Had one. And a follow-on 130XE. What I miss: Star Raiders and Star Raiders II, M.U.L.E. I don’t play a lot of games but would play those. I wrote to Atari to try to get them to port the first two to Nintendo handhelds. I would have bought a Gameboy Advance Micro (was that the name?) to play them, even .
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I have more than one system like that (though none of them are laptops). One of my cases dates back to the early pre-64-bit Athlon era. [ETA: right at the transition between AT and ATX cases.] It’s currently housing an FX-6100, a bit old in and of itself. None of its original hardware is among the living.
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I had an 800 for many years. There were a lot of really cool games for it. Also, attempts at office / productivity software that were painful to use.
Setting up the 800 for anything serious (more than cartridge games) was a real pain. Big thick clunky cables, an external serial port box with proprietary serial cables if you wanted to use a fast modem, a flaky video interface.
Eventually I got tired to having a cubic yard of Atari stuff in my apartment, and sold it for $20 to an utterly astonished collector.
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I still have mine up in the attic. I wonder if it still works?
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In the early 2000’s a co-worker came into work grinning like the cat that ate the canary. I asked why he was so glowing. He’d gone to a big box store. The one radio shack had spun off if I recall correctly. He’d bought a new expensive cell phone and had “negotiated” a killer deal. Once a year he could replace his phone due to damage, no questions asked. The sales person told him directly to just drop it in the parking lot out front, then come in for a new shiny phone. Forever!
A few weeks later the entire chain closed suddenly, forever.
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It was all so useless and all so expensive. What were we thinking?
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M.U.L.E. came to mobile for awhile, but now it’s gone again:
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Oh yeah…I had a Tandy 1000EX with an external second floppy drive and mono screen. I spent many hours on Prodigy…waiting for one page to load. Fun times!
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Just struck me now, years later, that the Commodore Vic 20 and 64 computers had DB connectors same size and pin layout as the old Atari joysticks.
First example of early cross vendor operability I suppose.
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Motherboard mounting screws, power supplies, 5.25/3.5" drive bays are common to many old beige boxes and modern less-beige boxes.
If this is the ones I’m thinking of, this is more a feature of the big-box manufacturers like Dell/Emachines/etc. who make a pin header which covers power button, indicator lights, etc. Sometimes flash card readers as well. Some of these manufacturers like Dell also use nonstandard motherboard mounting dimensions, power supplies, etc. though…
This is not a deal breaker though
Assuming we’re talking about the same thing, you can pull out the individual wires and chunk them into 2 and 3 pin width headers as you need, and put them on the board where they need to go. It’s a bit of a guessing game on what wires do what, but the bare minimum is figuring out the power button, right?
I got my first computer in April, 1979, yes forty years ago last month. I couldn’t afford one esrlier, this was actually a hand me down, someone at RCA taking an intro course and not keeping the goodies.
It wad a MOS Technology KIM-1 single board, 1K of ram , 1MHz clock, andcalculator style keyboard and resdout. What a great thing, I stilll have, but not sure it works.
It took till 1984, and my third computer, before I could do anything useful, write, with a computer. This tablet beats all that I had before, except my desktop.
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Such memories! Same here. I used it exclusively to MIDI control my synth. Both hardware and (then very limited) software were pretty much obsolete less than a year later (such was the progress then in those areas).
I soon sold it to a fellow who wanted it for his son. (Games and homework, I gathered.) After demonstrating it up and down at my place for both dad and lad, dad proceeded to demonstrate (for his son’s “benefit”, I think) his superior haggling abilities. I wanted him out of there; 20 bucks got knocked off. I had discarded the box the Tandy came in, so I urged daddy to place it on the back seat of his pickup (for cushioning) and have his son hold it in place. He would have none of that; he placed it in the pickup bed. A half hour or so later I get a call from daddy; a problem getting the PC to boot up w/o issues. I get to his place, try this and that, but no soap. I said nothing about my earlier transportation tip, and he said nothing about having paid for a PC that didn’t work. To this day I still feel a bit sorry for him… played The Master Haggler (again… for his son, I figure) ignored my advice (with his son watching on), and then… zilch. Dad and son shouldn’t have to go through that.
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I had the 400 XL and used the word processor till 1995. Never did transfer all that early angst fiction from that medium (thank heavens)
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I still play M.U.L.E. on an emulator. It held up fairly well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEaBDzp4T7g
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Ooh, you reminded me of the old religious wars between those of us with Commodores, and the heathens who owned Atari! Much like our predecessors warred over whether Chevy or Ford was better, with the advantage that we actually owned our computers! And of course the true apostates like the kid who had a TI-99 at home, or the rich kid with an Apple //e!
To be honest, it was never all that much of a war to begin with, it just meant when it came to trading floppies, you had to belong to a tribe with the right kind of computer. Or stick to trading copies of Apple II games, which we all could play in the computer lab. Or swapping printouts of BASIC code.
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Obsolescence of machines is a two-sided… thing. It can render your data inaccessible! Recently I used my 65XE (some derivative of the 800) to play a tape I bought at a concert since it’s the last remaining tape deck in the household. Very distorted sound quality & sometimes it stops after six seconds. It’s a grindcore tape so first I didn’t even notice…
Embiggen. Oh and “fun” fact, my avatar image is this very Atari running a baseball game (a Hardball, I think) - on the monochrome monitor the Atari came with… my great uncle never realized that you can just use your regular TV and play River Raid in color!
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I still use the personal computer below, so it is not obsolete (although I rarely use it for programming). I also have an emulator for my smartphone, but the tactile feedback is better on the original.
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… and that one kid who kinda failed at being an apostate because he had the model of the TI-99 that didn’t have enough memory to do anything fun with it.
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