The Atari GAZA Graphics Workstation

The Atari GAZA Project

Meanwhile in the summer of 1983 a group of engineers formerly with Coin-op had

moved over to work in Atari's Home Computer Group in the Advanced Engineering Division.

Their first project: "GAZA"...

Symbolics 3600. Used as a reference for the development

of the Atari GAZA Graphics Workstation design.

They had setup in the old Atari 800 assembly building down at the end of Gibraltar by

1st Street where they designed the unique central bus frame that custom Development

boards would plug into.

Two surviving sheets of Schematics from the Atari "GAZA" project:

(Click for full size)

(Click for full size)

From Bruce Merritt, part of the Gaza/Mickey Team :

"Gaza was a project that we had pitched to the Warner Communications people,

and Manny Gerard (Warner Comm Board member) had seen the promise in our
ideas (he was probably the most human big wheel I had encountered in
that crowd).

Anyway, Gaza was a proposed hi-res 1k x 1k color graphics
workstation based on the Motorola 68000; had multiple processors

(3 as I recall, 1 for the user, a 2nd for graphics, and a 3rd for I/O) and

was intended to compete with the Sun/Apollo equipment that had

been announced around then.

Our group designed and prototyped a 2-CPU system with video board (the

CPUs were interconnected via an independent bus and had separate everything),

got started on development of (believe it or not) our own OS called "Snowcap"

but bought/ported CPM-68K (also just released) to our hardware

prototype in order to develop/demo the graphics capabilities."

The GAZA "Cray" Frame... would be used later by Atari Corp

to develop their "RBP" (Rock Bottom Price) project: The Atari ST


As it turned out, nobody expected this stuff to actually happen (there
had been very little D in R&D), and once it became clear that
manufacturing computers for business wasn't consistent with the
Warner/Atari business model, the Gaza Project was killed and our group

 was chartered with moving that 68K technology into the consumer

(set-top) arena, which was Project "Mickey" based on the Amiga chipset."

By April 17, 1984 the GAZA project with formerly canceled.

If you are a former Atari employee who worked on the GAZA or have additional information, documents or other technical data/software, materials, etc... Please:

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