ilaskey

Not sure I see the point. I love the original hardware, all the celever design points, the quality and look of the boxes, documentation etc. If it's not original, with that warm fluffy feeling, it may as well be an emulator on your PC. I can't see what cloned hardware gives us that an emulator doesn't apart from a few edge cases where you might have one to use with the main TV as opposed to your PC monitor.

Depends on what country you're in. Here in the UK, a 400 is typically £350 upwards and I see 800s for £600+ Peripherals are rare and again, usually premium priced.

Sorry, stumped. Why on earth would anyone do this. Let's get this straight, she knew it was yours but decided to chuck it on the fire? Surely a police matter? criminal damage or somesuch.

My pet hate of the modern Maplin shops is they insist on someone by the door to greet and ask if they can help, as soon as you arrive. It might work for some people but I'd much rather wander around then ask if I need anything. As it stands, as soon as you arrive, your forced to mutter 'no thanks' and then immediately, your shopping brain is in no mode which really isn't good for the shop. Plus 99% of the stock is overpriced crap. You can tell it's the same stuff that's 99p inc P&P on eBay yet Maplin charge £24.99 or somesuch.

Atari Writer was for the home. They had the Atari Word processor which was a full featured, powerful professional product. Whether something was released or not is immaterial, the point was the early titles show where Atari's mindset was in terms of the direction they were aiming for. As far as dev tools goes, There was MS Basic (when did that hit the Atari?) and I know someone who used it to write/port business software to the 8bits. Even without that, a programmer could easily port to Atari Basic or even assembler if they were keen enough. At the time, you are right that CP/M was riding high. I get the impression you weren't really involved at the time and are putting this together in hind-site, no idea how old you are. I remember those times well and as Bill noted, everyone was scrabbling around throwing anything at the market to see what worked. Business were steeped in the mainframe/mini world and small businesses would have had CP/M but those were mostly older tech machines so the new machines with colour, audio, graphics etc were very much an unknown. There was a feeling they'd be good for anything but no one had really made it happen yet. I remember early stuff like PrintShop being grabbed by both hands by businesses as a way to make cheap graphic stuff. Early PC apps like Harvard graphics showed graphs etc could be done for business but we were just finding our way. It's only after the event you can suggest some firms/architectures knew what they were doing.

I'm not convinced. Most of the earlier numbered Atari titles are productivity based with games only appearing later. I think the original intent was business/learning but also able to play games CX8102 Calculator CX8104 Atari 810 Master Diskette II -LB CX8106 Bond Analysis -LB CX8107 Stock Analysis -LB CX8108 Stock Charting -LB CX8111 Atari Formatted Diskette II CX8119 Atari Word Processor Master Disk with Atari Word Processor CX8120 Atari Word Processor Training Data Disk With Atari Word Processor CX8121 Atari Macro Assembler And Program Text Editor CX8126 Atari Microsoft BASIC CX8129 Home Filing Manager DX5047 Timewise DX5049 Visicalc And later CWM200 MenuWriter CWR200 ReportWriter CWBI200 Small Business Inventory CWHI200 Home Integrator CWRI200 Retail Invoice CWRP200 Accounts Receivable / Payable CWSE200 Salesman's Expenses

The FCC rules for shielding changed just as the 400/800 were completed so the VIC20, even though soon after didn't have to worry about it so much. As far as numbers goes, ISTR someone in one of the Atari Interview podcasts suggested Atari had lied about sales numbers to encourage devs and it was actually much lower that they stated publicly?

You can have as many character sets as you can fit into RAM, it's just a poke to select the one you want. As far as the giant space ship goes, I wouldn't have thought it was a sprite as such, just a block of redefined text scrolled into view so almost no CPU overhead.

Trouble is, Cancer isn't a single thing. Each form has it's own issues, causes, solutions etc. so we're slowly chipping away, moving more from the "fatal" to "improved lifespan" to "cure". It's not a single cure, it's hundreds of cures that are being worked on, one for each type.

No, that was on dates. He said the book stated Sears never carried it and they had to sell it direct but then showed a Sears advert for it.

I was about to post this myself. Interesting that he found an error in Curt/Marty's book about Sears.

Don't know sorry, it was on the Maplin twitter feed, turned up when I was googling for something but I just got the picture, not the actual tweet.

Any better? Not uploaded a pic before.

Just been reading about Monitor Magazine having its origins in Maplin Southend (sic) and it mentioned Keith Mayhew. I have a vague feeling the Saturday guy was a Keith. Possibly him?

I think Atari had two big issues towards the end. I remember talking to Darryl Still (UK Marketing) who mentioned the phrase 'Burden of history' quite a lot. This was on two levels. Partly, that they had pissed off a lot of retailers and developers over the years who wouldn't work with them but also that they had to work with the perception of Atari being a huge multinational firm when in reality it was a few small pockets of people working themselves into the ground trying to create the impression of being much bigger than they were. The marketing budgets were negligible, R&D, barely there. He was very proud of what they'd achieved with the resources available but essentially, the last few years from about 1990 were a rapid decline and no cash in the piggy bank to ride it out.

The main one I remember at Maplins was some young lad who worked Saturdays and was always bashing away on the Macro Assembler, creating demos etc. To be honest, Apart from one or two who had clearly been there a long time, I found them OK on the Atari side but generally I was there Saturday so got the kid genius when I wanted to ask about anything or to see something demoed. It does sound though that Hammersmith was the place to be but back then it was all so new, I was just happy to have access to anything, anywhere! As for Mike, yes, you're right. Oddly, when I warned a friend off of him, he said "You're joking, he's the biggest pirate out there, I get all my stuff from him". He used to drop into Maplins too to show off little demos he'd written (or someone had given him possibly). I remember one that had multiple scrolling bands of text in different sizes/directions/speeds horizontally whilst what looked like some GR.2 text scrolled up behind it all. Very impressive at the time. He opened up his shop around the time the STs started so pretty much all my 8bit purchases were at Maplins, 32K 400 with 410, then the 810, 1029 printer, software etc. I did briefly have an 800 from Scientific & Technical over the road when they flogged a load off in plain boxes for £99 each.

Pretty much everyone I knew got theirs from Maplins - the Westcliff one. there was 'Mike's Computer Store' briefly a bit down the road but until Dixons etc started doing the bundles, Maplins was the only game in town. There was a pretty decent display and interesting hardware/software most of the time. I remember seeing a Versawriter being shown off there.

I've noticed a lot of recent interviewees seem amazed the 400/800 could do stuff other than games. Back in the day, most people I knew with Atari's were about 50/50 games and productivity - word processing, spreadsheets, simple databases, accessing BBSs, programming, drawing, music, all sorts. There was so much add on hardware from better floppy drives to things like the VersaWriter, interfaces, 80 columns etc. Was my circle of friends that different to the norm back then?

Back when I used to review Jag games I had a few versions of Rayman sent over during development as they were trying to get coverage to build the interest. I don't remember any of the versions I had as being that different, mostly just tweaking the levels, better colours etc. The cart looks like the one's I'd get sent though. I did have a similar cart from Atari UK for Val D'isere but donated it to the Atari Museum with some other odds and ends a few years ago.

Between about 1987 and 1995 it would be easier to say which ones weren't. As Pixelmischief says, they were in every studio. Live, I've seen them on stage with Jarre, Sparks and many more. Steinberg Pro24 and later Cubase was everywhere as were patch editors and music generators like M. Every band I knew personally used them too so from small bedroom based set ups through to Jarre! Add in a couple of Akai samplers and some of the extra hardware like the SMPTE boxes, you could do anything.

Is it me or does he talk like a speech synth or the Evil Computer from a 1970's SciFi film?

Nice pics but I did have a 'Seriously?' moment that someone thought it was a good idea to call themselves Scatarians.