Okay, a true story, my second disappointing interaction with Atari marketing.
One fine day my boss came to me and said that he had an ask from Atari Marketing (in the Home Computer arm of the company).
The marketing drone came to my office (yes, we had offices in those days). "My idea is to pre-copyright all possible 8x8 bitmaps so that people can't use them without our permission. Can you print them out for me so we can submit them to the copyright office?" He actually meant all possible 8x8 bitmaps containing five colors, with colors chosen from an 7 or 8 bit space (I forget which).
I told him the story of the guy who supposedly invented chess, and was offered a choice of reward by his king. The fellow simply asked, "Just give me one grain of rice for the first square, two grains of rice for the second, four for the third, and so on." Most of you know how this ends, it's grade school math.
I explained to the marketing guy that the printout would probably outweigh the planet, maybe the solar system, maybe the galaxy. He went away, a little disgusted with those pesky engineers. (I don't know if he was the same oxygen waster who wanted me to write a 16K cartridge in just a couple of weeks, but he certainly was in the same department).
So I'm still sticking with three brain cells, despite all the downvotes :-)
Actually it's a LOT more than that, since each of the 5 colors has 128 possible values. There's some duplication (same color slot, trivial rotations and reflections and such) but I think the order of magnitude is probably "cluster of galaxies" at a minimum :-)
Wow, that increases it by a lot; it's much, much heavier than the mass of the visible universe [0]. Universe is ~1e50 kg, the marketing exec's request was ~1e500kg. Now you can go back in time and tell them just how wrong they are ;)
OK, you're so grayed out but your bio says you've been programming since '79 and you've written games for Atari. So perhaps all we need is some elaboration? They seem like a successful company, don't they?
There is not really much if anything left of the original Atari. That pretty much failed after the video game crash in 1983, and was split in two, and bounced around various owners.
The Atari that brought out the Atari ST etc. was one of those, but that pretty much failed and Tramiel merged it into JTS and later sold the remains to Hasbro which then sold it to Infogrames Entertainment. The current Atari Inc. used to be Infogrames, and just licensed the name. Infogrames Entertainment itself then renamed itself to Atari SA.
The other part of the original Atari, Atari Games Inc. failed in 2003. The intellectual property of that division is as far as I know now owned by Warner.
