Atari 1200XL Stacked Up Against a Dell Inspiron

Bill Kendrick writes "My first computer was the short-lived 1200XL model of the Atari 8-bit computer line. I finally got ahold of one again, after having to settle with a lesser Atari system. My immediate reaction was: 'Damn, it's as big as my Dell Inspiron laptop!', and I couldn't resist doing one of those side-by-side comparisons, complete with photos of one system sitting atop the other. (I also put the 1983 storage and speeds in 2009 terms, for the benefit of the youngin's out there.) While in many ways the Atari pales in comparison to the latest technology they cram into laptops, I do get to benefit from SD storage media. It also still boots way faster than Ubuntu on the Dell, has a far more ergonomic keyboard, and is much more toddler-proof."

Comments

Youngins

[ubergamer1337]

"I also put the 1983 storage and speeds in 2009 terms, for the benefit of the youngin's out there." We would thank you, but we're too busy getting off your lawn.

Re:Youngins

[Moblaster]

>>"I also put the 1983 storage and speeds in 2009 terms, for the benefit of the youngin's out there." We would thank you, but we're too busy getting off your lawn.

Considering the Atari 1200 was powered by the 6502 microprocessor, the assembly code of which drove the original Terminator, that would be an entirely wise idea.

Re:Youngins

[Anonymous Coward]

keep your dendrophilia to yourself

Re:Youngins

[mcgrew]

He just graduated ten years ago? He is a young'n!

Re:Youngins

[Magreger_V]

"I also put the 1983 storage and speeds in 2009 terms, for the benefit of the youngin's out there." Thanks for moving the decimal for us. 2Ghz is 2000 Mhz no matter what

Interesting

[jimbobborg]

I had an Atari 800XL back in the day. With a 300 Baud modem, two floppy drives, and a color monitor! I miss that machine. Had way too many pirated games for it.

Re:Interesting

[cybrchld]

Ahhh those were the days. i remember it would take an 1hr to download a single side of a disk. 127K if i remember correctly...

Re:Interesting

[chimpo13]

Pirating Atari software. Tsk, tsk.

Nolan Bushnell is still a pretty neat guy. I remember years ago when slashdot posted his email and he'd answer just about everything.

I asked about the rumored "Kramer vs Kramer" game where you lure your kid to your side of the screen with gifts and threats. He said if they worked on that, it was past the time he worked there.

I wonder if Bill Gates will answer my question about a possible bug in my Windows 1.0 version of Reversi.

Re:Interesting

[anss123]

Had way too many pirated games for it.

A pal of mine had an Atari XEGS. It looked awesome and futuristic, but was a bit of an oddball considering Atari already had the cheaper 2600 and superior 7800 out on the market. Apparently one could convert the XEGS to an XL so I suspect Atari just wanted to cash in on XL games that wouldn't run on a 7800 without a rewrite.

Re:Interesting

[uberjack]

Yeah, he'd probably blame the amateur BASIC programmers

Re:Interesting

[Bill Kendrick]

XEGS was actually just an XL/XE with built-in Missile Command and a funky, detachable keyboard. (The Atari 5200 game system was also similar to the 400/800 (predecessor to the XL/XE), so a lot of games were identical and/or pirated+ported.)

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they'd built an 8-bit computer with the 7800's graphics chip. Maria, wasn't it?

I tried to interest Mike Hohman (Fine Tooned), but he wisely blew it off.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, my 1st computer was an Atari 400 with the annoying membrane keyboard and only a cassette drive for data IO. Spent many hours drawing crappy graphics pixel by pixel in Atari basic with it though.

Re:Interesting

[killmenow]

I still have my 1200XL, tape drive, Atari /BASIC cartridge, Jumpman Jr. cartridge, floppy drive, original Zork disks, and my Mapping the Atari book. This computer and my then pre-teen self attending a 6502 assembly class started me off on my technology love affair. I also still have old issues of Compute magazine, including the one with the code for keying in Lunar Lander. Lost my modem with acoustic coupler, unfortunately.

Re:Interesting

[Hurricane78]

Why did you steal those games from a freighter? Couldn't you just have copied them from others like normal people?

Or are you just already indoctrinated with **AA newspeak?

Re:Interesting

[aztracker1]

Don't Copy That Floppy!

Re:Interesting

[Bill Kendrick]

Thank god Black Ops didn't throw you in "get the crap beat out of you" prison for copying games back then.

Re:Interesting

[Dogtanian]

A pal of mine had an Atari XEGS. It looked awesome and futuristic, but was a bit of an oddball considering Atari already had the cheaper 2600 and superior 7800 out on the market.

Atari's problem seemed to be that they tried to do too many things at once and lacked focus.

Bill himself has already mentioned the Warner-era 5200, which was a previous attempt at building a console derived from the 400/800 8-bit computer hardware. From what I know, internally the hardware was virtually identical to the 400/800, but for some reason they changed round the location of a few registers in memory and removed some of the OS. They also changed the cartridge interface.

Therefore, despite the hardware and most of the system being identical, the 5200 couldn't directly run 400/800 games (*1) and vice versa, even if you could get it to load them.

AFAIK, they launched the 5200 around the same time that the 400/800 was replaced with the XL line. The XL was backwards-compatible (*2), so it ran (most) 400/800 games and hardware, and it *wasn't* compatible with the 5200.

Why did Atari do this? Was it a cynical attempt at marketing? Or were the divisions within Atari just more concerned at scoring points off each other? It happens.

Anyway, the 5200 flopped, not least (I heard) because the joysticks were horrible.

Re: the XEGS. This was launched later on, circa 1987, during the Tramiel era. I heard that Atari were originally planning on releasing the 7800 in Europe then changed their mind and launched the XEGS instead. Since the XEGS was (unlike the 5200) fully compatible with the 400/800/XL/XE line, it was probably a quick and easy way of exploiting existing hardware that had a lot of pre-existing software.

Thing is though, I later saw the 7800 for sale in Europe (more specifically, through Argos in the UK) and I think they sold the XEGS in the US anyway. So I'm not sure what the story was. I don't think Atari did either.

Then during the early-1990s there was the launch of the ST's successor, the Falcon 030. The ST had been quite successful in Europe, but was later overtaken by the Amiga 500 when the price of that came down. I *knew* that regardless of whether it was a nice machine or not, the Falcon 030 was going to flop because (a) Even then the ST market was seriously declining with no obvious likelihood of things getting better and the PC compatibles were taking over, (b) Atari probably didn't have the budget to do it justice and (c) Atari couldn't market ****.

The Falcon 030 flopped.

It was withdrawn after just a year or so, I seem to remember so that Atari could commit to the Jaguar console, but that was a relative flop as well. If they'd launched it properly, it might have done some business before the far superior PlayStation came out and wiped the floor with it, but they didn't.

Oh yeah, and the technically-brilliant-for-its-time Lynx was a flop as well, even though it should have done well.

Atari sucked.

Re:Interesting

[Rycross]

Between terrible rap music and black-ops busting my door down, I'd have to say its a toss-up.

Re:Interesting

[jimbobborg]

You had to have a cartridge for BASIC? If you didn't hit a special button on the 800XL, you defaulted to basic. Sucked if you programmed anything, as you couldn't write to a floppy if you didn't boot from it.

Re:Interesting

[Dogtanian]

Forgot the footnotes(!)

(*1) Though the changes required to port 5200 games to/from the 400/800 would likely be limited to tweaking a few locations

(*2) Almost; some games didn't run, but the majority did.

Re:Interesting

[anss123]

So I'm not sure what the story was. I don't think Atari did either.

LOL. Probably true that :-)

Oh yeah, and the technically-brilliant-for-its-time Lynx was a flop as well, even though it should have done well.

The Lynx should have been smaller with a bigger BW reflective screen. The Lynx hardware itself was quite innovative, but its "huge" size and hunger for batteries made it a poor portable. The Game Gear was similarly troubled but Sega somehow managed to attract buyers though.

Re:Interesting

[SpammersAreScum]

Still miss it, huh? I think I still have mine -- or maybe it's the 520ST I got next -- in the basement somewhere. Hint, hint.

Re:Interesting

[rattaroaz]

Anyway, the 5200 flopped, not least (I heard) because the joysticks were horrible.

Don't even get me started here. The joystick itself was bizarrely unresponsive. The buttons on the side were so difficult to push, it was painful after less than 5 minutes playing in the store. I think I was 10 years old at the time, but I remember how shocked I was by this controller. Today, I'm always surprised when shoddy designs get passed through QA, into an end product. I don't know why, but after all these years, I still am. Go figure.

Re:Interesting

[maxume]

I don't have an OED so I can't check the veracity of the Wikipedia citation, but newspeak it isn't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#cite_ref-1

I can never get it straight which British newspapers are supposed to be trustworthy, but the Globe and Mail backs up the wiki (but maybe they just read it, who knows these days):

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/archives/article800923.ece

Re:Interesting

[Hal_Porter]

Landon Dyer, who wrote/ported Donkey Kong for Atari 8 bit machines has a blog

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987

It's actually a remarkable story - he was in charge of the 'port', but actually he just played the arcade game at his hotel, wrote a spec and reimplemented it from scratch. When it was done he had code that just fit into the Rom - only a 'dozen or so bytes' were free. It's easily one of the best arcade ports to the Atari too.

Actually since Atari is the topic, I had one back in the day and there are two things I saw demonstrated that I never could figure out.

One was a turbo loader for cassette tapes. There was a lump of electronics in potting compound and a normal cassette recorded. They claimed it could load from tape faster than an 1050 disk drive. It couldnâ(TM)t but it was pretty close. The lump of potted electronics was quite small and the sold the whole thing for about 40 bucks. I never figured out how they managed to modulate and demodulate that high a baud rate with what must have been a couple of Op Amps. I donâ(TM)t know how stable it was - probably not very - but I donâ(TM)t think it was faked.

The other was an Atari 800XL with a Prestel cartridge. It was displaying 40Ã--24 text in the Prestel font, which is easy to do on an Atari. But it was also displaying Prestel colors. They allow any character cell to have one of 8 colors (basically R1G1B1) in the foreground and one in the background. If you looked carefully the screen looked like Mode 0 with a strage overlay color, like they used the player missile graphics or something. But PMG doesnâ(TM)t look like it can handle the worst case where either the background or the foreground can change each character square. It was sort of flickery too, though not as bad as if they interlaced a color frame and a text frame alternately.

Re:Interesting

[L4t3r4lu5]

The Game Gear was similarly troubled but Sega somehow managed to attract buyers though.

Sonic.

Re:Interesting

[tignet]

40 tracks, 27 sectors per track (dual density only, 18 sec/track for single/double density), 128 bytes per sector (single/dual, 256 for double). Leading to:

• Single density: 90KB (back then a KB was still 1024 bytes for storage)
• Dual density: 135KB
• Double density: 180KB

Be sure to get a disk notcher so that you can use both sides of the disk. Also... get off my lawn.

Re:Interesting

[Dogtanian]

The Lynx hardware itself was quite innovative, but its "huge" size and hunger for batteries made it a poor portable.

Apparently, Atari made the first version of the Lynx's case *larger*- and half empty!- because the focus groups said that this was perceived to be better value or something. They launched a more compact (and better looking) version later on- my brother had one of those- but it was still very battery hungry.

In some ways, the Game Boy and the Lynx were different anyway- the GB was a pocket system, the Lynx was a portable one.

The Game Gear was similarly troubled but Sega somehow managed to attract buyers though.

I never got the impression that the Game Gear was *that* big a hit personally, but I might be wrong.

Re:Interesting

[g253]

True ; it could also play master system games...

Re:Interesting

[slapout]

The Game Gear had a higher resolution screen, but that ended up making the characters/sprites smaller and thus harder to see.

I remember at camp I had a Lynx and another kid had a Game Gear. He always wanted to play my Lynx.

Re:Interesting

[slapout]

The 5200 joysticks weren't that bad. I actually liked them. The problem was that they'd wear out very quickly and then the buttons would become unresponsive.

Re:Interesting

[rattaroaz]

That's funny. I would have liked to have played against you on the system. I would be the guy constantly losing, and blaming my ineptness on the controller . . . seriously though, they sucked :P

Re:Interesting

[EvilBudMan]

--Atari's problem seemed to be that they tried to do too many things at once and lacked focus.--

Atari when Warner owned was a billion dollar a year company. Jack Tramiel really fubared Atari. All those old Atari guys quit and went to Amiga like Jay Minor. Atari should have had that and Commodore should have had the ST.

Re:Interesting

[Dogtanian]

Atari when Warner owned was a billion dollar a year company.

Yeah, but remember Warner wanted to sell them because by that time they were *losing* like a billion dollars a year. ;-)

Well, I exaggerate slightly, but they were losing a *lot* of money apparently.

BTW, if Wikipedia is to be believe, Jay Miner was one of the founder members of Amiga Corp., which was set up in late 1982, at least 18 months before Atari was sold.

Tramiel-era Atari and, er, post-Tramiel-era Commodore were pretty much as bad as each other anyway. They enjoyed some further success but never regained their heyday and in retrospect both showed the traits that would eventually lead to their downfall.

Re:Interesting

[EvilBudMan]

Yeah, we'll it wasn't the product. How it couldn't earn money off a Billion gross in the 80's is beyond me. They were blowing a lot of money on stupid shit tooo early, etc. This was the early 80's boy where their Billionaires were real old fashion ones like Howard Hughes. After the original line up quit they burned up soon after simple as that. A 12000XL is cool through time and space. This will be on the Net now 1000yrs. because of Archive.org but anyways?

What the hell?

[XPeter]

No SSD? No blu ray? No multiple core processors? No high clocked graphics cards? No ram with heat-spreaders attached? And worst of all no big case with lights inside?!

What kind of world did you people live in?

Re:What the hell?

[Moblaster]

It was a world where almost every kid grew up learning at least a little BASIC, because virtually all computers booted right into the BASIC command line. Which skill-wise puts the early 80s generation ahead of every generation before or after, young whippersnapper.

Re:What the hell?

[Hatta]

No SSD?

Actually, depending on your definition it does have a solid state drive. SD cards are solid state media, and his SIO2PC emulates an atari drive.

That's actually a really cool device, I just got a 600xl, and I'm going to have to pick one up. Very reasonably priced at $60, considering a comparable solution for the IIgs costs twice that.

Re:What the hell?

[tsa]

As I recall most kids in the 1980s couldn't care less about BASIC or assembler. They just wanted to play games on their home computers.

Re:What the hell?

[XPeter]

Not so fast there.

I'm currently learning VB and Ruby (Basic, but you said basic), and my hardware knowledge is also proficient. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Re:What the hell?

[Loconut1389]

To Both: Why? Dear Lord, why?

Learn C# instead, and learn Python instead of Ruby.

Re:What the hell?

[idontgno]

No, no, no! Learn Java instead, and learn Perl instead of Ruby. Or Python.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Re:What the hell?

[mcgrew]

What kind of world did you people live in?

As primitive as the world is today, the world I grew up in was WAY primitive. Computers took entire buildings to house but were less powerful than a pocket calculator (my "pocket calculator" was a slide rule), there were no mice, no laser pointers (no lasers at all). there was color TV but only one family in the neighborhood could afford one and besides there were only two station (this was in St Louis, a major metropolis). No VCRs, no video games, no microwave ovens, no cordless phones (the phones had dials instead of buttons), no remote controls. Cars had no fuel injectors, air bags, or seat belts. Most electronics still used tubes. No accomodating lenses for cataract patients (in fact the first IOL was developed only a few years before I was born). Most folks didn't have air conditioning, and nobody had air in their cars. Cars only had AM radio.

When Star Trek came on TV (I was 12 iirc) everything about it was pure science fiction - doors that opened by themselves (now every grocery has them), flat screen desktop computers, "communicators" (cell phones), etc.

You don't realise how primitive your world is until you get older. I can't imagine some of the stuff you guys will get to see. I never dreamed that some day I wouldn't have to wear glasses!

Hell, the laser didn't exist until I was 8 or 9. Talk about primitive.

Re:What the hell?

[EvanED]

Which skill-wise puts the early 80s generation ahead of every generation before or after, young whippersnapper.

Maybe if you compare % of computer users who can program, but I would bet any money that the difference is more than made up by the increased prevalence of PCs since the early 80s' generation.

(And yes, I was born in the early-to-mid 80s and started programming BASIC in 3rd grade.)

Re:What the hell?

[jbeale53]

Cars had no fuel injectors

What about the 1958 Pontiac Bonneville? ;) Unless, of course, you were going back before then...

Re:What the hell?

[EvanED]

No, no, no! Learn Java instead, and learn Perl instead of Ruby. Or Python.

No, no, no! Learn C++, and learn Lisp instead of Perl, Ruby, or Python. ;-)

(Truth be told, I'm closest to the C#/Python person here, but it depends what you want to do of course. C# is a bit nicer language than Java, and programming with Windows Forms beats the crap off of Swing. I would say that it easily should be your choice before VB, even with the improvements in .Net that make them almost the same language with different syntax. The downside to C# is the tie to Windows you get from it. (This is a pretty big downside; whether it's a deal-breaker depends on your personal goals and ideology.) Perl v. Python is a big holy war, but I fall squarely into the Python camp between the two.)

Re:What the hell?

[Rude Turnip]

Unfortunately, starting with BASIC as your first computer language is the metaphorical equivalent of eating a steady diet of lead-based paint chips as a child and hoping to get into medical school as a young adult.

Re:What the hell?

[Rasperin]

And what Java v. C++ isn't the war of the languages? Learn C++ || Java > C# > dogshit > VB just matters what you want and what you are ready to give. I've been in Java webdev crap for 5x years and I'll tell you it's a great language but there is a point where manual control; even to this day; would be nice. Oh wait java has that what am I saying.

Re:What the hell?

[EvanED]

And what Java v. C++ isn't the war of the languages?

Yeah, but the part I said at first was much more tongue-in-cheek than the longer notes after it. It's not entirely unfounded in my opinions (especially the Lisp suggestion), but even I will say that C++ no longer qualifies as a "you really should know this" language.

Learn C++ || Java > C# > dogshit > VB

I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java nothing like pure BASIC), and spawned lots of crappy apps.

I've been in Java webdev crap for 5x years and I'll tell you it's a great language but there is a point where manual control; even to this day; would be nice. Oh wait java has that what am I saying.

I'm not saying Java's a bad language, even if I mostly don't like it personally. If you're looking to start programming and want a more "traditional" language than focusing purely on something like Ruby or Python or Lisp, Java's fine.

Re:What the hell?

[Hurricane78]

Which was only possible if you could do basic!

And many kids actually later started making their own little games. For FUN. Yes!

I loved my ASCII-art games, until I found out, that my crappy 8088 PC could do graphics on his black/green AGA (CGA+Hercules+Monochrome) graphics system. Then I got really sad that I did not find it out earlier.
My father was such a cheap ass. Wanna know what computer I wanted when I got that thing instead?
A 386DX with 33 MHz! Yes. That's how old that thing was!

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ruby isn't so awful. Especially if you're into giggling over your clever Perl-y tricks, more than writing understandable code. If you're just hacking out scripts, whatevs. But yes, VB is an unequivocally awful choice in a world with C#.

Then, if you want to be able to write useful systems-level code, learn C.

-- a Linux Pythonista who makes a living with the mess that is C++/Win32

Re:What the hell?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Did you know that when it was invented, the bosses at Bell labs said "there will never be an application for a room-temperature laser"?

Anyway, speaking of times changing: Before I was born, my dad got out of the Navy and went into an electronics store to buy some items for a home project.

"I'd like to buy some LEDs."

"Uh, what are those?"

"Small round lights, solid state, produce a red light when you apply power."

"They... uh... they don't make anything like that, sir."

*remembers that they were Not Released Yet*

"Oh yeah, you're right, they don't."

Re:What the hell?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hey, being admitted to a teaching hospital is virtually the same as getting into med school, right?

Re:What the hell?

[vlm]

Computers took entire buildings to house but were less powerful than a pocket calculator

A very common misconception. Actually they were far, far more powerful than any modern computer. One mainframe could run multinational corporations, put a man on the moon, etc. In comparison, on a good day, a modern computer might be able to balance my checkbook, with alot of help, play a game, or maybe replay some music.

That is what motivates people like myself toward retrocomputing... Its not that its a low clock speed, who cares about that, but that on my desk I can now use technology that ran entire research labs, major corporations, etc.

You can either learn how to solve scalable, ultra high reliability, enterprise grade computing problems by studying how the ancients solved those problems, or flail around blindly while re-learning the ancient's wisdom... Your choice.

Power is applied by changing the world, not toggling a flipflop at GHz speeds but not really doing anything out in the world.

Re:What the hell?

[bughunter]

What kind of world did you people live in?

A world without insanely cheap, plentiful CPU cycles, digital mass storage and RAM. Therefore, games were all analog and generally involved things called balls, and lots of dirt, and it carried the risk of a range of bodily injuries from scuffed knees to broken bones. Similarly, porn was recorded in analog form -- i.e., stored in your biological neural network (aka, "spank bank") -- for, ahem, later retrieval. If you were lucky, you could find a photographic album of naked women, cars, and left-wing politics (aka, "playboy") hidden in your father's workbench. And we had sex with corporeal, fleshy things sporting the occasional hairy and/or saggy bits (aka, "girls")... unlike the waxed silicone representations of today.

That world was called... the Nineteen Seventies.

Re:What the hell?

[EvanED]

I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java nothing like pure BASIC), and spawned lots of crappy apps.

Wow, that's some HTML fail on my part. Let me try that again:

"I've already said why I think that "Java > C#" is far from true (even if "Java < C#" isn't necessarily true either). VB gets somewhat of a bad rap; VB.Net's worst aspect is really that it offers almost no benefit over C# and a few drawbacks. Pre-.Net VB was rather worse, but it still wasn't terrible; the worst things about it are that it didn't have features that real OO languages rely on despite trying a little to be OO, the need to have the VB runtime, and that it spawned lots of crappy apps."

Re:What the hell?

[bughunter]

That sounds like the 1970s version of walking into a Turner's Outdoorsman and asking the man behind the gun counter for a "phased plasma pulse-laser in the forty watt range."

Re:What the hell?

[TheBig1]

The patent for the first laser was apparently granted in 1959, so if GP was 8 or 9 at the time, it would be before the bonneville in question. Wow... I feel young ;-)

Cheers

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arguing with my friends between the Commodore 64 and Apple //e.

But mutually laughing at the friend with the IBM PC.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah? Well I learned QBasic in the 90's.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your complaint is misphrased. The correct formulation is:
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Re:What the hell?

[Gilmoure]

Art Therapy man! That's where the bucks are, education wise.

Re:What the hell?

[CohibaVancouver]

just wanted to play games on their home computers

Yes, and often the way you got games was to painstakingly key them in (in basic) from the source code printed in magazines.

You couldn't help but pick up a little basic along the way...

Re:What the hell?

[Dogtanian]

As I recall most kids in the 1980s couldn't care less about BASIC or assembler. They just wanted to play games on their home computers.

Which was only possible if you could do basic!

We had these things called tapes and disks when I was a kid. You could buy them with other people's games on and stuff!

And no, I don't count 'LOAD ""' or whatever the C64 equivalent was as knowing BASIC. :-)

BTW, BASIC was a ******* horrible language for encouraging bad habits, for myself included.

Re:What the hell?

[camperdave]

What kind of world did you people live in?

We lived in the kind of world where one could fully reboot a computer faster than one could type the words "full reboot". We lived in a world where installing a program was faster than ejecting a DVD. We lived in a world where one could double your storage with a hole punch.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

On my Apple //e
I had SSDs; Standard Single Density floppies, 140k.
Blue Ray? Didn't have that game, but played me lots of Karateka!!!
Multiple core processors? I had a second CPU and card for CP/M in there...
High clocked graphics card! Oh yeah baby! 80 columns!!!! That card was awesome!!
RAM with heat spreaders? Just about everything inside had to have heat sinks, along with my sidecar fan.
Big Case? CHECK!!!
Lights inside? Well, when playing around on it at night, I needed the flashlight to keep my parents from knowing I was still up.

Re:What the hell?

[Zak3056]

No SSD? No blu ray? No multiple core processors? No high clocked graphics cards? No ram with heat-spreaders attached? And worst of all no big case with lights inside?!

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but you still learned it though. (Or simply became a half-decent typist.) This is because back in those days, the magazines that had games rarely ever included a disk. Instead, you were directed to the back of the magazine from the article in the front. The back pages were where you painstakingly copied the program source in BASIC verbatim word for word. (And on some occasions you even had to debug, because the magazines had a typo or two.) After getting the program done, you had to hope there wasn't a power outage, or that the craptastic belt on the 1050 drive didn't slip while you were saving the results of that work. (The older 810 drive which I later got from a cousin was a lot more reliable, even if it was uglier and didn't aesthetically match the 130XE I had.)

Anyone else remember the hour or two spent in the back of Antic Magazine just to try a game that sounded interesting. It was worth it for the occasional fun game, but the average for the typed-in games was more so-so.

Of course if you saved up money from chores you could mail order disks of various games listed in the computer magazines. Or if you had a few floppies to take to a swap meet or a friends house you could copy the better binary-based games. (Arr!) The difference was that you had to hold down the option key to load those, or in some cases use Atari-Loader because some of the older games relied on a glitch from the XL series that was fixed in the XE series.

Re:What the hell?

[Knara]

flat screen desktop computers

Even Star Trek didn't have those (not TOS, anyway). All the desktop terminals looked like those giant hand-held slide viewers (YES, PHOTO SLIDES) you could stick a few batteries in, so clearly the intent was that they were small, high-definition CRTs :) They did have the tablet computers, though (stylus and everything), though of course the effects tech was far too primitive to make them actually look functional.

Re:What the hell?

[Knara]

I love that line. Much more than "I'll be back". It's just so.. great. I dunno how else to say it.

Re:What the hell?

[Knara]

The mainframes were hobbled by the lack of their ability to do more than any one task at a time, and their ultra-slow methods of input.

You're kinda aggrandizing the whole retro-computing thing. It's cool and all, don't get me wrong, I liked my C-64 as well. But saying that mainframes were more powerful than the modern global computing infrastructure is just silly.

Re:What the hell?

[_avs_007]

My dad refused to buy games for me and my brother... Said if we wanted to play games on our TI 99/4A, we had to program them ourselves.... Incidentally, that's how I got into computers. Even wrote a couple programs that my dad's company used on a daily basis when I was 7 years old.

My brother and I would get into competitions seeing who could write better games.

Re:What the hell?

[clintp]

Where's my mod points when I need them!?! Dammit. And I misplaced my dentures too.

+1 Truthyness

Re:What the hell?

[grumling]

I picked up enough to figure out that the joystick ports were bi-directional, and built a robotic light sensing/tracker (using cadmium sulfide cells connected to the paddle inputs, which were A/D converters). I still remember walking around the family room with a candle and watching my path traced out on the TV.

Re:What the hell?

[black6host]

Especially since more often or not there were errata in the source code listings. At least that was the case with my Radio Shack CoCo and related magazines. Either you knew enough to fix things or you waited until the next months issue. Such fun, frustrating times!

Re:What the hell?

[jedidiah]

Yes, but can any of them do anything with their PC's without
excessive handholding from the local guru? Can they manage to
install their own USB camera, get pictures off it and then
proceed to crop/rotate/un-redeye them and upload them to the
web or otherwise "publish" them.

These days nevermind "programming", a little basic self reliance
would be a good improvement on the state of things.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a world where almost every kid grew up learning at least a little BASIC, because virtually all computers booted right into the BASIC command line. Which skill-wise puts the early 80s generation ahead of every generation before or after, young whippersnapper.

hear, hear......as a teacher booting into ur os and a BASIC interpreter at the same time.........I love it.....booting into a python interpreter might be kool!

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where my 6-year-old today plays World of PadMan, and thousands of Atari 2600 and NES games using emulators on his old POS Edubuntu machine I coddled together for him, I fondly remember keying in BASIC programs from Family Computing and ANTIC magazine into my 800XL, then futzing with the code, when I was around the same age. ...all interspersed with games of Bruce Lee and Behind Jaggi Lines, of course!

Ah, Fun times!

Re:What the hell?

[darf]

> and nobody had air in their cars.

Yeah, I remember the government education posters and bulletins reminding people to open the windows when they got in their cars lest they suffocate. They really needed to have a "Duck and Cover" type program for this - would have solved a lot of problems. I feel old now.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

We lived in a world where one could double your storage with a hole punch.

For you youngsters on my lawn:

The Apple ][ took 5.25" floppy disks. It had a single-sided floppy drive, so it would only use one side of a floppy at a time.

You could write to a floppy disk side if it had a notch cut. To write protect a floppy you would put a sticker over the notch. You could buy "double-sized" floppy disks, which had two notches; or "single-sided" which just had the one notch. The protective outside of a 5.25" floppy disk was flexible tough plastic, not too thick; 3.5" floppies have a hard plastic shell, but not these.

Well, the single-sided disks would actually work as double-sided disks, if you could only get the notch you needed. You could buy a special notch punch, you could use an X-Acto knife to carefully cut a notch, but mostly we would just take a paper punch and make a sloppy but effective notch.

You might have a bad sector or two on the back of the "single-sided" disks, but hey, format the disk and get what you get and be happy.

I don't miss those days too much. I love my USB key drive, with several gigabytes of storage with no moving parts. Apple ][ disks stored 140 KB per side, which is about 0.0001335 gigabytes.

Re:What the hell?

[CZakalwe]

But I love spreading gratuitous GOTOs throughout my programs!

Re:What the hell?

[jamesh]

Which was only possible if you could do basic!

And many kids actually later started making their own little games. For FUN. Yes!

Most didn't though. Most just learned the absolute minimum that they needed to start the game (LOAD "xxx",8,1) etc.

My younger two kids could type their own names into the computer when they were about 2 and a half. They didn't know what the letters meant, they just knew that they had to type the same 3-6 letters into this box and that box for them to be able to play their games. Same with playing a DVD on the TV. A toddler doesn't know what most of the buttons do, but if everyone else is busy and they want to watch a DVD then they'll pick it up once they've been shown a few times.

I loved to program when I was a kid, but it wasn't an interest shared by most of my friends. I did love the fact that a lot of computers of that era came with just about everything you'd need to know to start programing, should you be interested. And the fact that if you screwed something up a reboot would put it right again!

Re:What the hell?

[Jesus_666]

LOAD"*",8,1

SEARCHING FOR *
LOADING
READY.
RUN


don't use so many caps. it's like yelling. don't use so many caps. it's like yelling.

Re:What the hell?

[Cytotoxic]

Care about it? No, not really. But you'd buy a copy of Compute's Gazette that had a few games in each issue. In printed text. In Basic. Then you'd run home and spend a couple of hours typing in all of those lovely sprite graphics.... Poke-ing and peek-ing. Then you got to play they game! Awesome!
Then you'd put a sign on the computer "Do Not Unplug" because you didn't have a tape drive to save the game to and if anyone unplugged your computer you'd lose all that work. Ahhh, good times....

Re:What the hell?

[mcgrew]

In 1972 I was in the USAF at Beale and drove the flightline (I recounted it in Growing Up with Computers back in 2005).

By 1972 I was in the US Air Force as a driver, working on the flight line in the Aerospace Ground Equipment (AGE) unit. One cold, snowy night a half hour from the swing shift's quitting time, a call came in for two air conditioners way over on the other side of the base. My tractor had a top speed of about ten miles per hour - I was looking forward to a beer, and here I had to drag these damned air conditioners out. I was going to be working late. Hell!

A half an hour or so later I arrived at the facility, swearing, with air conditioners in tow. To my amazement there were two guys standing outside in the snow waiting for me.

"What the fuck do you need a God damned air conditioner in the snow for? I demanded.

"Oh, man," one replied excitedly, "this is so cool. You have to see it!" These guys were bouncing around like kids at a birthday party. One showed me around as the other hooked up the hoses from the air conditioners and turned them on.

Inside was what looked like a library. Every room was filled with rows and rows of what appeared to be bookshelves. However, instead of books, these shelves held printed circuit boards. There must have been thousands of them. I was duly impressed, and had nerdily forgotten about the beer I had wanted so badly.

"Cool. But what is it for?" I asked.

"Ahh," he said, "come in here," and led me to yet another room. This room was huge, and had little in it that I recognized. It was straight out of a science fiction movie, only less corny looking.

"Ok," I replied stupidly, "what is it?"

"It's a C5 simulator! Come on inside!"

And inside the contraption was the cockpit of a C-5A cargo plane, at the time the largest aircraft in the world. We had several C5s there at Dover, which was, of course, why they needed a C5 simulator. And two SUV sized air conditioners to cool the contraption's circuitry.

It was identical to a C5 cockpit, right down to the bolts and carpets. The only difference was that the windows were ground glass rather than clear, for projecting images on.

They let me "fly" it. It was incredible! It sat on hydraulics, so when you accelerated, it felt like acceleration. Likewise banking, diving, etc. You could even crash the thing! This was even cooler than the other computer I had seen back when I was 12.

I assure you, you're wrong. Your laptop is more powerful than twenty year old supercomputer. It has more storage, more memory, faster processing, and better graphics.

Re:What the hell?

[mcgrew]

I was six years old in 1958. And AFAIK nobody I knew had a Bonneville.

Re:What the hell?

[mcgrew]

I read that shortly before I was born, someone (at IBM? It's been a long time since I read it) said that the world market for computers was about a dozen.

Re:What the hell?

[PriceIke]

"I notice you're still working with polymers."

"Still? What else would I be working with?"

"Ahh, what else indeed..."

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I recall most kids are stupid.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point. Sometimes simpler technology is easier to understand how to apply. Modern computers are so complex, it's obvious by the software people write for them that it's unclear how to put them to good use.

Facebook is not a good use!

Re:What the hell?

[Hognoxious]

Actually they were far, far more powerful than any modern computer. One mainframe could run multinational corporations, put a man on the moon, etc.

Here's an interesting fact - they still make mainframes.

Re:What the hell?

[Hognoxious]

The mainframes were hobbled by the lack of their ability to do more than any one task at a time

Really? So what was the point of having hundreds of concurrent users?

Re:What the hell?

[DRACO-]

Power referenced by the previous poster is philosophical.

Mainframes were powerful in their reach of the consequence of their existence. Like he says, the mainframe ran entire companies. The purchase and use of a mainframe for a company would create a splash of changes throughout the organization. The pc of today, certainly has more computing power, but it's reach of consequence for it's existence almost only changes things for one person or a small family, not 900 employees and thousands of customers.

The change in application in business getting a mainframe was monumentally great. Then change in application is minimal for you buying a pc. Business processes changed because of mainframes. For normal people, a pc just makes a few things easier like communication and writing/research but the pc doesn't make magic biscuits, it doesn't help you understand how to restructure your household's organization and predict future.

For business a mainframe was a number cruncher and money tracking/making machine.. For normal people a pc is simply an entertainment device.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

... which was, on almost every computer you could find, Microsoft Basic.

Apple had its own (they needed MS for floating point. Jobs interrupted Gates to tell his version of the story where Woz was a genius who just didn't like decimal points or some bullshit RDF voodoo).

Re:What the hell?

[Hognoxious]

Power referenced by the previous poster is philosophical.

I understand what you're saying, but I don't see any evidence that he meant it that way.

Re:What the hell?

[badkarmadayaccount]

No, God no. Screw C. Please. Learn Ada, for Pete's sake. I'm sick of buffer overflows.

Re:What the hell?

[Knara]

"Mainframe" does not automatically imply "time sharing system". :)

Re:What the hell?

[Hognoxious]

It doesn't automatically exclude that either. FAIL.

Re:What the hell?

[Knara]

If there are exceptions to being time shared systems, then the generalization by the poster is incorrect.

You should spend more time thinking and less time on 4chan.

Re:What the hell?

[Hognoxious]

In the absence of a qualifier such as 'some' or' many', 'all' is assumed. Learn to speak English, you dumb, arrogant wog.

Enjoyable reading.

[davebarnes]

I look forward to your IBM 1401 versus the Dell laptop comparison.

Not again!

[girlintraining]

Slashdot's continuing trend to post stories late continues, with one now finally exiting the queue that came from 1983. And even then; The 1200xl was so horrible that people bought up its predecessor to avoid having to succumb to the evil. Someone quick, draw an analogy to the current Vista v. XP debacle as a distraction while I run away now!

Re:Not again!

[Hurricane78]

Do you want to have some car analogy in there?
We offer nice Edsel ones today!

Re:Not again!

[Dogtanian]

The 1200xl was so horrible that people bought up its predecessor to avoid having to succumb to the evil

As far as I'm aware the 1200XL had two problems that caused this; intentionally "closed" design with a lack of expandability (and loss of compatibility with some older peripherals), and also some software incompatibility with older 400/800 software.

This is why (AFAIK) it was replaced with the 600XL and 800XL computers.

Re:Not again!

[jjmcwill]

I had a 1200XL, and after updating the ROM, a 256K RAM upgrade, and the video output circuitry, it was every bit as good as the 800XL.

I actually took an XF551 drive modified to use a 3.5" floppy drive mech, and hacked the controller board and drive inside the 1200XL case. The floppy drive was accessible on the right side of the computer via a nice square slot I cut out of the case.

It was pretty darn cool at the time. SpartaDOS was very similar to MS-DOS in terms of a command oriented disk operating system, and I made the leap from my Atari to PC's pretty easily.

I can't believe someone came up with a SD reader hack for them. I'm amazed some people are still hacking them!

Re:Not again!

[domatic]

You can also run something like APE and use either your main PC or just any old machine you have laying around to emulate a stack of Atari disk drives. Things like APE are so good that the Atari can't tell the difference and just thinks it's sending SIO commands to real hardware. So you just chuck a disk image in of your favorite game from back in the day that you downloaded and boot the Atari. Nice stuff.

Re:Not again!

[phozz bare]

I had - actually, still have - a very, very nicely hacked 130XE. It got a 1 MB memory upgrade, a video output upgrade, a replacement OS and a keyboard upgrade that made it actually usable to human hands. I believe the parent poster will be eerily familiar with it...

Personally I think this combination made it the best 8-bit except for the 800 (which still wins for best keyboard, internal speaker click which I miss terribly and its nuke-proof construction). It served me well for many years. Thank you, jjmcwill :)

Even better!

[EdipisReks]

I'm going to compare my horse to my car! My dog to my Xbox! My socks to my power outlets!

Re:Even better!

[box4831]

My socks to my power outlets!

I, for one, am looking forward to that one. :D

Re:Even better!

[CannonballHead]

Dude, Dells aren't all that bad. You don't have to call them horses, dogs, and socks. ;)

Re:Even better!

[aardwolf64]

Well, we DO measure the power of an engine in "horsepower". Dogbox, not so much...

Re:Even better!

[Gay for Linux]

http://www09.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=dog+%2F+xbox

http://www09.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=atari+%2F+dell

Hmm Wolfram doesn't understand either.

Re:Even better!

[Mursk]

http://www.dogboxracing.com/?

Re:Even better!

[L4t3r4lu5]

How many dogbox would you need to play Crysis on your sock drawer?

Missile command

[Hatta]

Unfortunately, the Atari trakball is digital so you don't get that much benefit from using the trackball over a regular joystick. If you want to play a real game of Missile Command, you need an Atari 5200, and it's giant ass trackball.

Re:Missile command

[Bill Kendrick]

Digital in the same sense that a ball-based mouse on a PC is digital. Though the Trak-Ball I have also has a switch to change between trackball and joystick mode, so you can play joystick-based games with it.

Re:Missile command

[idontgno]

If you want to play a real game of Missile Command, you need an Atari 5200, and it's giant ass trackball.

0_o

Oh, ok. I get it. English isn't your native language, so it's natural to drop those pesky indefinite articles.

Here's your sentence, expanded and grammatically correct:

...you need an Atari 5200; it is a giant ass trackball.

Now, I was always partial to the Amiga back in the era of the Atari ST/Amiga flamewar, but I'd never call the 5200 a trackball. It was a legitimate console.

Wait. I think I misinterpreted that. You're saying that the Atari 5200 was a very large trackball intended to be manipulated by the user's butt. Am I right? That would be quite a peripheral, kinda like a ur-Wii Fit controller.

BTW, if I recall correctly, the original Missile Command controller was digital (rotary quadrature encoding, like optomechanical mice). The Atari 2600 Trackball was also quad-encoded digital, and pretty easy to retrofit for use with the Amiga, the mouse interface of which was based on quad encoding.

Re:Missile command

[Hatta]

Mine doesn't have that, I know there were a few different models so maybe that's the difference.

Re:Missile command

[Anonymous Coward]

and it's giant ass trackball

?????

Re:Missile command

[Bill Kendrick]

Hrm. Tried holding the [Select] button down while you turn it on? That _should_ boot it into Missile Command, if my Google-fu is working for me.

Cue those age-old memories

[Ollabelle]

I think I was the only guy who bought an Apple III; it had 5 meg hard drive that sat between the box and the monitor - meaning that the drive was as wide as the monitor.

Re:Cue those age-old memories

[jeffb (2.718)]

And five or six inches tall. ProFiles came in 5 meg (what you had) and 10 meg (what I got with my Lisa, er, "Mac L").

Re:Cue those age-old memories

[u38cg]

Finally, someone who has *heard* of the damn thing :)

My parents bought me an Apple III for a half ton of bricks (in 1991!) convinced that "this computer thing" would be on the way out (just like guitar bands, I guess). I didn't get a hard drive; I had to boot SOS and then some mental crap called Business BASIC to be able to do anything. I had an external hard drive though, and one of my proudest moments was re-writing part of SOS to be able to treat the internal floppy and the external one as a single contiguous volume.

And your point is?

[LABarr]

I have a .22 rifle from the early 1900's that still shoots the bullets out the barrel end. When compared to my "modern" .22 rifle they pretty much do the same thing.

Re:And your point is?

[east coast]

That's not really the same. His comparison would be more like you putting your .22 rifle against my Heckler and Koch 91. Granted, the H&K 91 is a 1950s design based on a 1940s rifle but I bet you it will make things seem worlds apart.

Re:And your point is?

[Gilmoure]

I have an '03 Springfield that works just as good as my cousin's Remington 700 (about 15 years old). Course mine has a lot cooler markings on it.

Now, if I could just get a nice Garand...

Re:And your point is?

[ducomputergeek]

more like I have a j. savage arms jr. scout breach loading single shot .22 from 1907 and a semi-automatic Ruger 10/22 from 2007. Both do the same thing, but the Ruger does it faster and with better accuracy at distance thanks to a longer barrel.

Longevity

[Mordaximus]

That dell won't be running in 27 years to make a similar comparison. It may be huge and slow, but that atari is still running in 2009. That's no small feat.

Re:Longevity

[MrEricSir]

I'm here from the future to tell you that in fact, the Dell lapto-

BZZZTT *crackle*

OH NO THE ROBOTS ARE OUT! *bzzzZZT* EVERBODY RUN, RUN! AAAAAAAAA ...*ZAP*

Re:Longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

If it were a Dell Latitude it would have no problem lasting for 30 years. Those things are built like tanks.

Re:Longevity

[Nimey]

What percentage of 1200XLs still function, do you think? Remember that people think "they made stuff better 100 years ago", but that's because only the stuff that was any good in the first place survived 100 years of use. Plenty of crap was made back then too, but it's not around to admire.

Re:Longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

That dell won't be running in 27 years to make a similar comparison. It may be huge and slow, but that atari is still running in 2009. That's no small feat.

Um; TRS 80's (trash 80's) are still running today. Where have you been?
-Scriptsit Lives!!!!

Re:Longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

A rock might last you a billion years.

And still be more useful than an Atari.

Re:Longevity

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right. You're like the people who say modern cars are crap and will never last as long as the old "built like a tank" ones. It's all a bunch of bullshit and people are morons. For the most part modern cars are better than the old ones and will likely last longer not shorter. For example, my current 15 year old car (built in 1993/1994 now 2009) is in much better shape than my 1970's era tank car was when it was 15 years old (built in 1971 in 1986 condition).

Same goes for computer hardware.

Re:Longevity

[Abcd1234]

That dell won't be running in 27 years to make a similar comparison. It may be huge and slow, but that atari is still running in 2009. That's no small feat.

Two words for you: survivorship bias. Or: No, they didn't actually make things any better back then.

1KB != 1B

[Mprx]

Some of the "In 1980s terms" calculations are out by a factor of 1024. I'd love to have a laptop with 2TB ram, but I don't think they exist yet.

Re:1KB != 1B

[needs2bfree]

Also, he makes a comparison based on the processor frequency. I didn't run the numbers, but I'll bet those are off by a fair bit as well.

Re:1KB != 1B

[Bill Kendrick]

Heh, crap. It was late, and I've got a toddler, so I do appreciate corrections. ;)

Re:1KB != 1B

[JoeRandomHacker]

Atari 8-bits were 1.79Mhz.

Re:1KB != 1B

[hattig]

You forgot to add entries for "desirability 25 years after release", and "fun factor".

Because I am damn sure that seeing big blocky graphics and text on a 12" TV back in 1983 was a lot more exciting than anything computery today. And I doubt you'll be hunting around for a 2009 Dell Inspiron in 2035.

I had two awesome experiences - My Amstrad CPC 464 (my first computer), and my Amiga 500. Nothing since then has been even within an order of magnitude as fun.

I bet my dad went through the same thing with cars and TVs. At least this decade has seen some major TV advancements - vast, high resolution flat thin TVs after decades of bulky CRTs.

Re:1KB != 1B

[Anonymous Coward]

same here for the amiga 500, I saved up 1000$ when I was 14 to buy one to replace my atari 400. I think back and realize I could have bought a moped and worked on my social life but the atari had me already set in stone to be looked at funny for the rest of my high school years.

Re:1KB != 1B

[Rene S. Hollan]

I bet my dad went through the same thing with cars and TVs.

Heh.

My dad was born in 1921.

He was a hacker too, like I am. No surprise there.

He amazed the local townfolk when be brought a portable radio he built to the town square and demonstrated it. It was tube powered, the size of a suitcase, and ran on lead acid batteries. It was portable in the sense that a strong man could lift it.

One thing my generation (I was born in 1961) experienced was the decline of analog. See, we worried about the linearity of our amplifiers, the flatness of the response curves of equipment, etc. Audionuts^H^H^H^Hphiles still do, to some degree (e.g. the vinyl vs. CD wars), pointing out that for any digital system there's an analog equivalent with less distortion due to the absense of sampling error (though, it's getting harder and harder to build them, as resolution increases).

Us digital kids traded sampling error for the joy of reproducibility. Sure, early CDs sounded harsh, but they didn't get worse over time, didn't get scratched (in the vinyl sense), and OMG, tape hiss was gone forever (except for early transfers where the masters sucked because the final result sucked worse). One can argue that graceful degradation is better than sudden failure when the error correction can't cope any more, but the knowledge that "it plays, therefore it plays as well as it alwauys did", is admitedly intoxicating and addictive. TVs were still analog until very recently. I remember the pride I had when I owned a 32" Sony XBR TV. (Sony made great CRTs in the early 1990s.)

If my father were alive today (he died in 1999), I wonder what his reaction would be to the fact that (a) I don't have a home phone, (b) my cell phone has an internet browser and I can look stuff up on "Wikipedia" with it, (c) Kodak does not make Kodachrome any more since most cameras don't use film, (d) an old TV will pick up static and mine is 52" corner to corner and sits flat on the wall, (e) I get turn-by turn travel directions from my phone, and it can show me where I am on a map stiched together from satellite photos, (f) people socialize via "Facebook" and "Myspace", (g) copying something you buy can land you in trouble, (h) non-insignificant producers and consumers of "child porngraphy" are teenagers (i.e. sexting), (i) things can "break" when the company that makes them goes out of business, (j) wireles connections aren't just for "walkie talkies" anymore, but link such mundane things as keyboard, mice, "ear buds" to computers, and phones, (k) payphones are starting to disappear, (l) people pay their bills for it all without licking a stamp, and (m) if you want to go to the movies, you can probably pay for, and print, the tickets right at home.

All that in the ten years since his death.

If he miraculously came back to life, I don't think he could function in modern society, without first undergoing some serious technological and culture ("the President of the U.S. is black!? [yes] and no one thinks this is a big deal!? [well, other than thinking 'about time' for a day or two, no]. It didn't start a race war?! [er, no]) shock.

After a lousy ten years.

Can't wait for the next ten!

Re:1KB != 1B

[hattig]

Yeah, a lot has certainly happened in the past decade.

I graduated ten years ago, I had a PII 233 with 64MB RAM (i.e., the original iPhone was technically better, indeed PowerVR MBX beats Virge a dozen times over!) which cost me over a grand at the time. Last year I got a netbook for £200. 10 years ago minus two days I got married, not that it lasted as long as I wanted. I remember thinking that 64MB was massive - I had come from a 10MB Amiga 1200 before that. Now I have a Mac, oh the horrors!

I wonder if this coming decade will see the end of advancements in silicon chip technology, and what will take its place... will wall-sized displays (reflective as well as emissive) be commonplace? Will trains run on time ... oh, wait, no.

Re:1KB != 1B

[Knara]

Sony made great CRTs in the early 1990s

All around, CRTs got *really* nice once the "threat" of LCDs started. I got a 19" Toshiba in 1999 which was by far the nicest looking CRT I ever owed, and I'd still be using it today if the coax connection wasn't broken (so I could use it without a cable box -- and DVDs get played on the HD LCD in the living room :D ).

My dad and his dad are/were tinkerers as well. My grandfather on that side was a watch repairman, and man, his garage was a sight to behold.

Re:1KB != 1B

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, crap. Shut the fuck up. Also I hope your toddler dies in a fire.

Re:1KB != 1B

[jackbird]

Mostly awesome, but re: your closing paragraph - Colin Powell was widely talked about as a possible Republican nominee in 1998/1999 until he decided not to run.

Re:1KB != 1B

[clickclickdrone]

Very true. For those who grew up in later years, there's no way to understand just how awesome it was seeing your name on a computer screen. Computers were the stuff of SciFi and things like video cameras were pretty much unknown in the home so seeing your name on the screen of a piece of technology was incredible. It felt like the future.

Re:1KB != 1B

[Jesus_666]

I'm a time traveler and let me tell you, you're in for a wild ride. One of the biggest things was (er, will be from your point of view) when the first lesbian got elected president. Mostly because due to her lobbying plastics were finally banned worldwide. (Good riddance!) This was possible because stem cell research has enabled the development of equivalent biomaterials... Let me tell you, in ten years you won't see connective tissue with the same eyes. Especially not since most of it will come from the African Federation, which formed around 2016 when the various warring factions in Africa realized that their newfound biomanufacturing wealth has put nuclear weapons into so many hands that any further conflict would end with localized MAD.

The advances in bioengineering still didn't stop the Human-Canine Immunodeficiency Virus pandemic of the late 2010s. Let's all agree to not judge the era on that one.

But yep, interesting times indeed.

Re:1KB != 1B

[Rene S. Hollan]

I was very much disappointed that Colin Powel did not run, actually.

Try again in another 26 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fascinating that your Atari from 26 years ago can still power on and operate. So the big question is: What will your Dell Inspiron be able to do in 26 years?

Re:Try again in another 26 years...

[Reece400]

Poisin our drinking water?

Re:Try again in another 26 years...

[Toonol]

Yeah, it's interesting... the microelectronics are, obviously, terribly outmoded... but in a lot of ways, the physical construction of those pcs from the 80's are far better than much of what we get today. I've held laptops in my hands that I swear I could shatter with a firm twist. Plus... keyboards have generally declined in quality.

I guess it's because materials technology/manufacturing has been pretty mature for decades; progress in the last 20 years has been focused on cutting cost and eliminating waste, rather than building things stronger/better/more accessible.

Re:Try again in another 26 years...

[hot soldering iron]

Hold a door open?

Re:boot time

[Anonymous Coward]

It does, he says so in TFA

Sound

[Bill Kendrick]

Plus... sound _always_ works on my Atari, unlike the latest version of Ubuntu ;^P

Re:Sound

[Bambi Dee]

I've paid more attention to the SID in some Commodores, but I was quite impressed with the nasty, gritty POKEY sound in these Atari 8-bit demos: Zero, Pure, Unfused, Recall... I don't even know if those are the best. (I do have an 800 XL somewhere but precious little working software, most importantly Archon.) The PC beeper was one reason not to envy PC users...

Re:Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

OSS4 is what you want. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but it works wonderfully. What's more, it works with virtual machine, without the jittering. http://www.4front-tech.com/ There is a forum for support, so I'll stay anonymous - I ain't support.

Re:Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

I also have an Inspiron 1525 and I could never get everything working at once in Ubuntu. The older versions had a better wireless driver, but more recent versions are better with the sound, at least in my experience. Never did get dual display working. Eventually I just gave up and installed XP, which works with all of my hardware, boots faster and is more responsive than Ubuntu.

Re:Sound

[macraig]

Why didn't you bring up stuff like this at the old Slashdot Meetups? Maybe they wouldn't have fizzled! I'll have to get my old Sinclair QL back from my coworker I sold it to, and compare that to my Dell laptop.

Atari wins...

[Bazman]

...on boot time, I reckon. The Dell will still be flipping through its BIOS screens when the Atari has checked its RAM and started its OS from ROM.

  Seems to be a trend - my (1981) ZX81 started almost instantly, the ZX Spectrum (1982) took a few seconds, my Atari ST (1987) a bit longer, and these days a PC needs to check a couple of gigs of RAM and load a bloated OS from disk....

Hm.

[CannonballHead]

... does it run Linux? :)

Re:Hm.

[Bill Kendrick]

"Does it run Linux?"

Sadly, no. But I love it anyway. :) Everything else in the house does, though. (The SmartStor NAS, the Roku Netflix Player, the TiVo DVR, my laptop, my wife's laptop, our toddler... oh wait, not yet.)

Re:Hm.

[Aliotroph]

The closest thing it might run with sufficient hacker dedication would seem to be LUnix.

Re:Hm.

[Bill Kendrick]

Ooh! And that reminds me... need Contiki and for someone to build a decent Ethernet or Wifi adapter. :)

Re:Hm.

[hot soldering iron]

It's from 1984, for God's sake! It runs CP/M...

Re:boot time

[hesiod]

He says so in the summary.

Keyboard

[Danathar]

The Atari Keyboard looks cooler. That's enough for me!

Re:Keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be a mac fanboi

Re:Keyboard

[Dogtanian]

The Atari Keyboard looks cooler. That's enough for me!

The XL line had very nice industrial design- not just the computers, but the matching peripherals as well.

Re:Keyboard

[PRMan]

Yeah, but it types much slower than you do.

mod me off-topic but...

[jollyreaper]

I still haven't figured out what constitutes a valid submission and what would be considered mindless tosh to be rejected.

This is all fine and well but...

[east coast]

As nifty as your comparison is I've always found that the computing experience is based more on the ass in the chair than the box on the desk.

In other words: I knew how to get more out of my Commodore 64 at the age of 17 than my 17 year old nephew can get out of his Dell. At least as far as how to do it without Google support and a slew of gadgets and gimmicks.

Re:This is all fine and well but...

[Blakey Rat]

Out of curiosity, if you rolled-back the clock and you nephew had a Commodore 64 at the age of 17, do you think he would "get more out of it" than his Dell now?

That sounds like it attaches to the *person*, not the chunk of plastic.

What I got from this article

[Gizzmonic]

Flame me if you want, but it seems like an Atari computer made in 1983 works better with peripherals than an Ubuntu does made in 2009. And it probably plays more games, too. Let's all play Missile Command.

Re:What I got from this article

[abigor]

Flame me if you want, but it seems like an Atari computer made in 1983 works better with peripherals than an Ubuntu does made in 2009.

Let's be honest - that's not saying much.

Seriously though, those early 8-bit computers were simply the greatest things ever for learning. They were small enough that you could comfortably learn them in a pretty complete fashion. My C64 Programmer's Reference Guide taught you everything you needed to know about that machine, supplemented by The Transactor, possibly the greatest technical computer magazine ever.

Re:What I got from this article

[PRMan]

Definitely more games than Ubuntu. Well, better games with more realistic 3D action... ;-)

Fail...

[Twig]

Ataris were always rubbish anyway. Long live the Amiga!

Re:Fail...

[Bill Kendrick]

Don't talk like that to your ancestors! (Remember who designed the Atari 400/800, and who designed the Amiga! :^P )

Re:Fail...

[Dogtanian]

Ataris were always rubbish anyway. Long live the Amiga!

You probably mean the ST range, which competed with the Amiga. The 8-bit Atari computers (400/800/XL/XE) were a totally different range designed during a different era and with a different philosophy- i.e. state of the art (for their time) rather than affordability-oriented like the ST was.

The 400/800 are sometimes considered the spiritual predecessors of the Amiga, not least because some of the same people worked on them both. (And remember that the Amiga was designed by an independent company that was bought by C= at the last minute).

Re:Fail...

[bxbaser]

"(Remember who designed the Atari 400/800, and who designed the Amiga! :^P )"

I would like to meet the guy that designed the 400 membrane keyboard...Yup just a 5 minute meeting is all it would take..

Re:Fail...

[domatic]

It never ceases to amuse to me that Jay Miner is God to Amigaphiles.....but only when his work carries a Commodore badge.

Cost?

[AdamTrace]

Did I miss it somewhere? It would be interesting to know the retail cost at time of purchase for each computer.

I knew/knew of the submitter (Hi Bill!) in college. He had a real hard-on for Atari's. Still does, apparently. :)

Adman

How do you figure that?

[Animaether]

I bet you could find an original 100XT today and still get it running. Those were available.. what, mid-1980's? That's getting close to 27 years... though not quite yet, so can't be 100% sure. Just as you can't be 100% sure that if somebody keeps that dell laying about for 27 years, it won't start back up.

At least with the Dell, you won't have to worry about finding a display, etc. Just a power source.. that should still be doable in 27 years, long after the battery's died you can still hook it up to -a- power source that fits the bill.

Maybe it's popular to bash 'modern devices', claiming they were 'made to fail in 2 years, just after the warranty runs out'.. and there's sure to be some truth to it, but it's still mostly bashing.

( written from an Acer Aspire 2000 - 5 years old, long way to go to hit 27, but I'm guessing the only reason it's not going to hit that number under my ownership is because I happen to be looking for a replacement, and will trade this one in so it can be refurbished or, more likely, recycled )

Re:How do you figure that?

[Bill Kendrick]

Heh. I _already_ can't seem to get a replacement keyboard from Dell. :^( (They've got all sorts of wireless crap they can sell me.) Maybe I didn't dig around the service section of their website long enough.

Re:How do you figure that?

[Ilgaz]

I booted my Atari 800XL with disk drive just a year ago, to test. It booted DOS fine and its own unique ''self test'' was all fine. BTW for people who never seen/used them, ''diskette drive'' on 8bit age (except Woz'es genius Apple) is actually a computer, having same CPU as the main computer and ''chats'' to computer via serial port. That is why diskette drive still working is a big deal.

BTW, Atari 8bit diskette/printer port provided chaining support, you could plug 3-4 diskette drives and a printer to the same port. Similar to USB eh? Of course, it comes from the same guy who designed the USB later.

I have also tried my games which some of them are on 'no name' diskettes. All runs fine. The only regret after that was the money I spent to 'memorex' diskettes for good stuff :)

Re:How do you figure that?

[Knara]

yeah, you could do that with the Commodore 1541 drives as well, but dunno if you could do 3-4 (I only ever had 2 that I could try it with)

Re:How do you figure that?

[maxume]

I don't know, my 12 year old Dell model AT101W keyboard still works great (I have to use some $8 USB widget to connect it to my laptop though).

Re:How do you figure that?

[Jesus_666]

BTW, Atari 8bit diskette/printer port provided chaining support, you could plug 3-4 diskette drives and a printer to the same port. Similar to USB eh?

No. USB does not support daisy chaining, even though some people manufacture USB devices with built-in hub. You're thinking of FireWire.

ERROR 9

[nvrrobx]

This reminds me of one of the most impressive things about my Atari 800XL. I ran into this error when I first started to learn anything about computers. I was thoroughly stumped. (I was also 8 years old.)

I wrote a letter to Atari (using Atari Writer!) and I got a reply back in the mail just a few weeks later. They told me what I did wrong, included a bunch of software, an Atari BASIC book and a years subscription to Antic.

No computer company has impressed me like that since then.

Re:ERROR 9

[n30na]

Wow. Makes me think of how I gave up trying to learn java initially when I was 9 or so (I'm 18 now)... I wish someone had given me that kind of push then.. though at least I do know java now. But still. That's really cool.

Re:ERROR 9

[Penguinshit]

Ahhh. The days when technology companies were run by engineers for engineers, not marketing whores worshipping their quarterly bonus.

Re:ERROR 9

[wcrowe]

I like your story. It reminds me of the time I was having a problem with an Epson MX-80 printer. I found the phone number for the company via information and in a few minutes I was surprised to be talking to the actual president of Epson America. Instead of directing my call elsewhere, he actually took a few minutes to help me troubleshoot my problem. Yep, all in all, I think I liked computers better when I was the only guy I knew who had one.
   

Re:ERROR 9

[fliptout]

Reminds me of something similar.

When I was in the fourth grade I wrote a letter to Jack(or Sam, I don't recall) Tramiel, the president of Atari. I had a few ideas for video games, and I got a personal letter back. Quite an awesome experience for me at the time. I need to dig out that letter.

Re:ERROR 9

[Anonymous Coward]

That was one of the best things about Atari computers. I was also young, maybe 10 or 11 when we got an Atari and the support for helping me to program in basic or assembly was great from the guys down at the Atari store where we bought it.

Re:ERROR 9

[Dogtanian]

Ahhh. The days when technology companies were run by engineers for engineers, not marketing whores worshipping their quarterly bonus.

I suspect that some nice people in engineering were responsible for that. But except possibly for their early days (long before the GP's 800XL was even launched), Atari were never the company you dream of.

They considered software writers to be little better than towel designers, which caused many of their most talented people to leave and form Activision- hence starting off the massive market in third-party VCS games. They considered licenses and such more important than good software, resulting in them rushing the likes of the notorious ET game to market, ditto the 2600 version of Pac Man.

All of which probably contributed to the video game crash of 1983.

When Jack Tramiel bought over the computer and home divisions, he sacked half the people working there. Apparently they had a really nice sound chip in the works, but nothing happened with that because all the people who knew about it had been laid off.

Re:ERROR 9

[atmurray]

Way back in the early days of Active X I was trying to do something, can't remember for the life of me what it was. Anyway, I sent Microsoft question about it and the following day whilst I was playing around outside (I was around 12 or so at the time) my mum came out to tell me that a man from Microsoft was on the phone for me. I was impressed at the time, this was back in the days before international calls were cheap enough to enable off-shoring of tech support. For what it's worth, these days I use a Mac for my primary PC and program in C/C++ :P

Re:ERROR 9

[clickclickdrone]

I wrote to Atari UK about the lack of updates (of worth) to the ST range and got a letter back from the boss (whose name escapes me) pretty much spilling the beans about the Falcon a good 6-8 months before anyone had been told about it. I later showed it to their marketing guy when I (briefly) worked for them and his jaw hit the ground when he saw the date and he mouthed 'WTF?'. He wasn't happy.

Re:ERROR 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they were great. I had/sold/worked on STs. I met Tramiel and toured the Company HQ back in the day. I loved my ST and GFA Basic, my fourth basic since I started coding in '77.

Get over the compares already

[Cryogenic Specter]

Oooh oooh I know! Compare an Asus EeePC to a Speak and Spell next! Or maybe an Asimo to a Teddy Ruxpin.
I first read the comparison between a C64 and an iPhone and thought that was dumb, but I am surprised to see another "comparison" story.
Yes, back in the day, things were old and different, but comparing them really does not do much.
It might be more useful to compare an array of things like storage methods over time (washing machine platters, real to real tape, cassette, floppy, HD, zip, jazz, optical, cd, dvd, flash). Or maybe interesting memory storage methods, for example, did you know that there was a method of storing data in "memory" by keeping a pulse in a tube of mercury? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory) That is cool.
Any more of these "comparisons" should compare more than one old school item to some modern device. That would make it more interesting and seem a lot less like comparing apples to ... rocks.

Processor frequency

[Dadoo]

I'll bet those are off by a fair bit as well.

No, for a direct clock speed comparison, those are correct. However, a modern PC processor can do things like a 64-bit integer multiply in a single instruction (and I'm fairly sure a single cycle). The 6502 would require tens (possibly hundreds) of instructions for that type of operation, more for division, and significantly more for floating point. It would depend on the application, so you couldn't quote a single number, but a modern PC is much more than 1117x faster than a 6502.

Re:Processor frequency

[Ilgaz]

Of course, being designed by Jay Miner before he joined Amiga team, Atari 8 bit series also have custom chips that does wonders (in terms of 8bit) when used right. For example, writing a ASM code which will glue itself to raster scan (under BASIC even) was the thing all nerd Atari users knew. They were using it against C64 fanatics since you had 256 colours on screen at once with zero CPU cost. Just imagine what real developers did.

Today, in 2009, we are debating if the GPUs which already has h264 decoding enhancements are supported or not on VLC with no hope on pre Snow Leopard OS X (Apple). People pick VLC because they are open source and human, you can actually speak to developers. Nobody bothers to talk with MS or Apple on that matter since they know they would be ignored.

I don't know if you could even find a job at Atari 800/Amiga developer scene if you didn't make use of chips included. Of course, you aren't really touching that GPU under OS X unless Apple driver supports it. Same goes for Windows and DirectX.

The developers of that age was different too because they could be and that is how 1 Mhz machines could even run a GUI (Gem OS, C64).

Re:Processor frequency

[Knara]

I remember being flabbergasted that GEOS had a Y2k update published for it by some group. Amazing.

Re:Processor frequency

[Paradise Pete]

The 6502 would require tens (possibly hundreds) of instructions for that type of operation, more for division, and significantly more for floating point.

Yes, it had only add and subtract operations. Multiplication required a series of shifts and adds. Although I could have looked it up, as a fledgling assembly language programmer I was quite thrilled when I worked out multiplication and divison. And while I still remember most of the 6502 opcodes, now of course that's just wasted neurons that could be put to better use.

Re:Processor frequency

[Z80a]

Actually you dont need to even count 64 bit, or multiply.

A 6502 cpu takes around 2-6 cycles to execute a single instruction, a modern x86 cpu can pull 3-4 instructions on a single cycle, so even if you ignore anything the modern cpus can do and a 6502 cant, you still have 10x-12x more proceessing power per cycle.

Typo at the end of article

[damn_registrars]

I read through it and it seemed pretty plausible until I ran across

He lives in Davis, California with his wife and son

They don't really expect us to believe that, do they?

Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[synthesizerpatel]

If you're dealing with say, realtime embedded devices for managing air travel or life-support systems, sure.

But who cares how long it takes to boot your desktop or laptop? I reboot my laptop maybe once a week, the rest of the time it's either running or hibernating.

I'd rather have a slow boot up that verifies everything is working correctly than a fast one that skips sanity checks. It's not the OS that causes bootup slowness anyway but rather the 5400RPM honey-encrusted hard-drives that slow things down.

Drop an SSD HDD in and the time is reduced to trivial levels on any operating system.

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[n30na]

If my laptop booted faster I'd be more likely to boot it down and carry it around. Enough of a reason to complain about boot times imo.

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[Anonymous Coward]

I reboot my MacBook when it's required for an update, but otherwise it just runs or sleeps. For days. Without a problem.

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[noidentity]

If my laptop booted faster I'd be more likely to boot it down and carry it around. Enough of a reason to complain about boot times imo.

And have to wait for shutdown as well (be sure not to move it before it finishes!). And even if startup and shutdown were instantaneous, you'd still have all your windows and programs closed when you started up. Putting it to sleep is quick and preserves your exact state; what's not to like about it?

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[n30na]

It breaks to heck on a lot of things? You make a good point though, session/state preservation is something that improvements to in many areas would be nice. At least browsers are starting to do it somewhat decently.

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[iamnothere900]

It's not the OS that causes bootup slowness anyway but rather the 5400RPM honey-encrusted hard-drives that slow things down.

Maybe you should find a better place for the beehive?

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[synthesizerpatel]

When I go home for the day, I unhook my laptop, close the lid, put it in my backpack. When I get in in the morning I put it on my desk, plug it in and open the lid. Done.

Hibernate/Wake-up takes about 5-10 seconds. Well within my comfort-zone.

This is a problem solved by a combination of hardware and software, primarily not the fault of software as depending on how the hw mfg handles the lid closing.

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[synthesizerpatel]

The only real session information that should be broken on your laptop are network settings. You'll lose your TCP sessions (of course) and possibly your DHCP lease..

Literally everything else _should_ remain just the way it is depending on how applications deal with that -- but it should be the same way they'd deal with it if you unplug the ethernet or shutdown the wireless.

If possible try and quietly reconnect, ultimately crap out if you can't.. 99 times out of 100 it should be invisible to the user or at least non-intrusive.

And still, thats not the fault of the OS or a metric of quality, that's a limitation of networking architecture and application design.

Re:Why is bootup time a metric of quality?

[n30na]

That's kind of not what I meant. I was more meaning that it would be nice if more applications could store/restore their running state/layout/etc, so i don't have to take the time to open a billion things every time I boot. =P

Not a speak and spell, but...

[Amazing Quantum Man]

When I got my Eee, I actually did a comparison to the (SCO) Unix server we used circa 1992.

Systems: EeePC 900, Target model; Austin WinTower 486/33E.

CPU:
Eee - 900MHz Celeron
WinTower - 33MHz 486/33 (note that this predates the DX/SX split)
Comparison: Eee - 30x faster

RAM:
Eee - 1GB DDR
WinTower - 32MB FPM
Comparison: Eee 32x more, runs at higher speed, wider bus.

Storage:
Eee - 4GB IDE SSD (added 16GB SDHC)
WinTower - 1GB 5.25" Full Height SCSI-2 HD (added 4GB SCSI-2 drive and 1GB Tape drive)
Comparison: Eee 4x larger (before and after upgrades). Eee - 3-4x faster (estimated)

Network:
Eee - 100BaseT, 802.11G
WinTower - 10Base2 (yes, ThinNet)
Comparison: Eee, 10x faster wired.

Video:
Eee - 1024x600x24 integrated 9" LCD, Accelerated (Intel chipset), external 1024x768 VGA available
WinTower: 1024x768x8, 14" CRT, Frame buffer (Trident TVGA)
Comparison: Eee: Better color, faster video. WinTower: Higher Resolution.

I/O:
Eee - 3xUSB2, Mic In, Audio Out
WinTower: 2 spare EISA slots, 2 spare ISA slots, 6xRS232, 5.25" and 3.5" Floppy disk, Bidirectional Parallel port

O/S:
Eee - Eeebuntu 3.0
WinTower: SCO Open Desktop 2.0 Server
Comparison: Eee wins.

Keyboard:
Eee - integrated laptop style keyboard
WinTower: 101-Key AT connector keyboard
Comparison: WinTower wins.

Mouse:
Eee - Integrated touchpad, MS Wireless Laptop Wheel Mouse
WinTower - Logitech 2 button mouse
Comparison: Eee wins (when using external mouse)

Cost:
Eee - $400 (2008 USD, includes RAM upgrade and SDHC)
WinTower - $15000 (1992 USD, includes SCO ODT2 and Dev System)

Re:Not a speak and spell, but...

[Cryogenic Specter]

Yes, but could the Austin WinTower 486/33E Speak OR Spell? I think not! at least not with the provided specs. ;)
Also, the keyboard comparison is purely opinion. The eee pc has an integrated keyboard (which I like) AND will take a usb keyboard, which you could argue is fair considering the mouse comparison and the fact that an AT keyboard is externally attached anyway.
I am thinking that the speak and spell could totally take your WinTower in a comparison anyway. I mean, you can make interplanetary phone calls with some simple modifications that enable the "Phone Home" features...

8bit colour?

[luther2.1k]

Hang on.. 256 colours? That can't be 256 at once, surely. The Atari ST could only do 4bits per pixel out of a palette of 512. I'm guessing that's a palette of 256 so did it have an 8bit RAMDAC? (if I'm remembering my terms correctly).

Re:8bit colour?

[argent]

The Atari ST has no relationship whatsoever to the Atari 1200 XL.

Atari ST: 68000-based computer designed by ex-Commodore engineers brought over by Jack Tramiel when he bought Atari.

Atari 1200 XL: based on Jay Miner's Atari 800 design before he left to create the Amiga.

Re:8bit colour?

[Bill Kendrick]

Switch into GRAPHICS 9 mode (16 shaded bitmap mode). Use a Display List Interrupt (DLI) to change the colors down the screen. You can arrange it to get a nice grid of 16 hues of 16 shades == 256 colors!

The paletted colors were actually only out of 128 colors. (16 hues of 8 shades)

More useful, though, are some of the software-driven tricks for drawing more colors on the screen. One simple one interlaces between 16-hue and 16-shade pixel modes, combining to give you any of 256 colors (albeit a little washed out), anywhere on the screen. In glorious 80x192 pixel resolution. (Not a typo)

Or cycle between 3 16-shade modes, one Red, one Green, one Blue, and you get 4096 colors, anywhere on the screen. (Or do it at higher horizontal resolution and get 64 colors or 8 colors.) There are GIF and JPEG viewers for Ataris that have been around for _years_ that use these modes.

Even fancier tricks give you 30 shades of grey at 160x192, some obscene number of colors at 160x192, etc.

In fact today (before this post appeared on Slashdot), someone contacted me about the character-set (you know, "font"? :^) ) driven multicolor text mode I came up with a decade ago that let me do cell/tile-based graphics and get 13 colors on the screen. (Simply toggle the font at each Vertical Blank Interrupt -- no need for Display List Interrupt tricks.) I wrote a puzzle game with it.

Anyway, he pointed out that those huge-pixel (80px across) modes can be "applied" to any graphics mode (try GRAPHICS 2:POKE 623,64:?#6;"abcd"), and therefore a similar frame-flickering trick could be made to get lots of large, multi-colored tile graphics on the screen.

Lots of stuff you can get ANTIC and GTIA to do; a few of which are 'artifacts' or 'bugs', but all consistent across the platform. :)

(Heh - I wonder if a single person will care about that braindump I just presented.)

Re:8bit colour?

[Bill Kendrick]

See: http://atariwiki.strotmann.de/xwiki/bin/view/APG/Ironman+Atari#HGraphicsModes ;)

Re:8bit colour?

[Dogtanian]

Hang on.. 256 colours? That can't be 256 at once, surely.

Are you confusing the technically-unrelated ST line with the 400/800/XL/XE 8-bit computers?

The 8-bits certainly *could* have that many colours on-screen at once, with some limitations.

The reason was that the custom graphics chip let you change the palette (and/or graphics mode, sprite positions, etc.) on every new scan line if you wanted to. This wasn't an esoteric trick or hack, it was a standard part of the hardware and used by almost all half-decent games, though they didn't all necessarily use as many as 256 colours.

Re:8bit colour?

[Vector7]

I'm really fascinated by this stuff, as planning out how you're going to (ab)use the video hardware is key to getting the most out of these old machines - modern machines are so boring, with high resolution and unlimited colors, and no need for split screens and hblank trickery. I grew up on old Ataris but was too young (or too lame) to do anything but putter around in Basic at the time, and I love reading about the clever ways people have come up with to stretch the limits of the machine. I wish there were more graphic examples on the web demonstrating what you can do in these exotic modes.

Re:8bit colour?

[Bill Kendrick]

There are numerous videos on YouTube. Search for "Atari Demo" and start following the 'related videos'. :) There are still big parties in Europe, with game and demo contests with big cash prizes. (Well, if you consider 500 Euro to be "big")

Re:8bit colour?

[domatic]

I agree that the ST was a tad limited in the graphics dept and that naive use of it's hardware produces limited results. However even back in the eighties clever developers got more out of it:

http://www.asterius.com/atari/spectrum.html

Spectrum 512 could display 48 colors per scanline out of a palette of 512 and it even did some rip-and-retry best fitting of colors so that artists could just draw and the software would take care of rendering the desired result as well as possible within the 48 color per line limitation.

Atari 1200XL

[Quiet_Desperation]

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Re:Atari 1200XL

[Nimey]

Kill yourself.

Dude, you're getting a(n) Atari...

[Ponga]

Just does not carry the snap that "Dude, you're getting a Dell" does. Sorry :(

Action! Woot!

[Quiet_Desperation]

I got through college in the 1980s with an Atari 800XL. Action! was the first programming language ever did anything interesting in, including two games- a vertical scroller and a side scroller. I remember side scrollers being harder because of the way the video memory was setup, or something. You had to do things in the video blank interval.

For classes, though, I also had QuickBASIC, Deep Blue C, Kyan Pascal and versions of Forth and FORTRAN. It was amazing how many languages were available for those things. I could write initial code at home before heading to the (always crowded) computer lab to enter the final version to be submitted for a grade.

[bleep] I feel old now. :-(

Re:Action! Woot!

[AngryDill]

IIRC, the difference in difficulty between horizontal and vertical scrolling on Atari 8-bits was due to the video memory not having a fixed origin. To scroll down, all you had to do was increment the memory location that controlled the video memory origin by one row's worth of pixels, and vice-versa to scroll up.

Another factor was the "player-missle" graphics (Atari's term for sprites). Typically in a vertical scroller, the player would move side-to-side, which was trivially accomplished by setting another memory location. Vertical player movement was much trickier, one had to actually move the bitmap in memory.

-a.d.-

Re:Action! Woot!

[Chordonblue]

OMG, this is the second article that's mentioned Action! in as many days! Just when I think I must've been the only one to have learned real programming skills on Action!, this post comes up...

My first attempt at something interesting on Action! was taken out of Byte magazine pseudo code. The article in question let you take a picture and apply anti-aliasing to it. It took me a while to translate the thing to Action!, but I did it. I also coded it in Atari Basic - just to see how much of a difference there was. In Atari Basic it took over three minutes to run one 192 resolution pic. In Action!, it took seven seconds. Action! was my first introduction to structured programming, and while I enjoyed the tremendous speed increase, I reveled in the joy of intelligent coding.

Meanwhile, I showed this program to a friend who was attending RPI. He took the magazine and coded the anti-alias routine on his Mindset's 6 MHz CPU. It ran in 50 miliseconds...

Oh, never heard of Mindset? Heh, I'm not surprised. :)

Ah... The good ol' days...

Star Raiders!

[dffish]

Yes...the Dell is faster...but can it play Star Raiders? Huh? Nooooo...

Re:Star Raiders!

[Hatta]

Sure it can, with an emulator.

Nitpick: 1116.318.. times faster

[noidentity]

A 2000 MHz clock rate is 1116.318... times greater than a 1.79 MHz clock rate. It's 1117.318 times that rate. The "greatER" means that you're implicitly adding one to the value.

Another example, $150 is 50% greater than $100, NOT 150% greater; $150 IS 150% of $100, $150 is also 1.5 times $100.

Re:Nitpick: 1116.318.. times faster

[Mhtsos]

while you're nitpicking: the column on the left says CPU. The CLOCK is that much faster, we all know the difference between clock speed and cpu speed here.

Some of the Atari XL series DID have S-Video

[logicassasin]

I was a die-hard 800XL user for many years. At some point during the 80's or very early 90's, I remember an article in either Analog or Antic magazine that detailed how to get S-Video out of the XL's composite output. I built the connector with parts from Radioshack, but for no reason as I didn't have a single TV or VCR with an s-video input to try it out on.

A quick check of Google reveals this - http://www.8bitclassics.com/vmchk/Other/TI-99/Peripherals/5-Pin-DIN-to-S-Video-RCA-AV-Cable-6-Ft-New.html

Apparently, the article's author is SOL since he's using a 1200XL. He should "upgrade" to the 800XL like I had and get an s-video cable for it. Then all will be good.

What is this "Boot" you speak of?

[Well-Fed Troll]

Why exactly should computers "boot" up? Computer systems should have states. We should be talking about stuff like state synchronization delay, or energy required to change state. "Save" and "Load" do not belong in computer terminology, only revision/branch.
Every day at a random period of time 1/4 of the computers at Microsoft and Intel should shut off with no warning, and they should be mandated to not run UPS. 2 months after they implement that policy we'll have reliable, quick booting computers.

why?

[nurb432]

What is with this sudden desire to compare apples to oranges? I love my retro machines more then most people, but i don't run around comparing an 8 bit device to a modern 64bit laptop..

If you just have to compare, at least use something like an Atari ST or Amiga which would have similar features ( or even better a STbook ).

Re:why?

[maxume]

Apples are Red. Oranges are orange.

Apples have a skin that doesn't detract from eating the fruit raw in the hand. Most people think oranges are better peeled.

Action! was great

[tjstork]

I loved Action. I'd have to say that it was probably the most advanced programming environment of the 8 bit era.

You can get better Ataris...

[zaivala]

The 1200 XL was cool... but nowhere close to the 520 and 1040 ST which came after Jack Tramiel (after being booted off the Commodore board) bought Atari from Warner. These machines were the much-famed so-called Jackintosh computers. How about talking about the earlier, horrible keyboards, like the Atari 400's membrane keypad... Them was the days. I first learned BASIC on an Ohio Scientific Challenger C7P... back when all you needed was an RF modulator and 64K of RAM... I still have a couple of working TI 99/4A s in my closet, with lots of peripherals... alas, not including the expansion box and drives...

Clock cycle comparison is incomplete

[nurbman]

A closer speed estimate: The Atari's chip took about 4 clock cycles per instruction. The Intel chip does 4 instructions per clock cycle. (so multiply by 16) The byte size is 8 bit vs 64 bits. (multiply again by 8) The Intel has a floating point subsystem. (multiply by 10? if you are doing math calculations. Probably more like 40 if you were to have each do 32bit floats.) The Intel has 2 cores. (multiply by 2) The Intel has L1 L2 RAM cache. (probably factored in to the 4 instructions per clock timing) So the actual speedup is more like 1000 x 16 x 8 x 10 x 2 = 2,560,000 for floating point and 1000 x 16 x 8 x 2 = 256,000 for data manipulation. Multiply by another 10 for the newer faster 8 core desktop machines.

A world where one could fully grok the machine

[PotatoHead]

and where one person could do amazing things on it.

Today that's very, very difficult to match understanding wise, and it takes teams to do amazing things.

Visit http://www.atariage.com

[PotatoHead]

All the examples you want are there as are the alphas in the Atari scene today.

It's actually vibrant, with new demo productions and games each year. The level of technical trickery is simply amazing, and there are very cool SIO hardware devices that make using a machine easy. Download cool stuff, copy to SD card, insert in Atari, boot and you are off to the races.

Machines are cheap, and the whole retro scene is just fun, IMHO. Love it. I participate in that, and do the Parallax Propeller micro-controller, as it's got 80's level, software driven and totally hackable graphics capability that is much like the computers of the time.

Just this year a method was discovered that brings true vertical interlace (480i) graphics to those old machines! We've not yet seen that exploited beyond a nice, solid demo, but that's coming. Just give it a year.

You go first

[Quiet_Desperation]

Nah, I think I'll live, and live quite well, just to annoy you. :-)

lol

[Gigiya]

my roommate's Windows95 laptop (and based on that horrifying experience, I vowed never to use Windows)

between the hardware and the recent Linux kernels and such in Ubuntu, it can barely keep playing sound and/or connecting to my wireless network.

i had an *overclocked* 800xl ;-)

[pointbeing]

Lived in Germany at the time. Eurospec 800XLs run on US power supplies and line voltage ran at (IIRC) 2.217 MHz. My itty bitty 13" Philips TV would display either PAL or NTSC so it worked just fine back in the states - until the TV died :-(

Bashed the 400/800 Translator disk into EPROMs

[awfar]

As many others, I had a blast with the 400/800/XL Ataris. In one hacking project I ran the official 400/800 Translator disk which overlayed the internal XL OS ROMs with those mostly compatible with a 400/800 system. After loading I then dumped the memory locations, readdressed them, and used an EPROM burner of my own design (my coworkers laughed - you should have seen the EPROM eraser they made up to mock my attempts, complete with framing hammer) to burn it into an EPROM, which I used to replaced the on board ROMs. As well, I fixed a few things I didn't like the OS defaults (don't remember now what they were tho'). I had several (P)ROMs selectable via switch and a board I layed out and etched. Most anything would then run on an XL, some that the Translator disks would not as I recall.

I also organized a user-group hardware project to build the famous bank-switched memory add-on published, where, maybe Byte mag. I modified it to use the 256k chips IIRC. 5-10 people but only a few comprehended what they were doing, and only a few finished though everything was supplied including solder.

Those were the days.

Re:What the hell? - Tape drive?

[glamb]

What kind of world did you people live in? We lived in a world where installing a program was faster than ejecting a DVD.

You obviously didn't have a computer with an audio tape drive as the mass storage device, young whipper snapper!

Still Got One

[gpronger]

We ferreted our Atari 1200 away, functional, and still pull it out now and again (to the delight of our kids). One game in particular, regardless of the dated graphics, is always a great hit; "M.U.L.E."

I'd rate it as one of the best head-to-head style video games I've played on any system.