:furious:
No, it was actually quite a revolutionary computer, the backward thing about it was the operating system, that harked back to CPM68 and Atari could not and would not update it, they had a dispute with DR about license fees and were stuck with a GEM/CPM system from 1984 and only partial sources and a management team that did not understand software.
Gary Kildall invented CPM for the Intel 4004(?) which sort of launched a new market. DOS would be a clone of CPM which Microsoft would end up buying. Gary went on to found Digital Research which created GEM. GEM got the pants sued off of them by Apple (there is a surprise) which slowed GEM's development a great deal.
However, when GEM was licensed to Atari it wasn't as restricted at it was before but you can see that GEM was pretty ugly all the way 'round.
TOS was a disaster for Atari and you will know why if you have read my other rambling posts here. TOS was designed on Apple Lisa Computers but TOS uses instructions that are not available on M chips > than 68k (010,020, etc...).
As I have rambled on in other posts, I cannot conceive of why you would do this. More to the point, why you wouldn't fix it in a revision of TOS. TOS 1.0 (like AmigaDOS 1.0) was a piece of crap so rewriting TOS to use certified instructions might have broken compatibility with TOS 1.0, but who cares when you have such a major problem? Instead, they just kept rolling out TOS versions that only cemented software to the problem.
I suspect the following occurred:
-Apple was suing the hell out of everyone with a decent GUI that looked like the Mac GUI. GEM and Digital were sued. You might be able to make the argument that GEM couldn't be updated because of legal issues tied with Apple. However, GEM under DOS was updated and looked much better than GEM in TOS. So I'm not sure.
-Perhaps GEM was updated and could have been cross compiled but ran like crap on a 68k? GEM might have needed a faster CPU which TOS couldn't support because of Atari. So GEM remained pretty basic in TOS.
-Jack made some crazy deal that they could only use one version of GEM or screwed M over so they could only use 68ks...
In the end, I wish I knew. As an adult now, I can honestly say that was beyond stupid. I can't think of any developmental reason you would ignore M's warnings and use instructions not guaranteed to be in the next version of M chips. I can't think of a single situation where this was the better choice.
The Falcon had a hardware multiplexer, so you could route data from one entity to another without a load on the CPU, eg the DSP bus could stream from the hard disk while the CPU was playing around with the graphics, this meant 16 track 16bit audio recording by using the DSP as a simple lossless audio compressor (since the 16x16b data stream was larger than HD's at the time could manage in RT), something we did not get reliably on a PC until 97/98 and then only just.
Atari really had something special, but no clue how to market or develop it, by the time I bought one it was cheaper than an A1200 and soon discontinued, I bought 3 more when they blew the last few off at silly prices
Atari had to rewrite TOS with the TT (the graphics workstation without a blitter) and the Falcon and this was a major problem with backward compatibility. Commodore had a similar issue with AmigaOS 2.x since it broke poorly written Amiga 1.x programs. I suspect that TOS and Muti-TOS was a much harsher upgrade given the extent of the rewrite.
While Multi-TOS was a nice upgrade, it just added to Atari's growing list of problems.
I've said this before, I wish somebody would write the history of Atari from about the 2600 to Atari's sale to JVC at the end. I think it would be a fascinating read of the accounts of the Atari 400/800, the XL line, the ST/Stacy/TT/Falcon, the Jag, and of course the end...
BTW: Gary Kildall was on Computer Chronicles and is dead (I believe some sort of bar fight or accident?)