In 1983, the personal / home computing era was in its infancy. Back in that age, there were not
many players in the home computing field. No doubt, everyone will recognize the names "Atari",
"Commodore", and "IBM", as these three were the big players in home computing back in the early 80s.
In November 1983, Atari relased what would become its most popular home computing system ... The
Atari 800 XL PC. By today's standards, the 800 XL was not much of a computer - It consisted of a
beige keyboard with a built in cartridge drive (for playing those old Atari cartridges) and a
powerpack which plugged into the back of the keyboard and a wall outlet. The keyboard and a monitor
was all you needed to run the computer, but like today, there were many accessories. Most people
had a disk drive (which is about the size of a desktop computer case today), and a cassette drive
(as cassettes were the big revolution in multimedia in those days.) In my opinion, it was the success
of the Atari 800 XL and its main rival, the Commodore 64, the spurred the technological revolution
in home computing.
My father bought a complete 800 XL system (keyboard, monitor, disk drive, and cassette drive)
in early 1984 for around 2000$. I was around 6 years old at the time, but I had hours of
fun playing that old computer. To this day, almost 20 years later, my Atari 800 XL PC still
works, and I still play it. I recently did some net searches to try and locate places where
I could buy software for my 800 XL, as some of my game disks no longer worked. To my amazement,
I found a plethora of websites dedicated to this old computer system; apparently, I am not the
only one who still uses their 800 XL PC. To that end, this section is dedicated to that classic
computer system, fans of the 800 XL, and some of the games that I grew up playing on the 800 XL.
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