Atari 8 Bit Computers - real world business use examples?

[SINGLE TOOTH]

Just wondering if anyone here has any stories of using, seeing, or knowing about people using A8 machines in business. I would like to hear about it. I am just curious about stories about a corporation, or a mom and pop store using an Atari for their small business, what software was used, etc.

 

Seems that compared to modern machines, these machines could do so little, but I would like to hear about people using them for their intended purposes not just games.

[Drummerboy]

Sure, i was in Atari 8Bit Computers club back in the 80s. And many of that guys used the A8, for University Projects, thesis work, and others things.

That club had very talented guys. they were doing anything with the Atari 8bit, you know their designed own app if not exist.

 

Another fact; I remember a electronic components store used any Atari 800XL, with Atari 1050 and Atari 1020 as billing system.

[Goochman]

8bits were used as electronic posting systems also. My community college was using an 8bit solution on TVs across the campus.

[+Stephen]

For years, my local cable company used Atari 8-bits to display channel information. I was able to buy one of the rack mount units a few years back.

[bandit]

 

My Aunt owned a pharmacy and used a 800 with 2 810's ,book keeping and inventory taxes.

 

And two local stores cleaners and Audio repair ran 800 and other ran 800xl.

[atari8warez]

Not really business but perhaps "serious work". I used my Atari to do my taxes, I created a tax form with all it's calculations and tax tables using SynCalc (took me a looong time), I also uploaded the sheet to local BBSes every tax year, and as a home security system at one point. I wrote the software and assembled the hardware myself using commercially available window censors etc... The only thing I didn't like about the latter project was I needed to leave the 800XL and my TV ON all the time

[sargie]

Novagen (of Encounter / Mercenary fame) used an Atari 800 for Word Processing in the office. It was called "Gladys".

[Goochman]

A friend of mine's Dad hooked his Atari 800 up to a seismic sensor and recorded Mt. St. Helens eruption shock waves on the East Coast and then hooked it up to a radio antenna and scanned the sky for any signals. He let this run 24x7 and it only went down once the 3 years I knew them.

[luckybuck]

Well, if you take into account, that the Atari could sum 4 numbers correct, while Excel 2013 can't do the normal way...

I have made my decision about serious...

 

 

http://atariwiki.de/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Atari%20Calculator

Please go to the bottom of the site

Further there were boxes:

Boxes:

 

CX401

General Accounting System, 4 disks

 

CX402

Account Receivable System, 4 disks

 

CX403

Inventory Control System, 5 disks

 

CX404

Word Processor, 2 disks

 

CX405

Pilot Educator, 2 disks? or 2 cassettes?

 

CX406

Personal Financial Management System, 3 disks

 

CX412

Dow Jones Investment Evaluator, 2 disks

 

CX414

The Bookkeeper, 4 disks

CX415

The Home Filing Manager, 2 disks

 

CX421

Family Financies, 2 disks

 

But if the people do not know and Atari couldn't transfer it to the people...

Edited October 31, 2013 by luckybuck

[Kyle22]

For years, my local cable company used Atari 8-bits to display channel information. I was able to buy one of the rack mount units a few years back.

 

Do you, by chance, still have the software? I worked at a company (back in the day) that produced Spectraview for cable co.'s. I wish I could find some of my old EPROMs.

 

 

Also, I helped out a family business by writing a fairly simple mailing list database program that would print labels. The database was in RAM, I used BASIC-XE, but, it still had size limits.

 

 

-K

Edited October 31, 2013 by Kyle22

[SINGLE TOOTH]

These are exactly the stories I was looking for. I didn't realize it was used to much in TV titles.

[atari8warez]

Oh and I also used my 800XL for video titling of my camcorder recordings.

[fibrewire]

 

Do you, by chance, still have the software? I worked at a company (back in the day) that produced Spectraview for cable co.'s. I wish I could find some of my old EPROMs.

 

Do you mean this? http://atariage.com/forums/topic/161828-hooked-on-8-bit-carts/?p=2475225

Edited October 31, 2013 by fibrewire

[Goochman]

I guess you could add this also. My Mom was a Realtor and back then the cost to print address labels was ridiculous so I wrote a program on my 130xe that could produce mailing labels from my Okimate 9pin printer. I had to input the addresses however I was able to get around 70,000 addresses on 1 5 1/4" diskette. A printer buffer was a must and I also got a 'reink' unit so we didnt have to buy new printer cartridges as much.

 

My Mom used that system for 7 years, though the last 2 years I imported the addresses into a personal Oracle DB and exported a text file to be printed from my 1040ST. That way my Mom could easily use the mouse to run the labels since I was not at home anymore. She would've used it another 10 years except the US Post Office made a change to the Carrier Route IDs which would've meant I had to update all 70,000 addresses which wasnt going to happen

[JayoK]

Not sure if it fits here, but I used my Atari 800XL as a cross-development platform for a 6800 processor for a project. I couldn't afford the PC based stuff at the time, as I couldn't even afford a PC!

 

Got a serial EPROM programmer, some battery backed SRAM and attached via a RS232 converter to the Atari. Taking MAC/65, I created macros for each 6800 mnemonic, as such the output code was for the 6800. Then wrote the result to the EPROM. Tada :-)

 

Won a National competition with that platform.

[ricortes]

Esoteric. Compucat was one of my favorite BBSs back in the day. They were started circa 1984 with an Atari BBS with integrated store and online adventure game. If you look at the old Antic magazines you will probably find one of their advertisements. They ran the bbs and business out of their home, a lovely cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains situated in the Redwoods. It's important to me because they predated all the eBay and Amazon type stores as well as online games. Unfortunately they hitched their star to Atari so we all know what happened to everyone who did that.

 

They were a really nice couple. Great background story that they shared with me at the time. Their first love was puppets and pursue that to this day.

 

So I make it something like 29 years as a going online business. Certainly not big by any standards but a bit of unknown history that not many people born after 1970 would know. Of course soon after the ST came out they switched from an Atari 8 bit to the ST. I remember at the time Neil telling me how much easier the ST with a hard drive was running the bbs rather then a bunch of floppy drives.

 

Small bit of trivia: Leonard Nimoy was a spokesperson for a Commodore modem manufacturer. Truth in advertising or something to that effect, he called up Compucat so he could endorse the modem as a user, or at least that is what Neil thought at the time.

 

If you want to look at a few bits and pieces that are still available, they did make the jump to the interweb.

http://puppetgallery.com/compucat/index.html?

 

I'm pretty sure they are about my age, read Social Security/semi retired.

 

On the bottom of that page, click on the "Laserbreath" icon on the bottom to see a faithful reproduction of the adventure game. It started on an Atari 8 bit as text only, was translated to an ST as a graphical adventure, and finally to the web site. I'm not sure, another blast from the past, there was something like drj or sgr or some kind of graphics terminal program for the ST that allowed you to mix text and graphics online. It predated the www by quite a few years for mixing media. I can't remember if it included sound too, I think it did. Sometimes you are just to far out in front. There were lots of people and groups I would put in that to far out front category. I remember all the attempts to get networking going with Carina and on the MS DOS side with Fido and Wildcat.

 

hehe phone lines! We got and still get the crappiest phone lines in the world just 8 minutes outside of silicon valley. I remember one time Neil said there was so much noise on the lines that no one could connect to the bbs at 300 BAUD. When a GTE service rep finally showed up, the phone line running to the house had fallen down and was buried under a couple of feet of forest trash. He said the clown just followed the line pulling the wire out of the dirt and leaves like that scene in 'Bridge on the River Kwai'. Soon as it wasn't buried, just laying on the surface, the tech said ~I'm done, and drove off.

[Kyle22]

 

Do you mean this? http://atariage.com/forums/topic/161828-hooked-on-8-bit-carts/?p=2475225

No, it was the same concept, but a different program. Thanks for the link though.

 

This http://atariage.com/forums/topic/207010-compu-cable-systems-spectraview-ii/

 

is the program. I already asked about a ROM dump in that thread, but had no luck

 

 

-K

[Dutch800XL]

I used our 800XL for making invoices for our company from about 1985-1989. In fact, my brother bought the XL because he wanted something a bit easier than a typewriter. To make a long story short: He couldn't really "get into" Basic, so instead I tried it, and after a few months/ years, the program became quite sophisticated. The first versions were run from tape (!), later I used a diskdrive, so datafiles could be stored etc. I used TurboBasic XL for later versions (I remember it well, using giant $strings$ in memory, dumping them to disk with direct SIO, etc).

Around 1990 I tried the ST, but with the poor software support, I could never find a decent program language (or other software), After that, I bought my first PC and used Clipper (dBaseIII compiler). Too bad the ST never took off as a business machine, though they came very close around 1990. I believe I was the very first owner of the MegaST1 in The Netherlands. It looked quite professional from a distance (but actually quite cheap from up close).

Oh well, I could go on forever...

[+Stephen]

 

Do you, by chance, still have the software? I worked at a company (back in the day) that produced Spectraview for cable co.'s. I wish I could find some of my old EPROMs.

 

 

Also, I helped out a family business by writing a fairly simple mailing list database program that would print labels. The database was in RAM, I used BASIC-XE, but, it still had size limits.

 

 

-K

I do have the cart that came with it - I think it has been dumped, but if not I will. I don't think it is the Spectra View you are looking for though. The cart site on a cart+ECI board and in order to be useful, it needs data coming in over the SIO port (there is custom hardware in the rack).

[jblenkle]

OK, I got one for you...

 

...ages ago my wife and I were going through model homes at a new housing development. The house where they had their office set up had several desks for the people trying to sell the houses and the computers they were using were very obviously Atari 800XLs...except they had all identifying logos and markings removed from them.

Edited October 31, 2013 by jblenkle

[crash]

During the production of the original Tron film, one was used to catalog the thousands of sound effects used in the film, such as the Recognizer, Solar Sailer, and and Sark's aircraft carrier engines.

 

As the effects were recorded, they were entered on a mailing-list type program on an Atari 800 computer. "every sound was described by some word like 'bang' or 'whoosh," Fremer explains. "We entered the number of the reel, the number of the track, the SMPTE code time, and a brief description of the source. The Atari produced a catalog for us where all the bangs are listed together, and so on. To audition a few bangs, we simply looked them up in the catalog, got out the right reel, dialed in the right tracks and times, and in a few minutes we had it. It was light years faster than the conventional way of cataloguing effects, where each effect or group of effects is on a reel of 1/4" tape. When you want to find something in that system, you often have to spend a half day looking for it and loading it up, and then you can hear only one sound at a time." The thousands of sound effects that Serfine and Fremer collected were stored on just five reels of 16-track tape.

 

http://www.wendycarlos.com/other/PDF-Files/KbdOnTRON*.pdf

[ClausB]

In 1982 I programmed some for CIS, a company which installed Ataris in hotels around Michigan and Wisconsin to display news and ads on the rooms' TVs.

[Kyle22]

I do have the cart that came with it - I think it has been dumped, but if not I will. I don't think it is the Spectra View you are looking for though. The cart site on a cart+ECI board and in order to be useful, it needs data coming in over the SIO port (there is custom hardware in the rack).

 

The only one I know of that needs something "extra" is SpectraView I, which is a cart that needs a custom ROM in the BASIC socket. If you power up one of these Ataris with the ROM in the BASIC socket, but without the cart, they display a Rainbow pattern (and that's all).

 

Spec uses a Disk Drive on the SIO to store its data. Most of the ones we sent out were 1050's, Indus GT, and a few XF551s.

 

I would love to see any and all ROM images you have, though

 

-K

[luckybuck]

 

Do you, by chance, still have the software? I worked at a company (back in the day) that produced Spectraview for cable co.'s. I wish I could find some of my old EPROMs.

 

 

Also, I helped out a family business by writing a fairly simple mailing list database program that would print labels. The database was in RAM, I used BASIC-XE, but, it still had size limits.

 

 

-K

 

 

Hi Kyle22!

 

Well, from the link above, you can download the software put there.

 

CX404

Word Processor, 2 disks

CX405

Pilot Educator, 2 disks? or 2 cassettes?

 

Both boxes can be bought and/or downloaded.

CX406

Personal Financial Management System, 3 disks

CX412

Dow Jones Investment Evaluator, 2 disks

 

Both boxes I am desperately looking for...

CX414

The Bookkeeper, 4 disks

CX415

The Home Filing Manager, 2 disks

CX421

Family Financies, 2 disks

All 3 boxes can be bought and/or downloaded

To your problem: Mailing List could be the solution:

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-mailing-list_12881.html

best regards

[+wood_jl]

Unsurprisingly, the Atari wasn't used much for business. I suppose that's what makes it interesting (and rare) to learn of such an occasion.

 

In the mid-1980s, my local (at the time) Atari dealer used an 800XL to record sales and print receipts, etc. The receipts were printed on an Atari 825 printer. The system was used for several years, until they folded sometime in the very early 1990s. That's the only occurence of an Atari used for *actual business* that I ever remember seeing.

 

(Of course, many used our Ataris personally for a few things other than gaming, but since that wasn't the point of the thread, mentioning word processing, spreadsheet, etc. at home is irrelevant.)