ClausB

Met him at VCFMW a few years ago. He sat there most of the time soldering stuff. Seemed like a nice guy, though I never ordered anything from him.

SF author Jerry Pournelle was a micro enthusiast and early adopter of word processing. In his regular BYTE column he wrote about his experiences and he reviewed much hardware and software. He encouraged many writing colleagues to get into it.

The methods used in Lancaster's Son of Cheap Video and in Sinclair's ZX80 are so similar that I wonder whether they happened independently or one influenced the other. Of course the CPU differs, and Sinclair made good use of the Z80's R register, but the rest is the same.

Nice, another from 1980. List now updated in first post.

What number is stamped on?

Strange, that's too early. Is there a code pressed into the case bottom plastic? Edit: on second look, it appears to be 083 which makes more sense.

Here's my best guess for a schematic of this early 400 motherboard, based on the photos upthread, on DeCuir's notes, and on my dissection of my pre-production 800. Putting that all together, I found four extra gates, so I drew them in a circuit which avoids the RAM / ROM conflict, allowing the full 16K of RAM. Without better photos though, that's just conjecture.

Nice one. Which SRAM chip did you use? In the day, most were 2K or 8K bytes. I did something similar, but with DRAM instead. It filled that 4K hole with RAM and also replaced the OS ROM with RAM: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/122750-64k-atari-800

Does this partial pre-production 400 deserve the top slot?

The OP has disappeared. Does anyone know the fate of this artifact?

Cool! https://travelertina.blog/2018/08/25/beach-beasties/

The Atari 48K board has enough logic for 62K - it just needs quite a bit of rewiring. If you start from a 16K board you will have to reroute the power traces and add a few chips. And going to 256K needs some more chips, but I'll look into it if you want to go that route.

Sorry, been busy preparing to host a robotics tournament. Done now but having a bourbon. Will study this long thread tomorrow.

On the 800 you can disable the OS ROM by asserting the EXSEL signal on slot 3. That's what I did BITD: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/122750-64k-atari-800/?do=findComment&comment=1483021 I recall trying to run an XL OS on it. There was some problem with the reset and NMI behavior, I think. Maybe it could be patched.

FYI, the 10K ROM board is in slot 0 and the rest are in RAM slots 1 thru 3.

Ten years ago I hacked my demo. Can you spot the differences? http://atariage.com/forums/topic/134623-christmasnew-years-2009-demospics/?do=findComment&comment=1627741

Went to my son's trumpet gig, a midnight Christmas Mass. Wore a green sweater over a red t-shirt. Heathen that I am, it was an Atari shirt.

True of course, once you allow for byte order. Byte order is one variable available for the sake of optimization of the rendering algorithm.

I created ACE80's font from scratch, though using Atari's native 40-column font as a guide, so lower case heights and descenders are the same. The three pixel width sounds daunting at first but many characters fall into it well. It helps that the native font is 6 pixels wide in most cases and that vertical lines are 2 pixels wide (to reduce artificing on color TVs). Two exceptions are M and W which are 7 wide and have single pixels in their middle points. With only 3 pixels, there is no room for those middle points, so M is approximated by H with the horizontal bar raised. W is just inverted M. What about N? I tried a few variations on my BASIC custom character editor before I settled on H with a thick bar. I found it easy to get used to and so did my friends. I'm not a fan of the tall n solution since it differs from native too much (plus it's just not upper case).

That's what ACE80 did in 1985.http://atariage.com/forums/topic/99666-ace80-xl/page-2?do=findComment&comment=1479296

Here's why:http://atariage.com/forums/topic/223411-1981-sio-modem The 400 had the best possible flat keyboard with raised edges and tactile and audio feedback. It made the 400 an affordable entry into the wonderful world of Atari.

Because computers since then have had less and less personality. And you knew what you had then. Later, with malware and incessant updates, you lost control of your systems. Also, back then you and a few buddies were on the forefront of home computing. So it's nice to revisit those happy times. And retrocomputing feels similar, out of the mainstream, because you know you have something special.

I used Text Wizard on my Ataris to write several magazine articles, 3 of which got published. MACE and BYTE accepted that format on floppy but ANTIC could not, ironically. (They had it retyped and filled it with typos.) Also, I wrote patches for some word processor and spreadsheet programs so they would run on ACE80.

I agree completely. I showed it to my high school robotics students and they were largely unimpressed. I should have done it like you suggest, and put it in context of the times.