Keatah Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 What was/is the purpose of the Atari Computer - Memo Pad?What function, if any was it supposed to serve? Was it filler material to help indicate the computer was in working order? Were people supposed to leave the system on at home and type messages to be read by the rest of the family? Was it there to help you get familiar with typing and the Atari keyboard? Maybe it says in the manual. I'm just too lazy to read it right now. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 Most computers had inbuilt Basic but modularity was part of the 800's philosophy so language carts were optional. You need something going on if no cart is inserted. A pretty rainbow like 1200 would cost 1/2 a K or so in extra programming. The Memo Pad cost practically nothing, the call to Open E: occurs anyway. Then a put characters call for the title text and endless loop of get characters. Without looking, I'd guestimate probably under 100 bytes of extra Rom usage. An alternative might have been to just endlessly attempt disk boot with another Boot Error message every few seconds as each operation times out. Not very informative, at least Memo Pad gives the user something that's functional. And you learn fairly quickly what all the different powerup behaviours are depending on configuration and user actions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tep392 Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 Were people supposed to leave the system on at home and type messages to be read by the rest of the family? I wouldn't be surprised if this was at least part of the intended purpose. Back in 1979, most people didn't really know what they would do with a home computer. Maybe Atari thought people would think this was a cool feature to give them a little edge over the competition. It also seems a little more friendly to the computer noob compared to a ready prompt. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 It's something functional and interactive, and we should look at it from a 1979 perspective. Having a computer display in the house was a huge novelty, and no doubt some people probably amused themselves for hours just with memopad. Then probably felt like throwing the computer out the window once they found there was no way to save the little cartoon they'd just spent half the day creating with graphics characters. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenjennings Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 What was/is the purpose of the Atari Computer - Memo Pad? What function, if any was it supposed to serve? Was it filler material to help indicate the computer was in working order? Were people supposed to leave the system on at home and type messages to be read by the rest of the family? Was it there to help you get familiar with typing and the Atari keyboard? Maybe it says in the manual. I'm just too lazy to read it right now. Good guesses. All of the above. What Rybags said. More than once I would start goofing off and then become engrossed and make an ATASCII masterpiece and then remember there was no way to save the stuff on screen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ryanmercer Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 Good guesses. All of the above. What Rybags said. More than once I would start goofing off and then become engrossed and make an ATASCII masterpiece and then remember there was no way to save the stuff on screen. It was a conspiracy with Polraoid to drive camera sales, ha! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ricortes Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 I recall one of the magazines at the time saying ~it was a safe way to let your child play with the computer w/o doing something detrimental. Plausible since booting w/o a language cart would take you to the DOS menu system where a couple of single character inputs would format your disk. I think they underestimated the average 4 year old: My grandchildren have a better understanding of computers then my mother. Hindsight is 20/20. It would have been better to just add a convoluted method to JMP/JSR to the first byte of screen memory. With all the built in features of the Atari it probably could have been done with an extra 10 or 12 bytes of ROM and provided a nice feature. Something like you would home cursor, go through a couple of dozen inverse and control characters on screen, press <cntrl+shift+delete> and it would execute. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 The problem there is you end up with a (probably harder to use) Kim-1 successor. Maybe the best compromise would have been colourful Atari logo with 4 line text window. And give it a couple of commands that actually do something like boot disk, boot tape. Then again, if the Rom space was available my vote would have been MLM or a partially resident Dos. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fujidude Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 Most computers had inbuilt Basic but modularity was part of the 800's philosophy so language carts were optional.You need something going on if no cart is inserted. My biggest vote is for that. Then the issue becomes what "something" to use. It is notable on the XL/XEs, they even though they did have built in BASIC Atari still went to the trouble to put in a self test in ROM. Personally, I think it would have been best to prioritise having an ML monitor available in ROM like the Apple ][ did, and if you have the space, a self test or whatever. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bbking67 Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 The memo pad did server a purpose though--it looked like something more useful than it actually was, and probably served to demonstrate the machine's capabilities. Plus the fact that it used a minimal amount of ROM memory to implement. Most people probably thought it to be a minimalistic text editor, which it was not. I wish it was a text editor... that would have been very useful indeed: if you could type and edit text and save out to cassette or disk it would have been a different story. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 26, 2015 Author Share Posted March 26, 2015 Most people probably thought it to be a minimalistic text editor, which it was not. I wish it was a text editor... that would have been very useful indeed: if you could type and edit text and save out to cassette or disk it would have been a different story. Maybe someone could make a modded version where you type a series of control characters and it DOES save it to tape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bryan Posted March 26, 2015 Share Posted March 26, 2015 My biggest vote is for that. Then the issue becomes what "something" to use. It is notable on the XL/XEs, they even though they did have built in BASIC Atari still went to the trouble to put in a self test in ROM. Personally, I think it would have been best to prioritise having an ML monitor available in ROM like the Apple ][ did, and if you have the space, a self test or whatever. Obviously a computer needs something to run or the other option is lock-up. MEMO PAD may have been the best thing they thought they could fit in the allowed space that demonstrated that the computer was working. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chevymad Posted March 27, 2015 Share Posted March 27, 2015 It was there to piss kids off on Christmas morning. I remember opening up my presents to find a 400. I was so excited! Got it all hooked up and what's this thing.. Memopad? Now I found out that no software was included and all I could do was type things on the screen. Was a few weeks more before Dad took pity on me and got me a few carts to play. 7 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 27, 2015 Author Share Posted March 27, 2015 That's almost funny in a way, you know? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted March 27, 2015 Share Posted March 27, 2015 Sort of like that old video where the kid gets all excited opening up his XBox box, only to discover it's got a woolly jumper in it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snicklin Posted March 27, 2015 Share Posted March 27, 2015 It was there to piss kids off on Christmas morning. I remember opening up my presents to find a 400. I was so excited! Got it all hooked up and what's this thing.. Memopad? Now I found out that no software was included and all I could do was type things on the screen. Was a few weeks more before Dad took pity on me and got me a few carts to play. Thankfully I was given the 65XE with 2 cassettes with 10 games on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted March 27, 2015 Share Posted March 27, 2015 The extra overhead in Rom is even smaller than I'd thought. A little over 30 bytes. The subroutine to print a line of text to E: is needed anyway for Boot Error. The reading of text is JSR to a routine which calls the E: get character vector by pushing the address to the stack and doing RTS. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fujidude Posted March 27, 2015 Share Posted March 27, 2015 Sort of like that old video where the kid gets all excited opening up his XBox box, only to discover it's got a woolly jumper in it. Parents were pretty uninformed about home computers back at the start like that. If they would have been better informed they would have realized getting a kid a computer for christmas (with no extras) was akin to giving a remote control car or something but no batteries. They just didn't understand. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted March 27, 2015 Author Share Posted March 27, 2015 Sort of like that old video where the kid gets all excited opening up his XBox box, only to discover it's got a woolly jumper in it. Nope. The xbox gags are purposeful tricks. Memo Pad only would be an honest mistake made out of ignorance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Creature XL Posted March 27, 2015 Share Posted March 27, 2015 Was a few weeks more before Dad took pity on me and got me a few carts to play. A few weeks? Not 1 or 2 days? Or even pull the carts out under the sofa? Seems these weeks influenced the choosing process of your pseudo in this forum @topic: For me as a non-native-english speaking person the word "memo" would include "to save" as it sounds a bit like "memorize". So the name would have been misleading. Lucky for me, we got an 800XL. Aaaand I was sure it was working as I ran the Self-Test a million times (The next day we got games from our friend 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chevymad Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 I use chevymad everywhere. Car guy who's always been into chevelles, impalas, and c10 trucks. So in other words crazy about chevy's. That has since switched to pontiacs but my nick has stuck. As Fujidude and Keetah said it was an honest mistake. Everyone thought it would at least have basic with it. Was a pretty big expenditure at the time too, so it did take another paycheck before I got a cart to make the computer do something besides memopad. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Ripdubski Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 It had a lot of uses. Enjoy. http://inverseatascii.info/2015/04/01/s1e14-atari-memo-pad/ 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JayoK Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 It had a lot of uses. Enjoy. http://inverseatascii.info/2015/04/01/s1e14-atari-memo-pad/ Apart from it being 1st April - that's a good bit of work right there! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted April 1, 2015 Share Posted April 1, 2015 I'll pay that. You should add though that a save feature was possible if you connected the optional VCR. Reloading requires the optional VCR and second TV. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+davidcalgary29 Posted July 15, 2020 Share Posted July 15, 2020 Dumb question! Is there any way to save screens developed on the Memo Pad? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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