Back in the 80's, I wanted one of these computers to write and carry around manufacturing related programs. Was too much money, so I settled on the PC-6. Pocket computer with 2K RAM, just enough!

I would have done more with the Model 100!

There is a 64 character driver floating around that I have lost track of. If you find it, it makes the display more dense, better.

I ended up with a PVM to get similar quality.

You have the 1200! Nicest of the Atari machines, IMHO.

Same for me. I don't daily drive my Apple 2e and 800XL, but I do use them regularly.

Games

Writing (most enjoyable, low distraction)

Electronics and general tinkering.

Programming. That is just fun.

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!

Good times.

The C64 really punched well above its weight class with recent releases nothing short of amazing!

If not, no worries. Was something in your words reminded me of those times.

I wanted one too! Nice machine, fast disk, built in goodies!

Even though it would not see a graphics system upgrade, the special chips allowing ANTIC to work on RAM apart from the CPU would allow the full exploitation of the graphics system, and give the machine a nice speed boost with a 6502 freed of the screen DMA.

The demoscene shows us what throwing lots of RAM at the graphics could do!

More seriously, Romero at least, likes to contribute to the history. That is the main contribution IMHO.

Automation, using cams, followers, switches, etc... is often robust, fast, easy to service. The latter, given a reasonable theory of operation.

I saw a company injection molding 3.5" floppy disk shells. They made billions of the things and almost all the automation was air and motor driven using those basic devices.

A cam encodes a sequence of actions, or states, onto something that slides or rotates. Really, it just needs to move in a consistent way.

Levers, followers linked up to one another, or switches and valves, would then perform sequences of state changes. I was impressed and could see how it worked almost immediately. Each machine, injection, trimming tools, suction cups, would produce a run of shells, trim various bits,, separate them from the runners, and discard the left overs, leaving a handful of those things in a box, prepped for assembly.

The old guard had built the place up on that tech. Younger ones choosing between the old, time tested, production proven tech and more modern, computer automation.

It was not always a slam dunk. Those newer engineers got both skill sets and would apply them as they felt made best sense.

This bulky computer is impractical in many ways today, but many of the ideas in it are still relevant and capable.

"HP 1347A Vector Generator:

Prototype (firmware and controls differ from retail version, no front bezel) HP-IB interface to the controller Second HP-IB interface to plotter for hard-copy Three analog outputs (XYZ) Programmable via HPGL or raw data transfer Display green phosphor 11.5 cm x 8.5 cm (5,6" diagonal) Adressable resolution 2048 x 1513 Viewable resolution on integrated display 266 x 196 lines Memory for max. 4,000 vectors or 8,000 characters Refresh rate approx. 60 Hz with 2,000 vectors Drawing speed max. 5.1 mm/µs Power consumption max. 80 Watts"

---- my original text here ----

"The resolution on the 9845 display was not high enough for recording or projecting, so the frames were created one at a time on a high resolution vector display and recorded onto film."

That sounds a whole lot like Tektronix 4012 and or 4050 storage CRT vector displays. They could act like a plotter for the HP machine.

The Tek had 4K vector resolution back then and a film recorder option.

Guess it can! Well done.