The Atari machines were well conceived in some ways mentioned in the article. SIO peripheral connections came with device independent I/O support in ROM, for example.
Another was the controller ports! Paddles, joysticks, trac-balls, and more were useful for games, and other things! The joystick ports delivered 16 bits of bidirectional I/O that I found useful.
And there is FujiNET! Until that device showed up, my Atari gathered dust.
I have never quit using my Apple 2e though.
It is the better 8 bit workstation and the ability to add expansion cards, PC style is what really made the difference! Doing that is not cheap, but it is powerful.
The one item I crave is 80 column text, and the Apple does that well, and does reasonable color graphics well, no sprites aside.
Back in the day, that text got me on the Internet, was good for office type work, writing papers, programming.
Interestingly, I can get a FujiNET for my Apple, meaning both machines can participate in games and applications online!
One thing not mentioned was how bloody slow the 1542 disk system was compared to an Atari 810 or 1050 drive. I remember there were specialty cartridges to make the disk faster but didn’t help.
The 810 was twice the speed but half the capacity of the 1541.
It was really just an observation. When I would go to my friends house to play Test Drive it always seemed to load up slowly compared to when we played at my house. However, he had the 1701 monitor which was superior to just about every home display in existence. The wait was totally worth it.
I remember people as late as 2002 friends of mine still using one for DVD playback.
I grew up with Apple at school, Atari at home.
The Atari machines were well conceived in some ways mentioned in the article. SIO peripheral connections came with device independent I/O support in ROM, for example.
Another was the controller ports! Paddles, joysticks, trac-balls, and more were useful for games, and other things! The joystick ports delivered 16 bits of bidirectional I/O that I found useful.
And there is FujiNET! Until that device showed up, my Atari gathered dust.
I have never quit using my Apple 2e though.
It is the better 8 bit workstation and the ability to add expansion cards, PC style is what really made the difference! Doing that is not cheap, but it is powerful.
The one item I crave is 80 column text, and the Apple does that well, and does reasonable color graphics well, no sprites aside.
Back in the day, that text got me on the Internet, was good for office type work, writing papers, programming.
Interestingly, I can get a FujiNET for my Apple, meaning both machines can participate in games and applications online!
Curious the revive machine doesn’t seem to make mention of network or Fuji-net
The 810 was twice the speed but half the capacity of the 1541.
I remember people as late as 2002 friends of mine still using one for DVD playback.
I ended up with a PVM to get similar quality.