Old tec info

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A0cf25ffa-1b19-4d37-a52c-b25245f6b218

For reasons of mostly historical interest I have posted the above link which details the way parallel devices were ment to work when connected to an Atari XL (XL stood for eXtended Logic) expansion chassis.

It is lnteresting  because the info was never released at the time (I only found it yesterday) and no parallel devices were produced but the effort they put into the design must have been huge.

[Ed P]

Interesting – it reads like an early attempt to develop a scsi-like device bus for i/o devices. (the paper mentions cdrom and disk drives in passing). All good stuff for a soho machine but only the ST managed to approach that ambition with its paper-white wsiwyg word processor. (it beat IBMs attempts into the dust and rivalled the Mac of those days). Unfortunately through poor marketing Atari never could kick off the toy games machine reputation.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

The whole history of Atari personal computers is a bit of a sad one, full of missed opretunities and later on revenge. The original Atari company was not at all sure it should be making computers ( its parent company, Warner, was much more interested in software publishin) and then the new owner (ex Commodore boss jack Trammel) was mostly interested in getting a more buisness oriented machine out the door as quickly and cheaply as possible to punish Commodore for sacking him ( he had already knocked Texas Instruments out of he home computer market with the C64 after they had knocked him out of the calculator market by raising the price of their chips)

[Author]

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