Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 9 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.When I was up in Ohio on vacation last week, my mom presented me with a cardboard box she found while cleaning out the basement. Score!
The Atari 800XL was my first computer, given to me by my parents as a Christmas present in the early 80s. That, combined with seeing the movie “WarGames“, is what steered me into computers and eventually, my career. This particular 800XL isn’t my original unit. I sold that one and “upgraded” to this one, which had the RAMBO XL memory upgrade to a whopping 256k (from the original 64k). So technically it’s my second computer. 😉
The cardboard box also contained my two 1050 floppy drives, a KoalaPad (no stylus), and an ICD P:R: Connection. I also had a 256k ICD MIO but sadly that was missing. I used to run a BBS on all of this hardware and with the 256k internally on the computer and the 256k external RAMDisk I was able to load the entire thing into memory to minimize floppy disk access. The 1050s were not the quietest drives and since the whole setup was in my bedroom, I could get woken up in the middle of the night when someone on the BBS saved a message board post and the disk drive would grind to life.
I managed to get the Atari hooked up to a Sony LCD HDTV in my home office:
Seeing and using the Atari again, compared to my Eee, really drives home how far computing has come in the past 25 years. Wow.
Now if my mom could only find the other box filled with game cartridges and disks …
that computer has a lot of good memories attached to it for me as well. it was my first introduction to digital art (that koala pad was my first “wacom” tablet), my first email account and my first computer games (remember the sesame street ones?). i loved that computer…ah memories. 🙂
I have more fond memories of writing programs for you in Atari BASIC! Oh, and remember Kindercomp?
Check out this cool Atari 800 laptop.
Another cool Atari hobbyist article. Maybe I should pull out my 800XL and try to read SpartaDOS partitions on my PC. 😉
I purchased the SIO2PC cable from Atarimax which allows me to connect my 800XL to my PC. There, I can run APE for Windows to load and run floppy disk images on the Atari instead of using the old 1050 drives. Very cool!