The stuff Hacker News actually recommends.

Desktops and mini PCs

Atari 800

7owners with an opinion
71%of verdicts positive
5/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and ease of use; criticized for reliability and value.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it
I was a total Atari kid and I still have my 2600 and my 800 on me. If Atari was the one distributing an NES like system IMO they would have just fucked it up. While I loved my atari devices, they were also extremely unreliable mechanically / electronically. The build quality of Nintendo devices (I own about 10 Nintendo devices going back to the SNES that's plugged into my TV with a modern HDMI adapter today) is worlds beyond what Atari was able to pull off in my experience. Granted the Nintendo devices have the advantage of more sophisticated technology but Atari I think really had a cheaper build mentality.
Likes it
The Atari 800 was my first personal computer (i.e. one I had at home). I bought one when they first came out and learned 6502 assembler language and had a blast. I had experience with assembler language on larger computers (DECSystem 20 and CDC 6400 in high school/, IBM System 360/44 in college then IBM System 370/145 at work) but having my own personal computer was incredible. Of course I moved on to the IBM PC when it first came out (and learned 8086 assembler language), and many PC compatible computers after that, until I retired and got my first iMAC (Intel x32 and x64), then now to my M1 Macbook Pro.
Likes it
This is silly reporting with a couple of interesting stories. Forget about the technical ways of doing it. Doing it at all changes the game experience. Pausing a game has a massive impact on the game experience. It lets you break the fourth wall experientially. Not wrong, but it changes the dynamic of the game. Same as saving at any time does. As losing your loot or your life permanently does. Not wrong, but a hard choice that appeals to some players and not to others. I used to pause pacman on my Atari 800 so I could run to church and sing in the choir or be an altar boy. Then I ran home and unpaused to continue. Sometimes in summer the computer over-heated and I lost everything while I was at church. Lessons learnt? None, I think :)
Doesn’t like it
> seems like computing was so much more expensive compared to now. Heh. That's an understatement. My Mac was $1800 (college discount), the 512K upgrade was $400, the extra drive was $400, and $499 for Aztec C. That's ~$9000 in todays dollars. I spent almost $5K (today) for my Atari 800 system (essentially obsolete by the time I got my Mac, < 5 years, gave it away to a friend). I remember being excited when I got my first 1GB drive, since it was only $1/MB. (We already had $1/MB drives, but not that big -- and not SCSI). I later sold that Mac and put the money towards a motorcycle. Boy, that was one of the best trades I ever did. I had that bike for 26 years. I can't say either was an investment, but that bike aged a lot better than the Mac did! Anyway, yea, computing was expensive.
Likes it
I chose C (Turbo-C) because it was much better at strings than Pascal: specifically it had strdup() and their length was not limited to 255 characters. Also C had escape sequences- actually Turbo Pascal had them, not sure about standard Pascal. I think earlier versions of Pascal had only fixed length space padded strings. Yeah, 6809 and 8088 (arguably an 8-bit CPU) supported C just fine. The other 8-bits, not so much. I wish the CoCo had been a better computer than it was (crappy keyboard, not a real serial port, terrible video). My Atari 800XL was better except for its CPU.