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Desktops and mini PCs

Atari 800XL

8owners with an opinion
100%of verdicts positive
0/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability.

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I wanted an Apple ][ as well, but also got an Atari 800xl. It did make sense for cost reasons, same as you. A bit later on, I did end up with an Apple and have both today in working condition. I am glad I got the Atari first. There was a lot in the box, so to speak, and I learned a ton. Later, when doing more advanced projects, I found the Apple and it's expansion cards could make a very capable workstation.
Neutral
Oh wow, this was my first computer exactly. I wanted a commodore 64 which was way more popular in the Netherlands but it was 3 times the price so my parents couldn't afford it. But it was good, because the lack of software availability (locally) made me learn programming in short order. I still have 2 of these, my original one and another one I bought during the years. Both have dead memory chips though. For some reason these age poorly. They are all socketed but very hard to obtain these days. I'll probably buy this remake when it comes out.
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My parents got me an Atari 800XL for my 8th birthday in 1985. It came with a very terse list of Basic commands along with a few program listings from which I learned how to program. Stuck with Atari over the years, through an 520STfm, and even a Falcon 030 - before eventually switching to a PC running Linux in the late 90s while a student. Last year I went on eBay and bought one of these (I have no idea where the original one ended up), was so much fun.
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That's funny! I wanted an Apple ][ but my dad got me the 800xl. Looking back, it makes sense. The Atari was about $100 and the ][ was like $1000 and I was a little kid. I wouldn't buy my kids a $1000 computer now and that's 2023 dollars! But I am so glad I got the Atari. I learned BASIC, assembly, and Pascal on it. I would type in games from the back of the magazine. And here I am decades later!
Neutral
Mine was the Atari 800XL. Atari Basic hadn't PEEK and POKE as the C64 (though something similar which I can't remember right now), but some more possibilities to switch graphic modes and plot things. But I never learned how the machine worked from that, it was still magic. I tried typing in listings, but you only knew that there was a typo somewhere after you finished hundreds of lines. Finding the typo was out of the question for me. Also, it was obvious that the result of the listing, usually a game, was of much lower quality than the games I already had or could copy from friends. The reason I learned Basic was that I wanted to know how games work. They always fascinated me since I saw Space Invaders somewhere. I quickly understood, mostly with the help of more advanced friends, that you couldn't make games with Basic, it was too slow. You had to learn machine language. So that's what I eventually did, and that's how I really understood the machine down to the point where I could tell what almost every single of the roughly 40000 available bytes did. It took a long time to get there, those 8-bit machines where already quite layered in hindsight when you think about: How 6502-instruction, assembler, disk I/O, joystick input and graphical output where tucked together with what today be probably called the Atari-API was not immediately obvious and the result of 20 years of technical development, but nowhere explained for a 12 year old! My enlightment moment was this dialog wi…
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Do you know when Sega started using it? I traded my Megadrive for an old Atari 800XL with a diskdrive and Basic book! :D Honestly the Atari was way better because it had a keyboard and you could program it! So my whole retro hardware history (with trades): 1986 C64C -> 1987 SMS -> 1993 Gameboy 1989 Megadrive -> 1992 Atari 800XL 1995 Mac Classic!? 1997 Sun Solaris (at uni.) 20 year break using mainly PC and Raspberry 2017 C64 (with RR-Net and Nunchuck64) 2022 Amiga 1200 I have promised myself to stop hoarding devices now. :P Looking back the sadest part is how most kids never got to learn assembly on their devices back then, even if we wanted to the barrier was too high without cartridges, internet and interested parents! I coded basic on both my C64C and Atari 800XL but I always knew it was too slow.
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I liked the SIO system. Device independent I/O was nicely done. K: Keyboard C: Cassette (slooooow) Dn: Disk drive P: Printer Today, we have a device called FujiNET. It is basically a serial to Internet bridge. N: For Network And most programs just work across the Internet despite being 30 years old. Once the N: handler was done, Atari computers basically are networked. Programming with the Internet works like serial does, and there have been a couple multi player games written in BASIC that perform nicely. I plan on getting one for my 800XL one day in the near future. The FujiNET is being made to worn with other machines too. They all vary in how this kind of thing can be made to happen. The Atari will end up a benchmark, or reference. SIO today is seen as a very early USB type implementation that offered capability for up to 30 devices to coexist on the serial bus. Pretty damn spiffy, and I feel it is one of the better features. Each 8 bitter has at least one stand out thing. On the Atari, this is one stand out often underappreciated. The Apple had slots and an assembler monitor. C64 had great sound, sprites, nice user port.
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This blog reminds me of -me- back in the day. I cut my teeth on programming bad Atari BASIC games, but eventually I learned 6502 assembly and wrote my own disassembler, modem routines, etc... heady days! And funny timing, this weekend I (finally) plugged in and got working an old 800XL I bought on eBay about a year ago -- but after purchasing the machine, it gathered dust while I got distracted with so many other things. :-) This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk. Previous owner had the machine for decades and was very meticulous. It also came with a 1050 disk drive which makes scary wheezing noises when the disk spins, lol. I don't think I'll use the disk drive much since everything interesting is downloadable nowadays in seconds in ATR image format; I also picked up a SIO port to serial adapter, so I can link the Atari to my laptop. It's pretty amazing, the Atari sees my laptop as a disk drive using RespeQt [1] on the laptop. It is -so- much faster/easier than actually dealing with the disks like back in the day. And if you thought disks were slow... this machine also came with a cassette drive (!!) but it needs some lube or something, the rotors don't spin at the right speed. I kinda want to show some of my students the slow speed at which we used to be tortured: ten minutes to load a single game, and that only if you were lucky enough for it to load successfully on the first try... The most intere…
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My only "spectrum" was a paper one - a keyboard drawn from a magazine pic. Now you know there's something worse than a rubber keyboard! Never got the real thing though, ended up with Atari 800XL, better comp in many aspects but pretty rare thing in 80-ties ex YU.