Shrine of the Magnificent Atari

This page contains photos of my old Atari 1200XL. It recently went to live at an Atari farm in the country where it will get to run freely and play with other Atari's. Unfortunately I will not be able to go visit it as the farm is so far away. You may be thinking it actually got thrown away. Nope, I actually found someone who intends to repair it. Good homes are hard to find for old computers, but I think I succeeded this time.

This is a picture of the entire system. Just off the left edge is the 5.25" dual density floppy drive. To the right, the cassette drive, and in the center is the Atari personal computer. Setting on top of the computer is a 300 baud modem. A 13" color TV is seen here being used as a monitor.

At the time of these photos, this was the only software I had which would still run. The game is called "Miner 1049'er". Also shown is the Atari logo which appears if you boot up without a cartridge installed.

Atari 1050 Dual Density Disk Drive

This is the floppy drive capable of storing 147k of data. The first image shows the drive attempting to read a disk. The second image shows the results of attempting to read the disk: "Boot Error".

Orignal box including Kmart price tag of $189.00

Here again is the drive. On top is a box of 5.25" floppy disks. Also shown is the original drive insert used during shipping to protect the drive head. There are some secret messages written on the drive insert.

Included in the disk box was Infocom's "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy", Zork 1, Zork 2, and Hard Hat Mack (an early Electronic Artist's title). Unfortunately none of the disks could still be read by the drive.

Atari XM301 Modem

This was my first modem. A blazing 300 baud. I mail ordered this sometime around 1985-1987. My memory says it cost me $49. My memory may not be very good. I also recall that I had to add a wire mod to the main printed circuit board in order to make the modem work with the 1200XL. It was designed to work with either the 400/800 or 600XL/800XL line of Atari computers.

Atari 410 Program Recorder

Shown here is the Atari 410 Program recorder, or data cassette, or whatever you want to call it. The I/O rate for this was supposedly 600 bits per second. That would give you 100k for a 60 minute cassette.

Here is a picture of the system with the BASIC cartrige loaded. Unfortunately, the keyboard no longer works.

Atari BASIC

Everyone with an Atari personal computer had Atari BASIC. No telling how many hundreds of hours I spent writing BASIC.

Atari Assembler Editor

Assembly is where it was really at! ASM code runs much faster, but it was harder to write. No pain, no gain.

Purpose

This page exists primarily to document the existence of my old Atari computer. This thing had a lot to do with were I ended up. (I am a computer engineer.) I took these photos the day I gave away the computer. It has been in the box unused since about 1989.

The last time I tried to use it was in college to dial into the VAX. The VAX ran in 80 column mode. This thing only supported 40 column mode so it was had to use for writing Pascal across a 300 baud dialup connection.

Recently I attempted to power it up for nostagia's sake. After determining the keyboard no longer functioned I decided to try to find it a good home. I have been storing it unused for 15 years. Maybe the new owner will get a little bit of use out of it after he repairs it.

My Early History with Computers

My first computer was a TI99/4A. This was actually a 16 bit comuter. I placed an ad in the local news paper looking for a used one. I ended up buying one for $75 which included a cable to hook it up to a cassette player. I borrowed the money from my father to buy it. I spent a lot of time using this computer.

My second computer was an Atari 800 (8-bit, 1.79 Mhz). I bought this computer from a friend at school. His name was Robby Robinson. (He died while we were still in high school.) He was upgrading to an Apple. I don't recall the model. I traded him the TI 99/4A and some cash for the Atari with a 410 program recorder. I later gave this computer to my brother. He had also had an Atari 600 XL. He had a floppy drive as well. He bought his new. I believe this computer is still in storage in his house.

My third computer was the Atari 1200 XL. I purchased this computer from another friend at school, John Trash. John had purchased am IBM portable computer. With the Atari 1200 XL, I also got the floppy drive and another 410 program recorder.

During high school I took several computer classes. We had TRS-80 model IVs at school. I had a great computer teacher named Rex Nelson. He taught us BASIC, Pascal, and Z80 assembly.

Mr. Nelson convinced me to taking typing. He said that if I was going to work with computers, it was a skill I needed. He also pointed out that that most of the students in the typing class were girls. Sign me up!

Also while in HS, I helped Mr. Nelson as a teaching assistant for the junior high class. I even got to teach on occassion when he was out. When Mr. Nelson left, Mr. Hildebrandt was the next computer teacher. He was a good teacher as well. I went to a few computer swap meets in Dallas with him. The computer swaps were awesome. Lost of electronic stuff including computers, ham radio, etc. Mr. Hildebrandt knew a whole lot of stuff about computers that I wished I knew. Looking back , I believe he was probably an electrical engineer.

Any story about high school would not be complete without mentioning Imaginary Mike. Mike was a Commodore 64 guy. I believe he had a data cassette and a floppy drive. I never did figure out what all that ",8" stuff was about.

My fourth computer, which I bought while in college, was a Packard Bell 386SX (32-bit). It was a 16 Mhz machine with 1 meg of RAM. It came with a 2400 baud modem which I used extensively while in college. I primarily used the computer to connect to the university VAX and later the Sun workstations. I also used it to connect to a local BBS, Xignals, run by a local guy named Miles Lester. My friend Allen M. and I spend a lot of time playing TradeWars on Xignals.

I later upgraded this computer to 2.5 MB of RAM, added a 300 Meg drive (the orignal was a 40 Meg), and an orignal SoundBlaster card.

After college, the 386sx-16 was replaced with a 386-40 Mhz. There have been several more computers since then and I am sure there will be many more in the future.

It is worth mentioning that shortly after college I built a small computer from scratch using an 8-bit 8051. The entire computer was wire wrapped by hand and I wrote the OS myself. I still have this one in a shoebox somewhere. Anyone have a good home for this one?

As usual, I didn't spell check or proof read this. If you see any mistakes please let me know. Thanks!

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