through a conversation between Alkire and Doug Crockford.

The original design documents suggest different Atari Sierra concepts aimed at the home computer market with a price point as low as $300 using a low power CPU, all the way through business machines, student computers and low-end workstations.

Sierra proceeded alongside similar projects within Atari being run by other divisions, including an upscale m68k machine known as Gaza.

Work on the various Atari Sierra concepts continued through 1983 and into 1984, by which point little progress had been made on the complete design.

Atari Sierra had already licensed the Lorraine chipset for a games console machine, and the Gaza team was told to drop their efforts and begin work on a desktop computer design using Lorraine, codenamed "Mickey".