What Computer Did You Move To After The Atari 8-Bits?

[Clint Thompson]

I guess you could say I moved back to PC starting with the 386s but that was short lived and then right into the 486 DX4 end of things. Those DX chips were amazingly fast. Did end up with an iMac and was overall very happy with the OSX experience but still in the PC world of things, especially for gaming.

[576XE]

I even can't remember...

 

Atari was THE FIRST!

Then Armstrad

Then 286 with OS/2

Then some of apple Power series...

Then 386 with OS/2 Connect

then 486 on IBM's PS/2

Then IBM's RS/6000 with AIX

Then PC's and AIX

Then UPGRADES of IBM's

 

My personal meaning - they all goes not so far from ATARI

 

They built up the muscles and expanded memory in thus way that thair memory has become empty!

[electronizer]

Christmas 1984: 800XL (still have it, including the 256K Rambo XL I watched my dad install)

circa 1990: barebones PC XT (no case, 640k RAM, 20 meg HDD and 5 1/4" floppy with a green monitor assembled on a card table. Found an 8087 math coprocessor at the university's EE parts store and dropped that in too.)

Circa 1993: 486DX 50MHz with VESA local bus graphics (16 million colors!!!)

Used Sun workstations in college and HP workstations at my first job

Various PCs after that until I switched to a MacBook Air when I became a teacher.

[Gibstov]

My first computer was a TI-99/4a in 1981, then I went from an Atari 1200XL in 1984 and then to an IBM PC in 1994.

Edited June 15, 2016 by Gibstov

[Gunstar]

Direct jump from Atari 8-bit to IBM compatible PC as daily runner in... ahem... 2002.

This was the same for myself. My Atari 8-bit got me through high school in the '80's, college in the 90's and I finally "upgraded" from my A8, as my every day machine of utility, to a PC clone around 2001; purely for Internet use. Besides the Internet I still only use my PC as an SIO2PC file server. I still use my 8-bit for word processing, filing and bookkeeping. I did use a PC for that stuff for several years until I upgraded my 8-bit's memory and started using Syncalc+, Synfile+ and TLW processor. For my gaming, I stuck with the 8-bit and 7800 until the release of the Atari Jaguar. Ever since the Jaguar, aside from my 8-bit, all my gaming has been on modern consoles. The PC is still just my window to the Internet and probably will be only that until the day I die. Unless I start getting my Internet from another source completely, then the PC would be relegated to a simple 8-bit file server.

Edited June 15, 2016 by Gunstar

[jhallen]

Atari 800 was the first computer I owned.. purchased in 1983 or so in early high school. However I learned to program 6800 and 6809 assembly language around the same time on a Motorola Exorciser development system for a high school job. I thought 6502 programming was just lame in comparison :-)

 

Actually a bit later I did get paid to program a c64 (to write a remote terminal for a character generator). The 800xl was available and cheap, and I would have preferred to use that. C64 might be ok for games, but for real work the lack of a real OS, slow disk and terrible basic were big problems. I'm still amazed at how popular they became.

[sanny]

Moved to a PC compatible my father bought home from work. (And he never used it. :-) ) This was in 86/87. It introduced me to 8086 assembly language and that was the qualification for my first job in 90.

 

The graphics and sound capabilities of the PC (CGA and MDA/Hercules) for creating games really sucked, but it was great at disk/floppy access and text entry (80 columns with nice display, (just on MDA)).

 

So, creating a game (preferably for the Atari) is still on my ever-growing TODO list... :-)

[AHA]

for me the first eight bit love of my life was a speccy 48, moon alert was a game with speech (currah) which impressed me, i showed a mate who in return showed me moon patrol - that was it atari 800 (i still have it today. I was underwhelmed with the st and stayed with atari 8 for a while longer then i saw an amiga - same buzz as ther atari so i got one (still have it!) it was years later i discovered it was jay miners baby too. Next came the day when power won the battle...pc, im still with one of these, of course the atari and amiga are set up and ready to play with the flick of a switch... nice!

[Ransom]

Immediately after the A8s, I moved to an Apple //c. Loved that machine! But had to move on to a PC/compat. for college, so got the Zeos 386SX-16. After that, I had two "main" computers at all times, with a series of PC/Compatibles on the one hand, and then on the other hand A8s, a brief stint with a ][gs, and then back to A8s...used for most daily driving, including all my Internet activity, conducted through a shell account up until about 1998. The PC/Compatibles branch went from running MS-DOS to MS-Windows to Linux to FreeBSD. Then that path switched to Macs in 2002, and I haven't owned a Microsoft box since. I still have a 1200XL and a Platinum //e set up all the time, but unfortunately I rarely use them any more.

[griz]

Atari VCS (well "Computer" was in the acronym!)

Vic-20

Atari 65 XE

Atari 520 ST

...

[Level42]

Those who voted Commodore 64 need to go now !

 

 

 

I think it was 86 or 87 that I moved to a 1040 STFM. I had to sell all my 8 bit stuff to make it affordable enough. I regretted it later but not in those years.

I stuck with my 1040 STFM until....mmmm.....early 90's when I made a foolish mistake and entered my dark era in the Wintel world. It took me until 2006 to make the swap to Apple and I never went back.

I am only at my 2nd Mac since then, which says something ! Yes I upgraded my iMac with extra memory and SSD+larger HD which form a great fusion drive which makes that the machine is still fast enough for today's standards....

 

I hacked a lot with the ST. I put it in a mega big tower (server) case, wired up a MEGA STE keyboard, installed a socket on the 68000 on which I added an MS-DOS card (which I hardly every used, but it was cool it worked), and a TOS 2.06 card. I also installed memory expansion and a real time clock. There was a SyQuest drive in there and I had both color and mono monitors after a while.
I never wanted to switch to PC but I saw no other option in the end, the ST had served me very well and long. I though it was a better machine then the Amiga because of it's b/w modus which made it useful for serious stuff much more than the Amiga, and still it played games almost as good as it. It was also compatible with PC floppies which was great.

[Level42]

 

Actually a bit later I did get paid to program a c64 (to write a remote terminal for a character generator). The 800xl was available and cheap, and I would have preferred to use that. C64 might be ok for games, but for real work the lack of a real OS, slow disk and terrible basic were big problems. I'm still amazed at how popular they became.

 

Amen !

[+MrFish]

Those who voted Commodore 64 need to go now !

 

Are you sure you want TMR to go? He's done some pretty nice games for the A8's: Reaxion, Callisto, Battle Eagle, Lunar Blitz

[+Stephen]

Those who voted Commodore 64 need to go now !

 

[eegad]

In 1993 I broke down and bought a Macintosh IIsi. The Atari stuff got packed away in the closet, after having seen 12 years of daily use (first a 400, then an 800xl in 1984).

 

(and then in 1999 I broke down and switched to WIndows, because there were just so many games I wanted to play )

[flashjazzcat]

286 with Windows 3.1 salvaged from the back of my dad's pal's shop c2000, soon replaced by a Socket 7 Athlon.

[Mclaneinc]

Being a lover of all things computer I had already got a C64 as the Atari declined but my real next computer was the glorious Commodore Amiga, I still love that machine to bits. I never really got in to the ST, I had one for a day and hated it but admit that over the years I have got an ST but it was more just to add to the collection.

[snicklin]

It kind of depends because I started to use my brother's Commodore Amiga a lot after/during my Atari time, but the next computer I actually owned was a PC clone.

[+MrFish]

It kind of depends because I started to use my brother's Commodore Amiga a lot after/during my Atari time, but the next computer I actually owned was a PC clone.

 

Just select both; you're not forced to make a single selection here (on purpose). I entered Mac and PC. I owned a Mac, but I used PC's often in my college's labs during the same time period.

[kiwilove]

It really doesn't matter what computer(s) you've moved onto or through - but whether you've maintained an interest still with computers etc etc.

 

While I had a strong interest in videogaming - after playing so many hundreds (or is it thousands?) of games - you do start to tire when it's nothing new anymore...

I went from playing videogames - to collecting them (say Mame roms, etc) - then back into developing/playing.

Nowadays because I've found a tablet worth using and playing (the Nvidia Shield K1 Tablet) - I'm going through the PSP game library via emulation on the tablet.

Ultimate Ghosts n Goblins stand out as something to look closely at. Though it is mainly emulation for classic retrogaming - that I got this tablet for. Mame seems to run particularly well on it. This is the ideal emulators tablet - and for anyone who complains about 'space' being an issue. That you can store all your emulators and roms - on a micro SD card that is as small as your small finger nail - plus have room for your normal videos/other files as well. We are truly living in science fiction times when miniaturisation has gone this far.

 

Back in the day - you went off the 8-bit Atari's because 16-bit computing seemed to be the future. Although I did go ST - I ended up with the Amiga - but the Amiga games didn't really blossom into what I had hoped for. The 16-bit games consoles had more appeal to me - particularly the SNES. And when the ST or Amiga didn't survive - you had to go either PC or Apple - and went for the one you hated the least?

I went off videogaming entirely because I couldn't play the constant stream of first person shooters/etc. While Doom was fine at first, in it's day --- I could not see the point or fun in playing so many Doom look a likes thereafter. I guess I didn't like being trained into becoming a gun/rifle enthusiast and taking out lives in videogame scenarios.

 

Harvey

[Mclaneinc]

Same as me regarding the Amiga, I loved that machine and have one that needs to be repaired but like you Harvey I didn't see it go the way I hoped, I like you got a Snes, initially before getting it I was looking at Super Mario World being played and I said foolishly "my Amiga could do that", then when I got the Snes and played it I very quickly realised how wrong I was...

 

Regarding the PC, I got one because I had to, not really because I wanted one, Doom was fine but that was all you got on it then, pure Doom and Wolfenstein clones but when the Voodoo card came out I got one with Tomb Raider as a freebie, THAT was when I started to enjoy gaming on the PC but these days its just a workhorse for emulation, surfing the net (can you still say surfing the net?) and writing caustic letters to the Department on Work and Pensions who have declared war on ill people who can't work, ok there's LOADS of people faking it but the people they target the most are the GENUINE people.

 

Anyway, the point being that if I want to play its on a console, its easier to setup, does not cost a small fortune and is easy to move around the house so me and my daughter can enjoy it.

[Mechanicjay]

About '85 or so Dad pulled out his original 800 and 810 drive out a box. I'm not sure he really used it much when he first got it. I was about 6 years old, played a lot of Frogger, Q-bert and Super Breakout on the thing. Also played around with Home Filing Manager. That's all that made it out of the box.

 

I played around with that for years, never really able to convince my parents to help me understand it or expand it until I was 9-10 -- 1990 or so. We moved again, and I got the rest of the 800 stuff, more games on Disk, a BASIC programming manual, etc. At that point, finding Atari 8-bit stuff was pretty tough and as my parents weren't much interested taking me around to troll electronics stores and we lived in the middle of now where....I really wanted to expand my understanding of the Atari and computers and programming, but I was stuck.

About '92 or so, my Grandpa bought us a Macintosh Performa 400, (re-badged LCII), which was a steaming pile of shit. I didn't quite understand how a brand new whiz-bang machine could be such a step backwards in usability and pleasure of use. We suffered with that thing, (I still kept the 800 as a "toy") until maybe '96? The joke is that all kinds of stuff would appear for the Mac, a Modem, new programs, a PRINTER!. I was like, you couldn't have made this happen 5 years ago for the Atari?

 

Anyway, about 1996, we got a Windows 95 box, with a Pentium 200. That was a like a freakin' quantuum leap forward from the Mac. Through the late 90's, I came into my own on the Atari 8-bit line, buying used hardware wherever I could and figuring out how to actually program in BASIC.

As some point, while I was a way at school around 2000 or so, I lost my Dad's original 800 to water damage at home, a handful of disks were also lost. I was able to salvage the rest and our original 810 drive gave up the ghost only last year -- it's fixable, just need to work through the schematics and what not.

So Here I am, just about 30 years past when I first flipped on an Atari 800, still using a few of the same disks, though hundreds more have been added over the years. I'd really like to get on fixing my original 810 drive. I still cringe to think that I chucked the 800 in the bin, rather than trying to fix it.

[leech]

First off, @RodCastler, Nice profile picture!

 

We got our 800XL in 83-84, along with the 1050, so at least we didn't have to suffer through a tape drive. We even eventually got a happy chip put in there a few years later. It lead us to be able to get Ultima 4 working (we trashed a disk, copied a full track of bad sectors onto the U4 disk so that the copy protection would work, somehow the copy we had wouldn't let us harm any enemies, only ever saying '... is lightly wounded'. I later also discovered there were a few sectors that had been zero'd out, so I ended up reconstructing every bit in those sectors so that we could then win the game. Discovered that the way they mapped out the sectors were 00 = deep water, 01, shallow water, 02, grass, etc. and they were just logical maps, had graph paper to draw it all out after I found where the entry points to the town/castle that was supposed to be there... hacked all with Disk Wizard 2!

 

Sadly, my dumb kid mind one day was really curious on what was inside the 1050 (I can't remember if a disk was stuck in it or what the deal was). But.. curiosity killed the floppy drive... I had for some reason taken the happy chip out and when I put it back in, I didn't notice that I'd overlapped the pins by one in the socket, so when I turned it on... it'd died. We sent it off to get fixed, and it was never heard from again, they kept giving us excuses and months went by... then the place went out of business, never saw the 1050 again.. and sadly the computing days kind of dwindled... that was probably around 87-88.

 

Then my grandmother gave us... I think it was a Heath Zenith... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenith_Z-89<-- this guy. Wow it was a terrible monochrome thing, and I think it just sat there, sad and alone. There was Wordstar and some Pac-Man clone, the name of which eludes me at the moment. CP/M... yuck.

 

Then in 1990... we managed to get an Atari Mega STe... damn that thing was awesome. Used it for tons of things, though if I were asked now, there really is only a handful of games on it I really remember playing a lot, and at any given moment it is the music from the Atari 8-bit games that pop into my head. Though I can summon Xenon 2 and Gods' music by thinking about it. Somewhere around this time we also had a Genesis, though my younger brother was always more of the console gamers, we had a Sega Master System as well (seems I always went for the underdogs).

 

It wasn't until about '95 that my parents were talked into getting a Windows '95 Packard Bell. That thing was terrible, could never get the modem and the sound to work at the same time, had to flip IRQs when ever we wanted one or the other. 'Plug 'N Pray'... Shortly after that, the old Conner drive in my Mega STe had died. So it was shoved away under my bed, I'd picked up a fatty Barracuda drive from a friend that I'd tried to get to work in it, but never had it do more than detect it was there, and started replacing parts in the Packard Bell one by one.. until finally I ended up just building my first PC which was a Pentium 200MMX with a Matrox Millennium 2 in it, which also eventually had a Pure3D Voodoo 1... both of which I still have floating around somewhere. At some point I really missed my STe, so also bought a TT030, but didn't get to use it much before it too just sat there, since most of my software didn't work with it, and the STe was messed up, I still haven't gotten that fixed...

 

But since then I've acquired a Falcon, another Mega STe, and some time in the early 90's I'd gotten a 130xe, 800, 600xl, xegs... and had just bought new power supplies from Best that I got yesterday so I'm back in business!

 

Pulled up Missile Command on the XEGS and have seriously not had that much fun in a long time! And I even have an HTC Vive I can play VR in... just something about the old 8-bit graphics that makes me think 'hell yeah, this is when you could let your imagination soar and games were just FUN!