Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
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From: rbrown@CS.Cornell.EDU (Russell Brown)
Subject: Re: Old Atari Trivia
Message-ID: <1991Jun7.204023.28444@cs.cornell.edu>
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Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY 14853
References: <2970002@hpsmo100.rose.hp.com> <1991May30.195511.9316@groucho> <30223@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1991 20:40:23 GMT
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In article <30223@hydra.gatech.EDU> gt7865a@prism.gatech.EDU (Comer,Matthew Brian) writes:
>Speaking of old Atari equipment, does anyone remember the ATR8000? I had one,
>and it was a real blessing. It was a Z80 based CP/M expander for the Atari,
>though I never used it for CP/M. I used it for the built in disk drive 
>interface which allowed me to use standard disk drives with my Atari, the 
>RS232 port for modem and printer, etc. I had mine with two Shugart DS/DD
>5.25 inch floppy drives. It was an interesting piece of equipment.

	A mixed blessing, surely.  If you never used it for CP/M, then you
probably were able to avoid most of the severe drawbacks of the system.
I would have, but I didn't want to spring for a copy of MYDOS.  At the time,
MYDOS was the only thing available which had the necessary software to allow
an Atari to use the RS232 port on the ATR8000.  Not wanting to waste money on
yet another DOS (I already had OS/A+ DOS version 2 and 4, as well as a bootleg
of Atari DOS V. 2), I was forced to use the CP/M terminal emulator program
in order to be able to use the RS232 port to attach a modem.

	OK, so what's the problem?  Well, the CP/M or whatever was controlling
the disk drives when CP/M was running was one of the most amazingly poor
pieces of engineering I had encountered to that point.  I used that system for
I guess the better part of a year.  I was barely able to keep my software
intact, though, as it usually took little longer for a given copy of my CP/M
system disk to become unreadable than it did for me to make a new backup.  I
had this happen at least four times.  This part of the ATR system was quite
unimpressive.  I will agree, though, that it was a hell of a nice system as
far as its control of disk drives for Atari format usage, as well as a nice
big printer buffer.


	Russell G. Brown		Graduate Student from Hell

			Cornell Computer Science