🚀 go-pugleaf

I heard an ugly rumor last night at our local Portland Atari Club meeting.
It seems that the new Atari 1400XL and 1450XLD computers have been cancelled,
even though a million dollars worth of advertising has already been sunk
into them.  For those who are unfamiliar, these models had built-in 300 baud
modems and voice synthesizer chips, and the 1450XLD had a built-in slimline
disk drive -- all for around $800.

Apparently these models were cancelled because of IBM's announcement of the
"Peanut", a version of their PC for around $1000 (this model was formally
announced recently in the Wall Street Journal).

Does anyone have any more information about this (i.e. confirm/deny)?  I had
gotten interested in this 1400 series because they were supposed to produce
a card cage to go with it in order to encourage other vendors to provide
a bunch of expansion boards (like an IBM emulation board, for example).
If this cancellation rumor is true, after all the tooling and advertising
has been done, I can only conclude that Atari has their head up their
you-know-what.  Comments?

Don Ellis    |  USENET:  {aat,cbosg,decvax,harpo,ihnss,orstcs,pur-ee,ssc-vax
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