Atari is in no great hurry to bring its 1450CLD small business computer to this country.

Atari marketing director Eric Salamon told PCN that the company wants to have its new 600XL and 800XL machines firmly established in the UK marketplace before it introduces the more sophisticated 1450XLD. He said he plans a visit to the US this month to finalise plans on the 1450, and to decide on what specifications he wants to include on the machine and how he wants to market it.

In the US, the 1450XLD includes a 254K built-in double-sided dual density slimline disk drive, a speech synthesizer that uses phonemes, a built-in direct-connect modem with built-in telecommunications program and 64K of RAM. It also has all the other standard features of the 600XL and 800XL machines.

It's unlikely that if Atari does introduce the machine here late this summer it will come with the built-in modem, because Atari would then have to wait for British Telecom approval of the modem before it could sell the machine - this kind of approval is neither easy or quick.

Meanwhile, Mr. Salamon is hoping the business potential of the 600 and 800XL machines can be realised quickly with the released of new business add-ons. "The CP/M module is still a reality, but it's not likely to be on the market until mid-84, however we are keen to get that sort of product to market," he said.

Mr. Salamon claimed that people are already beginning to take the Atari computers seriously as business tools and that the recently-released Atariwriter cartridge word processor has been a great success.

Although as he said there is an overlap between the home computer and personal computer market, Mr. Salamon added that he doesn't see Atari making a full-blown push in the office computer market at the moment.

Atari's marketing director considers that many small businesses can use Atari machines rather than more expensive business machines. He said that accountants, doctors, dentists and other professionals often buy machines far in excess of what they really need and spend £2,000 on a word-processor when what they really need only costs £1,000.

At the other end of the financial scale, Atari is not planning to transform its successful games machines into computer. Mr. Salamon said the company won't be bringing out the Graduate keyboard to upgrade the Atari 2600 VCS games machine into a computer.

"The Graduate keyboard for the Atari 2600 games machine hasn't been introduced because we couldn't get the quality for the price we would have to charge to make the keyboard worth buying," he said. Atari also couldn't get a big software base or a reasonable memory for a good price, and the company didn't want to be stuck with an unsupported small-memory machine.

Despite the cancellation of the Graduate, the delay in bringing the 1450XLD to market and Atari's much-reported financial troubles of the past year, Mr. Salamon said the company is healthy.

"When a company is having the sorts of problems that we and our competition have been having, you tend to review plans more closely," he said. "We are victims of our own success - when any company grows as quickly as Atari has, it has to stop and re-assess plans periodically. Identifying what the consumer is going to want in the next few years is part of that. We are in the market with a long-term view."

He admitted that Atari introduced too broad a product range in too short a time. The company may have had short-term sales problems, but it is now conducting long-term research and development on both software and hardware. Mr. Salamon suggested that because of this approach, Atari is now the best-supported computer in terms of software and third-party software.

* For more on what Atari has planned for the future and some background about the machines and the company, make sure you keep an eye out for PCN's special 3-part Atari Micropaedia beginning in February.