Oct 20, 2016
Ed Stewart and Ray Lyons, APX Letterman
Ed Stewart and Ray Lyons co-wrote Letterman, an educational word game that was first available in the winter 1982-1983 Atari Program Exchange catalog. Ed also wrote two articles for Antic magazine: "Hokey Pokey Interrupts" - on using POKEY timers in assembly language - and "Talk Is Cheap", a 1-bit audio digitizer. Ed also had two articles in Compute!'s Second Book of Atari: Memory Test and Back Up Your Machine Language Programs With BASIC.
This interview took place on September 15, 2016. The first voice you'll hear is Ed's.
"They played that thing for days. They would love to try and stump each other by typing in their own word, primarily."
After the interview, Ray emailed me this update: "There's one fact I wished I had included--and I'll tell you just in case you find it useful: This would have probably been early in the 2nd year of the sale of Letterman via the APX. Atari contacted us and asked us to sign some legal documents giving them permission to port Letterman to a ROM for one of their game platforms. My recall is that it was for the 2600. But I'm wondering if they were announcing a new model. Or maybe it was an updated 2600 with a keyboard added? Sorry for this lapse. Anyway, they said they needed educational software to demo this on the new device at a trade show in New York City that year. The Toy Fair I think it was. We never did hear back from Atari about whether they actually carried through or not. If I run across any paperwork about this, I'll send it to you."
Letterman in the winter 1982-1983 APX catalog
Antic magazine articles by Ed Stewart
Compute!'s Second Book of Atari: http://www.atariarchives.org/c2ba/
Blog Post by Ray Lyons: https://libperformance.com/2009/03/05/technology-20/