Going Online Like it’s 1979: The Atari 800

I grew up on the Atari 800 and it has a special place in my heart. It's hard to overstate the prevalence and impact of the 8502, as well.

I am thinking of getting another one (my parents gave mine away when I moved out) and seeing about how far I can push it as a pseudo-dumb terminal. What lightweight protocol can be leveraged with most "pre-rendering" done via a special proxy? I wonder if it could ever get close to practical.

Grade 12 special projects. All on Ataris (400s and 800s).

My partner and I made Monty Pythons Flying Quadratic Equation Solver. The hardest part was synchronizing the program delays with the music on the cassette.

Two of our friends went full PEEK/POKE and made a periodic table that could be scrolled with the joystick; pressing button brought up a screen of info on the selected element.

That was cool. And eye opening.

FujiNet is great. I recently went on nostalgia/educational trip and bought an old 800XL with a bunch of accessories - (2) disk drives, a cassette recorder, printer/serial controller, and modem. One thing that surprised me was the absolute rats nest of SIO cables and power adapters. The FujiNet fixes all of that, one tiny device connected to the back SIO port, and I get all the same functionality as a desk full of equipment - plus WiFi!

We got an Atari 800 in 1982 when I was 7. I learned BASIC on it and there were so many great games like Star Raider for it. I wish I still had it!

I think finding and firing up my old Atari 400 is a bit much more than I want to get into, especially given how little I'll probably actually do with it when finally set up. But I DO wish I'd kept ahold of my old ATARI and ANTIC magazines, just to peruse again. I spent hours poring over those when they were new.

I really like the idea of presenting the net to an old 8 bit machine as a disk drive, very clever idea.

Anyone reading this used Auvik? Would like to hear comments on it–whether it was useful, etc.