{"id":604,"date":"2009-11-06T14:59:24","date_gmt":"2009-11-06T19:59:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=604"},"modified":"2009-11-09T11:43:43","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T16:43:43","slug":"inside-the-atari-800","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/604\/inside-the-atari-800","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Atari 800 (30th Anniversary)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Inside<\/a><\/p>\n

Thirty years ago this fall, Atari shipped its first entries in the personal computer market, the Atari 800 and 400 computers. I’m particularly fond of the Atari 8-bit series because I grew up<\/a> with an 800 as my first computer and video game machine — it was especially potent and impressive in the pre-NES days.<\/p>\n

Sadly, no publication I queried was interested in a full in-depth history of the computer (although I was poised to do one), so you’ll have to settle for my latest slideshow<\/a> on PCWorld.com.<\/p>\n

In “Inside the Atari 800<\/a>,” I dissect my family’s beloved Atari 800 unit and explore what makes it tick. This article is the eighth entry in my “workbench series” of tech teardowns, and it might be my best. If nothing else, it sports my favorite self-designed introduction slide yet (seen above) — I should turn that into a poster.<\/p>\n

By the way, PC World drastically improved its slide show system, so if you weren’t a fan of it in the past, check this one out. I think they’ve retrofitted all my old slide shows to the new system as well. (Even so, I’m not too happy they made my sharp photos look terrible with extreme JPG compression.)<\/p>\n

So give it a look-over; I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to share your Atari 8-bit memories and well-wishes here. I’d love to know how many Atari 8-bit fans we have out there.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Here are my previous teardowns, if you’re interested: Commodore 64<\/a>, Nintendo Game Boy<\/a>, Nintendo Famicom<\/a>, Apple IIc<\/a>, IBM Model M Keyboard<\/a>, TRS-80 Model 100<\/a>, and Macintosh Portable<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years ago this fall, Atari shipped its first entries in the personal computer market, the Atari 800 and 400 computers. I’m particularly fond of the Atari 8-bit series because I grew up with an 800 as my first computer and video game machine — it was especially potent and impressive in the pre-NES days. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,7,21,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-games","category-computer-info-and-history","category-news-current-events","category-retrogaming","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}