My precious....

[lovingboth]

I do not normally pimp my eBay auctions, but this has been especially difficult to let go: my collection of 8-bit Atari hardware, software and manuals, the computing stuff I've had for the longest time.

I bought the Atari 800 while I was at university. It used to make the owners of BBC Bs turn green, never mind ZX Spectrum owners (I had one of those too, and eventually they sent one that worked!), because its hardware was years ahead of its time*.

The disk drive came from the Reading branch of Laskys - they did assorted computing stuff as well as other electrical goods. It cost £199.99 and I paid for it via credit card. A few days later, I got a letter saying that after I'd bought it, they'd been robbed and the credit card slip, necessary for them to get the money, was amongst the stolen items. Would I mind coming in and paying again...? I am slightly ashamed to say that I didn't, but went 'That's what your insurance is for'. Actually, it might have been £299.99 - a substantial chunk of that term's budget, anyway.

Anyway, if you any of you buy it, I'd love to be able to come round and stroke it all. My precious...

* You can see the results in several films of the time, typically set a decade or so into the future. A few years after the Atari 800 was launched, the designers went off with some money from Atari, designed an updated version of the specialist chips, handed the money back to Atari and went off to sell them to Commodore: the result was the Amiga.

Comments

[yendi]

If I could afford this, I'd be all over it. I still resent my mother giving away my old 800 (along with disc and tape drive and a ton of software) when I was in high school. Yeah, I'd upgraded to a 1040ST (which I also loved), but the 800 was just so much fun.

[lovingboth]

Yep, because Miner et al had gone to Commodore with their chipset, the ST was just a PC with an 68000 CPU and a built-in MIDI port, but the Atari 800 remains a box of delights. If they'd followed Apple and not bothered to shield it properly, it should have beaten the Apple ][ in the marketplace as well as the feature scoreboard.

This one may not work in the US anyway - European Ataris ran at a slightly different speed because of the different TV standards. Typically, our TVs / videos / DVD players will do NTSC as well as PAL (or, as well as NTSC can be done!) but from what I can gather, US TVs don't like PAL.

[barakta]

Kim said "Oooh" when she saw that on my screen. Sadly I don't think we have space or transport for it. Have enough obscure old crap of our own, although I've not forgiven my mum for chucking my Apple II away cos she decided anything tech-shaped belonged to my dad so in the tip it went *SCOWL*.

[lovingboth]

Well, I can't argue with 'enough obscure old crap', but as far as space goes, it fits in two IKEA bags. It wouldn't be too difficult to get it to Birmingham on the train either :)

My parents were not perfect, but at least they did not throw away my stuff (as I discovered when I had to empty the loft at my mother's!)

[lovingboth]

Oh, and show her this - much smaller and just as interesting in its own way :)