Life in 8-bits

[JimS]

Before Amiga I was an Atari 800 guy... I can remember being exstatic about finally getting that 88k floppy drive! and the 16k upgrade... with the 800XL, the big deal was doing the 265k RAM upgrade and getting HD like performance from the ramdisk.  I did some programming in Atari Basic, and Action!, a language that existed nowhere else.  I used it to write this WYSIWYG lable printing thing which was so huge, it couldn't run on the machine with the Action! cartridge plugged in. (Compiler in a cart, wow!) So I dragged out my old non-XL 800 and hooked it up to the Atairi's serial peripheral bus in a crude networking setup. Compile the program to a real floppy, than boot the other computer from it to test the latest changes...

fun times. ;-)

[JimS]

I was also a Jay Miner 400/800 guy. I tried to design and build a 64K memory upgrade; it did work, but the machine would 'only' see 32K, which still was twice what most others in my user group had! Then I used $600 of my college student loan money to buy an ASTRA 1620 double disk drive - one of the best investments I ever made

I still have it all somewhere, including the Action! cartridge, the dot matrix daisey-chain printer, and a direct plug in modem. And Star Raiders projected onto a wall at night still rocks!

Cool... I still have most of my Atari stuff in the storage bay. A couple weeks ago I came across the label printing program I wrote in an online archive... so I had to try it out in the emulator. It was a hoot to see it again after all this time. I only wrote it as a hack to make some nice labels for the user group xmas disks.... but everybody kept asking for the program so I polished it up a bit for general use.

Never did much in the way of hardware design for the Atari though. Got my fill of that with the homebrew Z80 system that came before the Atari. That was one ugly POS. ;-)

[JimS]

I was in the first programming class my high school offered. Basic on a mainframe connected via a teletype and acoustic modem. Stone knives and bearskins. ;-) Although technically, that was a 48 bit system.