Don’t Forget About Atari

Cory Ondrejka joins in on the 40-year-old retro computing reminiscing:

For being otherwise bright folks, it’s remarkable how completely wrong they all are. The Atari was the best computer to have.

This whole friendly debate reminds me of the oft-cited adage that the best camera is the one you have with you: The best computer in the 1980s was whichever one your parents bought you. I honestly don’t remember anyone I knew who had an Atari computer. Atari game consoles, sure — almost everyone I knew had a 2600, and we all coveted the 5200. But they sure were cool-looking.

Oddly enough, Jack Tramiel* — who founded and named Commodore in 1953 as a typewriter company and was running the company when it launched the PET (1977), VIC-20 (1980), and Commodore 64 (1982) — left the company after a dispute with the board in 1984 (a common industry occurrence in those days, seemingly), founded a new company briefly named Tramel Technology (not “Tramiel”, for ease of spelling), which bought the then-failing consumer business of Atari from Warner Communications and took the Atari name for its own. In 1985 Tramiel launched the Atari ST line at CES. To me the 16-bit Atari ST barely registers in my memory — I don’t think I ever encountered one anywhere, including in a store. When I think of Atari personal computers I think of the 8-bit Atari 800 (pretty cool!) and 400 (horrible — perhaps the worst keyboard ever shipped) from 1979.

(Anyway, neither of those aforecited adages are really true, though. Some cameras are much better than others. And the best computers back then were the Apple II’s.)

* Just me or was Tramiel a dead ringer for character actor Gordon Jump, of WKRP in Cincinnati fame?

★ Sunday, 20 July 2025