[billygoat]

This blog reminds me of -me- back in the day. I cut my teeth on programming bad Atari BASIC games, but eventually I learned 6502 assembly and wrote my own disassembler, modem routines, etc... heady days!

And funny timing, this weekend I (finally) plugged in and got working an old 800XL I bought on eBay about a year ago -- but after purchasing the machine, it gathered dust while I got distracted with so many other things. :-)

This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk. Previous owner had the machine for decades and was very meticulous. It also came with a 1050 disk drive which makes scary wheezing noises when the disk spins, lol. I don't think I'll use the disk drive much since everything interesting is downloadable nowadays in seconds in ATR image format; I also picked up a SIO port to serial adapter, so I can link the Atari to my laptop. It's pretty amazing, the Atari sees my laptop as a disk drive using RespeQt [1] on the laptop. It is -so- much faster/easier than actually dealing with the disks like back in the day.

And if you thought disks were slow... this machine also came with a cassette drive (!!) but it needs some lube or something, the rotors don't spin at the right speed. I kinda want to show some of my students the slow speed at which we used to be tortured: ten minutes to load a single game, and that only if you were lucky enough for it to load successfully on the first try...

The most interesting aspect of this experiment is the speed at which technology operates now: I had forgotten just how slow everything was. A simpler time.

[1] RespeQT - https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt

[TedDoesntTalk]

> This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks

It sounds like these are homemade collections of software, not off-the-shelf store-bought stuff.

If I’m right, then this is the real gem of your collection, not the hardware. That hardware is much easier to come by than homemade, personal collections of disks. In fact, such collections are exceedingly rare and very expensive if you can find them at all. Sellers will often break a collection and sell one disk at a time for crazy prices like $10-20 each, without even knowing if the disk works.

I sincerely regret selling my collection about 15 years ago. I don’t regret selling the hardware.

[LocalH]

This. Please image those disks. You may find you have something that has not been backed up to the Internet until now. Pretty sure I had at least one C64 demo that I have yet to be able to find online in over 20 years of looking.

[zozbot234]

> This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk.

Please consider taking full dumps of these disks and uploading them to the Internet Archive software collection. Floppy disk data are extremely fragile, and the Internet Archive is one of very few institutions that can take advantage of existing copyright exemptions for libraries to properly store such content for the foreseeable future.

[gunapologist99]

Please explain how to do that? It seems easier said than done!

[cyco130]

I'm the original author of AspeQt (of which RespeQt is a fork: the maintainer after me turned out to be hard to get along with, so the guys in the AtariAge community forked it). Great to see it still brings joy to people after all these years.