Aug 6, 2016
Wes Newell, Newell Industries
Wes Newell was founder of Newell Industries, a company that produced a number of popular hardware upgrades for the Atari 8-bit computers. Products included Fastchip, which sped up floating point routines by 300%; Omniview, which provided 80-column text output; and RAMrod, which provided memory upgrades and enhanced ROMs; and Omnimon, a hardware monitor. Wes was also author of Pro Bowling, which was published by Atari Program Exchange.
This interview took place on June 9, 2016.
After our interview, Wes sent me his collection of Newell Industries paper: documentation for every product that they released, and a large collection of printed source code for Atari 8-bit and ST products. He generously placed all of the Newell Industries material in the public domain. I've digitized all of it: you can now find it at the Internet Archive (see the links in the show notes at AtariPodcast.com.)
Teaser quote:
"Well I sold 'em pretty cheap... that's probably why I went out of business... it was more or less just a hobby for me. I wasn't out to get rich."
AtariMania's list of Wes' software
Extended Directory article in ANTIC: http://www.atarimagazines.com/v1n6/assemblylanguage.html
Pro Bowling in the winter 1982-1983 APX catalog
Collection of scanned material from Wes: https://archive.org/details/@savetz?and%5B%5D=newell
The big gotcha in this episode was that Atari looked at Fastchip and said no because it made older software run to fast. THAT is the sort of thinking that kills companies.