Atari Program Exchange

~ the eulogy ~

When Atari launched its 8-bit computers in late 1979 it kept the hardware details to itself, on the assumption that it would supply the software the way it had for the 2600. That assumption did not survive the first year. Outsiders were writing better and stranger things than Atari was, and there was almost nowhere for those programs to be sold. Dale Yocum walked into management with a business plan for fixing that with almost no money, and the Atari Program Exchange started in february 1981 and was announced that april at the West Coast Computer Faire.

The mechanism was a paper catalog, published quarterly and mailed to every computer owner who had sent in a warranty card. Anyone could submit a program. If it was accepted it went into the catalog under the author's name, in simple packaging, with documentation the author had written. The first issue in summer 1981 said the point outright: interesting software, quickly and cheaply, with the costs kept down by not pretending to be a normal publisher. Games filled most of the pages, but it also carried utilities, educational software, a kit to expand an Atari 400 to 48K and the developer handbook De Re Atari.

Once a year the best submission got the Atari Star, and the names on that list explain why the thing mattered. Fernando Herrera took the first one in january 1982 for My First Alphabet. David Buehler took the next for Typo Attack, a typing game good enough that Atari moved it into the official product line as a cartridge, which also happened to Chris Crawford's Eastern Front (1941), the most popular program APX ever published. Fred Thorlin took over the division in october 1982 and ran it from Santa Clara until the end.

The submission model is the part i recognize. Send in the thing you made, get it listed with your name attached, take a share of what it earns. I met that arrangement about twenty years later under other names and by then it was a website with a payments page, and it kept being described as new. APX was doing it in 1981 by post, for a computer that barely sold in turkey, and it closed the year i was born.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Chris Crawford's account of the founding is the most useful thing written about APX, because it explains both the success and the shape of the ending. Yocum argued that there were a lot of people out there who liked writing programs and that publishing them would cost almost nothing. The clinching point was that the Atari platform badly needed a bigger software library and the existing publishers were not filling it. Management agreed grudgingly. It very quickly became a monster success and a major profit center.

Then, according to Crawford, they rewarded Yocum for the initiative by hiring somebody to be his boss. Yocum transferred out in disgust about a year after launch, into the new Atari Research division under Alan Kay. The idea outlived his involvement by two and a half years.

~ the day it died ~

The last Atari Star ceremony was in january 1984, and the grand prize went to Mark Reid for Getaway!. Nobody in the room knew it was the last one. The final catalog was dated Winter 1983-84 and was visibly thinner than the ones before it.

James J. Morgan had arrived as Atari's chief executive in late 1983 into a company hemorrhaging money, and in april 1984 he closed the mail-order operation. His stated reasoning was that APX was losing money on mail order and that Atari had to come to grips with the fact that Atari was not in the mail-order business. Submissions from outside programmers would still be reviewed, he said, and the topnotch ones would go into Atari's own product line. Anything else Atari would not sell in any fashion. Thorlin left. He later said he had raised enough money to buy the division outright and could not get anybody's attention, because Atari had a two-billion-dollar problem and this was not it.

~ what came after ~

Some of the catalog survived. Antic Software picked up a portion of the library and reissued it as APX Classics, which is why a number of these programs are still findable, and the whole archive has since been scanned and put online. What did not survive was the channel. For three years there was one place where an amateur programmer with a good idea and no company behind them could reach every registered owner of a specific machine, with their own name printed next to the program.

After april 1984 that person was back to shareware or a magazine type-in listing. It took the better part of two decades for anything to replace what a quarterly paper catalog had already done.

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