1979 · Cartridge Home Computer · Work 973 of 1,871
A wood-panelled basement den in California on a Sunday afternoon, on a low coffee table a broad flat computer forty centimetres wide in pale beige plastic, its raised back lid with fine ventilation ribs swung open, a dark grey cartridge half pushed into a slot beneath, in front a dark brown keyboard with brown keys, at the right four yellow-orange keys in a column, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, two black joysticks with red buttons on coiled cables, two children on an orange shag carpet seen from directly behind, faces turned fully away, a large colour television glowing with soft blocks of colour.
What it was used for
A home computer with two cartridge slots, unveiled at a press conference in New York on 14 December 1978, demonstrated at the Winter CES in Las Vegas from 9 January 1979 and shown to the public from 11 May 1979 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. After FCC approval, production started in October 1979 in a converted pinball factory at 1173 Borregas Avenue, Sunnyvale, and sales began in November 1979 through Sears, delayed by parts shortages. The recommended price was set in June 1979 at 1,000 dollars, against 550 dollars for the smaller Atari 400. The 800 started with 8 KB of memory, 16 KB from June 1980 and 48 KB from October 1982.
What was new
What stands out is the division of labour among purpose-built chips beside the 6502: ANTIC for building the picture, completed in January 1978 by Joe Decuir, CTIA for colour output to the television by George McLeod, and POKEY by Douglas Neubauer for sound, keyboard and the potentiometer inputs. Older machines could be upgraded to the successor chip GTIA at Atari service centres in 1982. In 1982 Atari sold about 600,000 machines of the line, twice the previous year's figure; two thirds of them were the cheaper 400.
What the sources leave open: Prices, memory steps, chip designers and annual sales come from the Atari-Computermuseum, which gives no total production figure and dates FCC approval once to August and once to 15 June 1979. The show dates are confirmed by Michael Current's collection of contemporary reports from Creative Computing of April and August 1979, which gives 550 and 1,000 dollars after the Summer CES.