8-Bit Hard Drive

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Saunders:

By the time the XLs were coming out, Atari had designed a parallel disk system for the 1400, 1450XL(d) machines. These would have been really fast. Never came out.

---

 

I had a Happy-enhanced 1050 drive and those are lightning fast, at least compared to a stock 1050. But they're still serial, moving along at 52K instead of 19.2K. I also had some US Doublered drives that had a speed improvement as well (I don't remember the exact details). Certainly a nice improvement over the stock drive, but a parallel interface would have been amazing back then, had Atari pulled it off.

 

..Al

[Guy Ferrante]

Hey Albert what BBS software did you use? my BBS (Star Net Omega) pro node 449 multi-line with BB/2-MIO and a Multi-plexer with 500 megs storage for DL files.

The Master had the BB and a 300 meg scsi drive the 2 slaves had MIO's with adaptec 4000 controllers each controller had 2 ST4096 (80 meg) MFM Hard drives, all my MFM HD where pulled from Dead IBM PC's and after some years all 500 megs where full, the BBS program alone was over 14 megs in size! I took the BBS off line in 1999 after a 11 year run. I have moved most of my 8bit files to the PC for CD rom burnning. Im at the 2 GIG mark!! and Im not done yet.. Theres seems to be Millions of 8bit files.

 

Atari8Man

[Guy Ferrante]

Dos 2.9 - Dos 3 both have no PBI code and cant see the Hard drive interface. Use Sparta dos or Mydos 4.5 both have full PBI code and sub-directory support.

 

Atari8Man

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Guy ferrante:

Hey Albert what BBS software did you use? my BBS (Star Net Omega) pro node 449 multi-line with BB/2-MIO and a Multi-plexer with 500 megs storage for DL files.

The Master had the BB and a 300 meg scsi drive the 2 slaves had MIO's with adaptec 4000 controllers each controller had 2 ST4096 (80 meg) MFM Hard drives, all my MFM HD where pulled from Dead IBM PC's and after some years all 500 megs where full, the BBS program alone was over 14 megs in size! I took the BBS off line in 1999 after a 11 year run. I have moved most of my 8bit files to the PC for CD rom burnning. Im at the 2 GIG mark!! and Im not done yet.. Theres seems to be Millions of 8bit files.

---

 

Wow, 2Gigs! I can't even imagine how many 8-bit files that must be. I was running a BBS on Carina II software, although it started on Carina and something else even before that. I was running 2 20MB hard drives off an Adaptec 4000A controller plugged into a 1MB MIO board. Thanks to Google's recent Usenet archive expansion, I was able to find the message where I posted all my 8-bit stuff up for sale:

 

Albert Sadly Sells His 8-bit Equipment

 

Not nearly as insane as your system, but it was still pretty impressive for the time, and I had a blast with it. I can't believe you were running your system for 11 years! Do you still have all that 8-bit hardware? I'm still looking for a few pieces, like an MIO board and R-Time 8 cart.

 

..Al

[Bill Lange]

quote

Omnitrend's Universe

 

Albert,

 

Did you ever finish Universe? I got so fed up with swapping disks way back when, that I never finished it.

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Bill Lange:

Did you ever finish Universe? I got so fed up with swapping disks way back when, that I never finished it.

---

 

I'm pretty certain I never finished it. I had completely forgotten about it until I dug up that old post from 12 years ago. I seem to remember playing it on the Atari ST as well, and not finishing that version either.

 

..Al

[Guy Ferrante]

Hi,

 

The 2 mio I have are 256k each, the ram in the MIO's where used as a hard drive cache that speeded the MIO's up. The cache driver was wrote by Craig Carter, its amazzing I still remember names of programmers and sysop from 20 years ago. I still have all my Atari stuff and will set it up viva telnet on 1 slave and the other slave will have a dialup, a util cmd is in the works for the caller on the dialup to browse the internet from the other slave thats connected to the PC. Thats what Im working on also a photo session . When you ran your BBS was Carina

owned by (Shadow) Dave Hunt?

 

He was a caller on my board for years. You can still get a New Black Box from CSS its like the MIO but uses super fast scsi drives that are easy to find and dirt cheap. The BB cost $200.00

 

I was lucky a few years ago I was at the Ham fest in Orlando FL and bought 5 segate st225 20 meg drives at $1.00 each, all formated perfect with no errors.

 

Even these days Im looking for the old MFM drives for the MIO, I was looking for replacement backup drives for the Segate ST4096 and I browsed the vendors on the web and one vendor had them in stock for $175.00 each!!! the 2 St4096 drives I have can from dead PC's (free!)

 

I remember the days when Atari 8bit BBS ruled!

 

/| Atari8Man /|

[Anthony]

Hello Guy,

 

Only one of my 256k MIO's works but it has been giving steadfast service on my BBS for years now. I haven't heard of a disc cache for the MIO, sounds interesting but I'm using all my RAM for the most used BBS files. I could care less how long my users have to wait for disc access...haha In fact I also have APE and an SIO2PC which runs real slow with the DOS I have to use to make both the BBS and the MIO happy. I keep my message bases on the PC. I figure this is the one place where speed is not so important and I can max out my bases to take up some 20+ megs.

 

I am very intrigued by your intention to connect your BBS to the net. I have BBS Express Pro which has multi line capabilities but I don't have the multiplexing hardware. I would really like to hear when you have this system up and also details of how you did it.

 

The controller card that runs my MFM's from the MIO looks suspiciously like the card in an Atari ST SHO harddrive (shoebox) do you know if this will work. I don't have a working shoebox but I don't want to buy one if it's a waste of time. I can't seem to get my card to recognise an MFM drive over 20 megs.

 

Cutter.

 

Cutter's Eclectic Collective BBS

(604)873-1131 since 1983 still going.....

[Retro Rogue]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Saunders:

The 800 system wasn't originally designed to talk to floppy drives through the serial port but they wound up doing that for cost reasons, I guess.

---

 

Glenn, the floppy drives and all the peripherals were designed to be "smart peripherals" in the first place. Are you saying they weren't supposed to be designed to take advantage of an SIO style interface?

I know from my interviews with Joe Decuir, the original idea by Ray Kassar was to make the computer a true appliance and easy to use in that sense. One common plug in interface for all products would seem to support this.

[Curt Vendel]

Marty,

 

I believe what Glenn is saying (Glenn correct me if I'm wrong) is that the original design of the Atari computers was as follows:

 

The Atari 800 was originally designed with an expansion bus slot architecture and the Serial I/O port was original intended ONLY for the cassette drive.

 

Atari had a lot of fears of FCC denial when going for review on its systems and several changes took place:

 

Only Memory & OS would reside as Bus cards

 

The system would be incased in 2mm thick aluminum.

 

The SIO port drivers were expanded with a resident boot handler to call for a disk drive to boot and load its Disk OS into memory, P: handler for printer was added into ROM.

 

In order for devices to talk along the SIO bus that had to have a 65xx series CPU to control and intelligent controller to talk on the bus.

 

In 1980 the Atari 850 was designed, this device had its device drivers onboard and would automatically load them into the 800's memory upon boot up if no disk drive was present, if a disk drive was present, it would boot up first, the 850 would handle printing, but in order to activate the use its 4 RS232 Serial ports you needed to have on your boot diskette an autorun.sys file containing a handler that would call out onto the SIO bus and manually activate the 850 driver download.

 

Atari would later use this very same auto-loading technology in its Atari 1030 Direct Connect 300 baud modem which would do the exact same thing: if no drive was present it would autoload its terminal software right into the Atari memory.

 

If a disk drive was present you needed to load software from a diskette... later releases of the Atari 1030 included a diskette with several terminal packages on it, one even had drop down menu's (Oasis I believe?)

 

It was this idea of autoloading devices that spurred Atari's "Closed Box" design of the 1200XL, management decided that EVERYTHING would hang off of the SIO bus and could load their drivers into upper memory.

 

In the earlier design documents of "Sweet 16" the Atari 1200XL (aka 1000X) and the "Sweet 8" the Atari 600XL (aka 1000 or NYLiz) there were specifications for a newer SIO bus with 2 additional lines for autopowering up peripherals, so when you turned on your XL computer, all of your peripherals would automatically power up, neat idea, but never implemented, too bad, it would've been a cool feature.

 

I have some extensive doc's on the original designs of the XL line of computers, I will post them up this weekend, also on the website for those who haven't seen it yet is a 5 part series of AVI video's for a 6 1/2 minute promo presentation on the Atari 1200XL "The Best Home Computer" as the promo is titled.

 

 

Curt

The Atari History Site: Online Museum

[Retro Rogue]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Curt Vendel:

Marty,

 

I believe what Glenn is saying (Glenn correct me if I'm wrong) is that the original design of the Atari computers was as follows:

 

The Atari 800 was originally designed with an expansion bus slot architecture and the Serial I/O port was original intended ONLY for the cassette drive.

 

Atari had a lot of fears of FCC denial when going for review on its systems and several changes took place:

 

---

 

Hi Curt, sorry it took so long to get back. Been busy doing interviews for the book. I wasn't refering to the original design in that sense, but I thank you for the re-clarification.

 

One of many initial ideas tossed around was

certainly a slot based architecture with the Apple II being a model. But from the get go the lessons they had learned from getting the 2600 through FCC Type 1 and seeing what the Apple II was to go through in that area, nixed the idea. So to be safe they decided to go with the FCC Type 1 for the 400/800 PCS. Later models of the PCS's

enjoyed more relaxed standards due to the

creation of the Class A and B standards.

 

To do Type 1, they had to distribute much of

the support hardware in to the peripherals themselves, making "smart peripherals" as I

had mentioned. This would of course cut down on the ammount of interference being generated by distributing the noise. In turn they devised a 5v single drive bus comparable in speed to the EIA-232 standard (9600 up through 19200).

 

All this was kept in mind with the original

goals Ray set down in the initial meeting when he announced the idea of the PCS in the first place as an "computer as appliance". With the ideas being laid out being quite similar to what actually came about years later with the IMac at Apple.

[t.skid]

This guy build his IDE Hard drive interface for the 800XL:

http://www.atari.myweb.nl/hardware-intro.htm

[Callipygous]

Hi. This project was discussed in this thread

 

Seriously Clever 8bit

 

Enjoy!

[Andreas Magenheimer]

Well,

Atari floppies normally run with 19,200 baud (approx. 2.4kbytes per second), the XF551 drive also supports 38,400 baud and third party upgrades support either 57,600 or 76,800 Baud. The fastest SIO port floppy drive is the super speedy 1040, it has 256k RAM on board, thus it reads, formats and writes Single (90k), enhanced (130k) and double (180k) density in approx. 12-13 seconds. This was a developer drive by Compyshop, only 5-10 were made, ABBUC has some of them. The Atari SIO port is limited to approx. 100,000 baud, so you are somehow limited in speed - but still faster than a Commie drive (even Atari turbo tapes are faster than commie drives)...

 

Next there is the parallel bus or the cart port + ECI on XL/XE computers. Nowadays they are used for hadrdrives, CD-ROMS, ZIP-Drives, etc. but you can also use them for floppy drives. Think this parallel bus (or cart. port+ECI on XE computers) can do 300,000 Baud and more. Have heard that some harddrives can read about 50kbytes per second. This is very fast, isn`t it ?!? Ok, it is still not fast enough for displaying REALTIME videos (they need some 200kbytes per second), but with a few tricks, one can still show some good video animations (not realtime, but who cares)...

[Andreas Magenheimer]

Well,

a msc ide interface (made in germany, already sold out) could have up to 240 partitions with 16 megabytes each...

 

When using a HD, one should use MyDOS or SpartaDOS, since they are the only DOS versions which provide subdirs and 16MB partitions (other DOS versions are limited in densities and/or do not have subdirs).

For instance DOS XE has subdirs, but a maximum of 360kbytes; DOS 4 has 720k support, but no subdirs, etc. etc.;

 

A selfmade IDe-interface can be found at sijmen Schoutens homepage, I do not remember the URL, sorry. But it is very cheap and schematics as well as software can be found for the 800 and the XL/XE computers...

[Curt Vendel]

Marty,

 

Actually, the whole "Information Appliance" perspective and idea came from Irvin Gould who came over with a group of managers from Control Data Corporation to Atari. It was based only their push for such a device that caused the redesign of the Atari 1200XL from 1981-1982 into its closed box design. Not realizing that people wanted a box to grow with, they thought of computers as disposable and that a user would simply buy a new one once they outgrew the old one... they were venturing into unknown terrority in marketing which is true, but they could've easily looked at the Apple userbase to see that users were hungering with for expansion capabilities, not a limited architecture.... the other side of the sword was that marketing did not like 3rd parties hanging periperhals off of the Atari computers and many times they tried to have the 850 interface canceled since it used industry standard peripherals... there was a great deal of contention in the HCD over which way to market the machines, plus there was some internal sabotage by its President Roger Baderscher who was canceling higher end products for the home computer line, all the while having a new high end 80186 computer initially designed within Atari based on a project called the A300 which was the original 1200XL design.... Baderscher would leave Atari in late 82' with several marketing people, and engineers and form Mindset who's computer rivaled all other IBM systems in graphics and design... however they never marketed it properly and quickly ran into problems by 1985 and were bought up by JVC who used the systems in-house until the early 1990's....

 

 

Curt

The Atari History Museum

[Retro Rogue]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Curt Vendel:

Marty,

 

Actually, the whole "Information Appliance" perspective and idea came from Irvin Gould who came over with a group of managers from Control Data Corporation to Atari. It was based only their push for such a device that caused the redesign of the Atari 1200XL from 1981-1982 into its closed box design.

---

 

Curt, if you're suggesting that the idea of a "computer as appliance" was not developed until after the 400/800 PCS, that would be incorrect. And unless you're suggesting that Irvin somehow influenced Ray before the 400/800 PCS speech (which could be a possibility), that would also be incorrect.

Ray's Winter meeting/pep talk called for his vision of the PCS being a household appliance. This included making them in designer colors (almost a full 20 years befor the IMAC), and that also included things like home decorating software. This whole speech actually caused some of the women in engineering to resign.

 

quote:

---

Not realizing that people wanted a box to grow with, they thought of computers as disposable and that a user would simply buy a new one once they outgrew the old one... they were venturing into unknown terrority in marketing which is true, but they could've easily looked at the Apple userbase to see that users were hungering with for expansion capabilities,

---

 

They did look at the Apple userbase initially. The Apple II was the original competitive model for the design of the PCS's. Both in hardware and software.

 

quote:

---

not a limited architecture.... the other side of the sword was that marketing did not like 3rd parties hanging periperhals off of the Atari computers and many times they tried to have the 850 interface canceled since it used industry standard peripherals...

---

 

Yes, marketing had a lot of boneheaded views like that. That's also similar to why they initially didn't want 3rd part software development either.

 

quote:

---

there was a great deal of contention in the HCD over which way to market the machines, plus there was some internal sabotage by its President Roger Baderscher who was canceling higher end products for the home computer line, all the while having a new high end 80186 computer initially designed within Atari based on a project called the A300 which was the original 1200XL design.... Baderscher would leave Atari in late 82' with several marketing people, and engineers and form Mindset who's computer rivaled all other IBM systems in graphics and design... however they never marketed it properly and quickly ran into problems by 1985 and were bought up by JVC who used the systems in-house until the early 1990's....

 

 

Curt

The Atari History Museum

---

 

Thanks for sharing. You seem (in this post and the last) to be focusing more on the early 80's (XL) period, which is not what I've been discussing. That could be part of the confussion.

[mos6507]

<<

They did look at the Apple userbase initially. The Apple II was the original competitive model for the design of the PCS's. Both in hardware and software.

>>

 

Gladly they didn't copy the Apple's weak graphics and audio.

 

The product that would have saved the 8-bit line was the 1090XL expansion box.

 

Products like the Black Box and MIO exist only because of the initial R&D related to the parallel bus and parallel bus driver specifications.

 

The Black Box is more than a hard drive. It's also a printer and serial port. So it duplicates a lot of what separate 1090XL cards would have done, in one device.

 

Not only that, but the BB serial port is the fastest available on the Atari, and the only one that supports hardware flow control which is the only way to reliably hook up a high speed modem to an 8-bit. The MIO lacks hardware flow control.

 

The parallel bus isn't just faster than SIO. It also allows you to run multiple devices at once. As you know, with the SIO, any individual device monopolizes the bus. This is an especially bad problem when downloading (or uploading) from a terminal or BBS program. Disk access halts the modem and vice versa.

 

The 8-bit line was definitely a model in economy which had its good and bad point. Sometimes the products could be a little cheap and fragile, but they still allowed you to get the job done. I really was spoiled in the early 80s by the pricepoint of home computers. It was cheap enough that parents could purchase them for their kids as expensive toys. They didn't necessarily have to be sold on the idea that this was an important household appliance.

 

As limited as they were, they were accessible to the masses. when the PC took over, the PC pricepoint of $2000+ took over and only in the last few years have we seen the resurgence of the <$1000 PC.

[Retro Rogue]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Saunders:

<<

They did look at the Apple userbase initially. The Apple II was the original competitive model for the design of the PCS's. Both in hardware and software.

>>

 

Gladly they didn't copy the Apple's weak graphics and audio.

 

---

 

I don't think that was ever a desire, heh.

 

quote:

---

The product that would have saved the 8-bit line was the 1090XL expansion box.

 

That is actually debateable (though I certainly think it would have been great if it would have). Joe Decuir was brought in again as a contractor to work on the cards for the expansion box, and actually had the unique position of working for both Atari and Amiga at the time of the Tramiel buyout.

It was his opinion it was to little to late, even when he was working on it. He originally had wanted something like this back when the 400/800 PCS was first released.

But by '84-'85 the 8 bits were already on their way out for the upcoming 16 bits everyone was working on. The expansion box was seen as a fix/bandaid more than anything.

 

quote:

---

Products like the Black Box and MIO exist only because of the initial R&D related to the parallel bus and parallel bus driver specifications.

 

The Black Box is more than a hard drive. It's also a printer and serial port. So it duplicates a lot of what separate 1090XL cards would have done, in one device.

---

 

Yes, it's a nice product. When I told Joe about it he was pretty interested in it. He's actually interested in making his knowlege available to anyone interested in making expansion stuff for the 8 bits.

 

 

quote:

---

The 8-bit line was definitely a model in economy which had its good and bad point. Sometimes the products could be a little cheap and fragile, but they still allowed you to get the job done. I really was spoiled in the early 80s by the pricepoint of home computers. It was cheap enough that parents could purchase them for their kids as expensive toys. They didn't necessarily have to be sold on the idea that this was an important household appliance.

 

As limited as they were, they were accessible to the masses. when the PC took over, the PC pricepoint of $2000+ took over and only in the last few years have we seen the resurgence of the <$1000 PC.

---

 

I think the old 8 bits had character more than anything. At a time when pretty much the whole thing (graphics hardware, sound hardware, the OS and interface) were done relative to the company, you had a computer and unique characteristics you could associate with a name. You could hear a sound, or see a screen, and instantly know what company it was associated with. The closest you can get to that now is discussing which PC graphics card has the most polygon rates and highest texture support. Just not the same.

[mos6507]

>>

It was his opinion it was too little too late,

<<

 

Technological innovation always outpaces the ability to make said innovation affordable. There is also something better on the horizon, but it takes a while for it to trickle down into something truly affordable. So I don't blame Joe for thinking of the 8-bit in historical terms at the time when the Amiga was on the horizon.

 

But it would be several years before the Amiga would become remotely accessible to the masses (when the affordable Amiga 500 was released).

 

But when you talk about market share, you know, the C=64 was probably more popular after the crash than before. The crash was brought on in part due to the shift from consoles to home computers.

 

While the 8-bit platforms were aging, you have to remember that when they first hit the scene they were very expensive relative to the mid 80s, mostly because of the high cost of RAM. You know, between 1977 and 1982 I think there were far far fewer home computers sold than there was between, let's say, 1983 and 1987, mostly because of economic factors. Early on, they were not penetrating beyond the early adopting geek crowd who didn't mind spending $2000 to max out their memory.

 

It really wasn't until 83-84 that 64K machines were less than $300. So the 8-bit machines were really just coming into their own.

 

(You know, most people who bought their first computers back then were NOT comfortable spending thousands of dollars. They only became accustomed to the higher pricepoints when the 8-bits were phased out and there was no alternative.)

 

The first wave of 16-bit machines were at too high a pricepoint for those making that console-computer transition, whereas 8-bit home computers were becoming as affordable as game consoles. Not only that, but most 16-bit machines had generally worse graphics than their 8-bit predecessors. I'm mostly talking about the early CGA PCs and monochrome MACs.

 

The mid-80s were really a two-teir computer industry of 8 and 16-bit machines. The 8-bit machines didn't fade away until the early 90s.

 

So while Atari was torn down by the crash, the 8-bit platform itself had a future at least as long as its past at that time. That's something the Tramiel's didn't realize when they focused all their attention on the ST at the expense of their existing userbase.

[ajbufort]

Speaking of hard drives, does anyone know where one can get their hands on a Corvus joystick-port hard drive these days? How many of these babies were ever made anyway? Are they that rare that I don't even see them for sale on the major 8-bit supply-house listings these days?

 

-Anthony