When did you move on from your 8-bit and why?

[GlowingGhoul]

I got a nice new 1040ST in 1987 and sold all my 8-bit stuff for money to buy stuff for my ST.

 

 

 

What a mistake ;(

 

(and I had an extensive collection of boxed cart and disk based software, especially Avalon Hill and SSI)

Edited December 5, 2014 by GlowingGhoul

[AtariGeezer]

Move on? NEVER

[Fletch]

I got a 520ST in 1986, but I never let go of my 8-bits. I love my ST's and go through phases where I give them more attention than my Atari 8-bits, but if push would come to shove and I'd have to choose my ST's would go.

 

May sound a bit weird, but the Atari 8-bit was my first love.

 

-Pete

[Rybags]

Started in 1988 when I got an ST, I did stuff on ST like a SIO2ST type interface and 6502 debugger, the A8 got confined to the cupboard probably from ~ 1990 till ~ 2002.

ST got sidelined around 1993 when I got an Amiga, it got sidelined due to hardware problem a few years later. Got a PS1 in 1998 which sidelined everything then got into PCs in a big way around 2000.

[+Stephen]

I took a break in 91 when my trusty 1050 died. But I was soon to get a driver's license and was busy working on my first car. Several years later I re-discovered Atari via emulation, got my old stuff out of storage, and have been building the collection up ever since.

[tep392]

I left my Atari 400 and 2600 on the curb in 1988, which I regret big time. I sold my Apple IIe the same year to buy a Mustang and finally have some wheels at College. I made a lot of beer runs with that car. I didn't buy another computer until about 6 years later. A used 486.

[pixelmischief]

I don't think I ever really "moved on" so to speak, because the Atari 8-Bit was never something I used for practical purposes. From 1984 to 1990, an 800XL and a 1050 were my everything. I had Atari Writer and a Star NX-1000 for printing, but I never did any serious work on it. Then, when I moved out of my parent's house in 1990, I moved into a boarding house and the owser had an IBM PS/2 with VGA and a SoundBlaster. Between Space Quest III and Eye of the Beholder, I was hooked. I still played on the 8-Bit all the time, but the IBM is where I started learning DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, and WordPerfect. This launched my career. Later, in 1994, when I had a little money and a more stable life, I started collecting next-gen Atari and Commodore systems. I got a 1040STe with all the trimmings; The Link II and an Iomega Jazz, 4MB RAM, TOS 2.06 and a High-Density FDD. Soon after, I happened into an Amiga 1000. Then I picked up a Falcon and an external SCSI CDROM. And while I did delight in getting the ST and Falcon to be useful in the practical sense with things like NVDI, Atari Works, and Kandinsky, my career was already exposing me to the dominant PC and UNIX systems of the time. The Atari was quaint and fun. But for serious work, the other systems were simply more powerful and better supported. Soon after and until now, emulation became stellar. I have since packed and stored my substantial hardware collection. And while emulation doesn't capture even half of the nostalgia of using the real machines, which I still do on rare occasion, the games play close enough. You can't beat emulation for space efficiency and ease of use, as well.

[_The Doctor__]

Never 'moved on' from the 8 bit... always had one hooked up & always will.... the spot next to it however has had ... S100 ST Mega Falcon AMiga WinTEL LinBox over time....and lately some android guts. Why would anybody want to be without the Tried Trusted and True 8-bit for any extended period of time?

[atarian1]

I used my Atari 800 for everything from 1983 to 1987. When my local Atari dealer was blowing out their MegaSTs, I begged my parents to buy their last one. It was nerve wracking because I hoped no one would purchase it before we got there. Luckily, my wish came true.

 

I was running out of memory. 48K could just fit in a 10 page term paper in Atari Writer. It was a pain to keep using the chain function to link multiple files once I reached that 10 page limit. I also wanted to use pretty fonts and newsletter type programs (i.e. desktop publishing). The 8-bits just couldn't cut it anymore. (Don't get me started with Springboard's Newsroom. It can't compare to any DTP program on the ST.) I never even thought of selling my 8-bits because there were still too many great games on it. My brother wanted to get rid of it but I stopped that. I can't believe he also threw away the MegaST too around the mid 1990s too. I don't understand why anyone would just throw a good piece of equipment into the garbage when someone else would want it. But I digress...

[Chilly Willy]

In the fall semester of 87 at college, I used my Atari 400 to do a solution to a bounded planar electric field from a 2D source, requiring Eigenfunction expansion of a 2D partial differential equation. It took almost four hours to compute. I decided right there it was time to move on, so I did my research and bought an Amiga 500 in early 88. I knew I wanted a 68000 based system (all the best systems were... the ST, the Amiga, the Mac...) and while the CPU in the ST was slightly faster, the Amiga beat it hands down in every other respect. And we had a few Amiga 1000s in the lab, so it was easier to take stuff back and forth going with the Amiga. When we needed something more, we had several NEXT boxes for the high end stuff.

[Audronic]

My Journey comes from a Radio Shack (Tandy) Model's 1 - 3 - 4 - 4P 8 bit Z80 Based series of machines.

I saw that there was a lot of activity and interest in the Atari Xl/Xe series of machines so i thought i will include the Atari 130 xe as my area of interest.

The amount of work that has been done to a very basis machine is incredible , Please keep up the good work.

 

Ray

Edited December 5, 2014 by Audronic

[snicklin]

When I went to university in 1996, I realised that I needed a PC to do my work. I'd saved £2K over the summer doing a summer job and used £800 to buy a PC.

 

I took my Atari to university also, got laughed at a bit but I didn't care.

 

Then I didn't use it from probably '97 to '08, throwing away a lot of cassettes and disks but keeping the hardware.

 

In 2008 I said to myself, "To enjoy life, I need to surround myself with things that I enjoy". So I got my Atari back out and started reading this website (when I'd previously looked at it, it didn't have an A8 section I believe), then I decided to try coding for it again and I was off again.

 

I love my Atari, whether that be physically or through emulation. It is part of me, it was me for so many years that I cannot and will not let it fully go. I vowed as a child that I would never throw away the hardware until I die. I am staying true to my word.

 

I've since realised, it's not just the Atari. I love all that is 8-bit. It had a charm, it was a special era. Modern systems have no charm whatsoever. Yes, they're downright powerful and can do so much, more that I could ever dream that the Atari would do, but they're soulless.

 

My favourite football player as a child (and to this day) is Stuart Pearce. Not because he's the finest player that there has ever been, but he is the one that through his determination, he has made himself better than he actually was more than any other player I can think of. I think of the Atari like that, it wasn't really that powerful, but with it's limitations, it gave a determined shot at being the best. Yes, sometimes it was pipped by others in certain ways, but it often won. With the Atari, the clever engineering did it. Things like the fine scrolling, using LMS's, even the PC couldn't do that for years and years and years.

[flashjazzcat]

My dad brought a succession of PCs into the house in the mid-Nineties. First one was an 8086 Epson PC, then there was a 286 with a green-screen monitor... all ancient second-hand gear but since I'd never owned an ST or Amiga and was into writing at the time, these machines alerted me to what could be done on the PC. I'd done all my Uni coursework using the A8 (TextPro and Daisy-Dot II), but Word for Windows 3.1 looked like a much quicker way of getting things done. I finally abandoned the A8 in 2001 and started word processing on a 286 machine running Windows 3.11. Around that time, my friend got hold of a Windows 98SE machine with 64MB RAM and a Cyrix processor and a dial-up Internet connection. I bought a Socket 7 machine a year later and followed suit.

 

The odd thing is that abandoning the A8 was a necessary part of discovering it again seven years later. In the 90s, I'd visit the public library and check out the old A8 resources, but it was always a pain to download anything and get it over to the 8-bit. Things moved on SO much in a decade. Thanks to a nostalgic chat with my friend David about 6502 a month or so after I got married, I pulled the A8 back out of storage and decided to see what was happening on the Net. Well... quite a lot.

 

What's very obviously different now to ten or fifteen years ago is that stuff is cheap enough so that it doesn't have to be 8-bit Atari or modern tech. Indeed, it's impossible to survive without the modern tech, so it's somewhat mandatory, whereas in 1998 I could still kind of get away with owning just an 8-bit computer (I had a printer, I could write letters and essays... what more do you need?). It's come one, come all now, and that's great. The level of integration between the A8 and modern tech now is just GREAT too, and a big facilitator. Cross development, using flash memory to transfer data, SIO2PC, cycle-exact emulation...

 

I think another aspect to giving up on the A8 in 2001 was the feeling of isolation; that the scene had completely died. I know now it hadn't, but without the Internet it might as well have for me. The A8 online community is the single best reason to own an Atari.

Edited December 5, 2014 by flashjazzcat

[Marius]

FJC! Online!

[flashjazzcat]

FJC! Online!

Thanks Marius for your help and your concern. Today the sun is shining and things look a little brighter! That was a tough two days.

[Lost Dragon]

Moved onto the ST from the C64 after seeing Starglider 2 and IK+ running on mates 520STFM.Had to have!!!!

 

 

Starglider 2 because of the 3D graphics (area C64 was always weak in) and IK+ because it had samples from Enter The Dragon in.

 

Looking back in hindsight, the P.D scene was fantastic, i got a lot of good years out of the ST, but i really should of spent the extra £100 and got an Amiga 500.

 

 

The ST soundchip was horrendous (bring back Pokey+SID), the lack of a Blitter caused headaches for coders, the stupid mouse/joystick ports underneath....

 

 

Whilst i'm fully aware ST was rushed to market and why, it still 'hurt' after the brillance of the 800XL hardware.The Amiga felt mouch more like a 16 Bit system to myself looking back it at now.

 

ST great workhorse, but could of been so much more....

[kenjennings]

Was dying to get the Amiga "Lorraine" for ages. It was described by the Atari magazines as the next generation Atari... (That is, until Commodore bought Amiga and Jack's ex-Commodore engineers made the ST. As if the commodore nameplate on the box killed all the Atariness built in. Go figure.)

 

Sold my original 48K Atari 800 with Newell fast chip to buy an Amiga. Did not sell any disk drives or other peripherals. A short time later got an 800XL with 256K RAM and Newell Ramrod OS switcher. Aside from the loss of two joystick ports it was a much more useful system. Still have that 800XL, plus another one stock, a 400 and an 800. And multiple Amiga 3000s.

 

I'll add that Altirra replaces a physical Atari for nearly all development work. I pretty much save the real hardware for running stuff that requires joysticks/paddles (games).

[+Larry]

I never left the A8, but I was never much of a game player, so I also moved into a dos PC. And when Windows really arrived (3.21?) I knew that the PC was the place to be for productivity. I did have a 1040ST, but never really much cared for it. Of course, with the PC, the power increases in both hardware and software just kept coming with (IMO) the introduction of dual core cpu's being the "magic moment."

 

-Larry

[thorfdbg]

I wouldn't say that I "moved on", rather "I upgraded". This happened when I read about the Amiga specs in a magazine. It was the logical continuation of the Atari line (not the Atari 16 bit machines, these were just "boring standard").

[+Ransom]

I moved on from the 8-bit for the first time in the fall of 1989 when I bought my first IBM compatible PC. A few years later, I switched back to using my 8-bit as my primary computer. Then in the mid-90s I briefly used the Apple ][gs as my primary, and then moved on to Linux, then FreeBSD, and ultimately Mac OS X once 10.1 it was released.

[Bill Lange]

We started out with the Atari 2600. We got that in ’78 or ’79. My first taste of ‘programming’ was my Big Trak (fun) and later the BASIC Programming cartridge (ugh!) on the 2600. When I was in the 8^th grade, in March of 1982, I purchased an Atari 400 (from a Consumers store, a catalog showroom store in the northeast USA). The Atari 2600 was put aside and later sold off to a neighbor along with all of our cartridges. Later when the Atari 800XL came out, I purchased one of those (through the Crutchfield catalog). I was using the Atari at home and had access to Apple IIs and IBM PCs when I moved on to high school. In my senior year in high school I took a UCSD Pascal class on the Apple IIs and at night, I was teaching two semesters (fall, spring) of an 'introduction to computers' class in my town’s adult class program. So in Aug or Sept of 1985, I purchased an Apple IIc which became my main home computer throughout my senior year. After I graduated, I enlisted in the US Army. I brought my Apple IIc with me when I was able to. By the time I got out of the Army in the spring of 1988, my brother had purchased an IBM PC and I started using that. Sometime soon after all of the Atari and Apple hardware was regrettably sold off. I did retain a shoebox full of floppies and some boxed software (Ultima, Universe, etc).

 

I've been using Wintel boxes ever since.

[low.blow]

It was just after the xl series was introduced. I had an Atari 400 upgraded to 48k since they first came out and a rana 1000 floppy drive. I loaned the drive to a "friend" who had an Atari 800. He was having trouble using it, so he took it apart and ended up breaking it. I was too young to fix it, and too poor to have it fixed. I remember wanting a 1450xld sooooo bad, but no way I could ever get one. I just sorta faded out of computers after that, until I started hanging out with a friend with an Amiga. I had another friend with an st, and was torn which one to get, but eventually decided on Amiga. I used that until picking up a 486dx2 in electronics school. Pc ever since. Although, I'm running with an Atari 400 again, and am in the process of upgrading an Amiga to match my old system.

Edited December 5, 2014 by low.blow

[Bryan]

I got my 800 in 1981 (I was 11). A few years later I got a good deal on an 800XL. Then, the new ST looked very exciting and I convinced my dad to get me one sometime in 1985 or 86. I moved out and went to school. I upgraded to a MegaSTE, and then finally got my hands on a Falcon030. Once I realized I'd bought an orphan and had spent years rooting for the incompetent losing team, I sold everything and built a 486 system. At the time, it was very hard to get PC stuff in black but I HATED that PC off-white color so I scoured Computer Shopper looking for the best options. The black CDROM drive I got (2X speed!) turned out to be a white one with a thin coat of spray paint on the front so it was a struggle.

 

At some point in the late '90s I dragged out the 8-bit stuff my parents had been storing and started work on Castle Crisis. I missed the 8-bit much more than the ST and it was an attempt to finally be the game developer I'd always wanted to be as a kid. I think one of the most magical moments of my entire life was when I discovered piracy. A friend gave me a copied disk of games and it instantly tripled the size of my software collection. I might as well have met Harry Potter.

[ryanmercer]

Hmmm well, I can't say I walked away ever... but I wasn't born until 85...

 

 

- 1987-1989 my much older half-brother had a 2600, I barely remember it.

.

- 1989 get an NES in March for my brithday and fall in love with it. The thought of manipulating images on a television display amazes me.

 

 

- 1990 First half of kindergarten I go to a private Christian school and scandals ensue, second half go to a public school and the first day I meet my first computer with a keyboard, an Apple II variant.

 

- 1991 I sell gift wrap door to door to buy myself a Game Boy. Christmas sees a Sega Genesis entering my life.

 

 

- 1994 I'm on IRC and logging a lot of hours on MUDs via Windows 3.1x

 

- 1995 hello windows 95, wow these windows games have so much detail compared to the dos games that were no better than early NES games. That fall/winter lots of renting the Virtual Boy from Red Giraffe and Mr. Video on the weekends, sore neck and headaches run rampant.

 

- 1996 Nintendo 64 for Christmas, wow Killiner Instinct Gold looks better than the arcade!

 

- 2000 -buy myself a Game Boy color, give my mom my Game Boy as she always wanted to borrow it to play tetris (when Doctor Mario came out for the NES I'd regularly wake up to her in my room playing it at 5-6am on weekdays too, she still plays similar games on facebook and her iPad and she did the same with my half-brother's 2600 for years with various breakout variants).

 

- 2003 working at Best Buy, buy myself a Game Boy Advance SP, I can keep it in my pocket and play it on my breaks.

 

- 2004 Still at Best Buy, January-ish I buy myself a GameCube and am wholly unimpressed, only ever buy a few titles for it. November 20th I hide a Nintendo DS at work, November 21st I'm off and am at the store waiting for it to open, head over to the computer printers and pull out my cached DS and purchase it. I still have this thing and surprisngly the original battery still holds a decent charge, every now and then I get it out and load something to a flash cart to play (it's actually sitting next to current Atari setup right now).

 

- 2005 to 2013 I reguarlly still use my original NES, sometimes my Sega Genesis, I have a 386 and 486 I fire up from time to time.

 

- 2014 Halt and Catch Fire premiers on AMC. I come and watch it after CrossFit each week and get absurdly nostalgic, wishing I'd been bore 5-10 years earlier because I really missed out on a lot of early home computers that I'd liked to have been around for. Season finale airs, the next day at work I find these forums. That weekend I find an 800xl on Amazon for 60-something shipped, buy it. Go on eBay and find a Commodore 1702 for a decent amount, bid. Sniped last 2 seconds, another one was listed buy it now for 4$ less than that guy won for (missing the door for the knobs) buy it. I now own (3) 800xl's, a 1200xl, (3) 1702 monitors, a Sony PVM I bought off a member here (which is what I actually play on), (3) Commodore 64's, a Commodore Plus/4 and various peripherals for them all.

 

 

So, I stuck with my 8-bit NES and Sega from 89 and 90 till today and have jumped pretty hardcore into the 8-bit systems before the this year.

[ricortes]

Any moving on I did was usually due to whatever female I was involved with at the time.

 

From a pure Atari standpoint, I knew several people that worked at Atari in minor roles, so I was somewhat brand loyal starting with the VCS. *BUT* we went with IBM PCs, the original ones with cassette interface MB, with disk drives of course at work. My Atari's always shared desk space with the clones I had to buy to mantain compatibility with work computers. I recall only one woman who thought it was neat I could hook into the work DEC mainframe from home using my Atari. She was the exception to the rule.

 

I'm usually kind of an easy going guy. On some levels this means I usually end up with control freak women with major personality disorders that nobody else wants and they stick with me a little longer. It is at least partly my fault: When Squeaky Fromme broke out of jail, my first thought was "I wonder if she would like a date? hehe

 

I've had women in my life who controlled my computer budget by spending every cent so there was no money left to waste by me on things like computers or food. I've had women who out and out smashed my computer equipment under the guise of 'saving me from a life of nerd' while I think it was out of jealousy. I've had two computer chairs smashed by a gf while I was in them! Same one would do a King Kong impression, raising the computer over her head and smashing it to the ground. Kind of scary. Woman used to take garden shears and cut monitor and keyboard cables: I think there was something sexual/Lorena Bobbitt about her cutting those cords.

 

Oddly enough, most of them are now into social networking/computers now. They keep in touch. You know how we talk about how our first computer was a Elf or Osborne? I wonder if they say they started working with computers in the 80s and forget the fact it was with a hammer and garden tools. At any rate, I managed to save more then enough Atari equipment that I can still indulge. Now that I am about as far away from thinking I need a relationship at any cost as you can get, my hobbies are safe! Wish I still had the energy to keep the electronics thing going but I think I am winding down.