My name is Chris Olson, I'm 34 years old, and home computers have been a large part of my life since 1980. My father, George, worked in Research and Development at a local university and was given the task of organizing and running one of the first Atari Computer Summer camps for Grades 1-6. The students were using Atari 400 computers, and, as a result, Atari Corp. sent my father home with one to learn and use. I was three years old at the time, and while I don't recall the first instance of unboxing and setting up the computer, I do have a vivid memory of how it looked and felt - solid beige plastic for the case and a very strange and difficult membrane keyboard! With no cartridge installed and no cassette or disk drive going, the 400 would boot to something called the "Atari Memo Pad" - a free text screen entry mode against the normal system blue screen. Especially at that age, many, many characters and "masterpieces" were typed into the Memo Pad, despite the keyboard! Disk drives would come later, but we had a rather modest cache of 8K cartridges and several cassettes. Atari Basic and Atari Pilot were the first two carts that I remember, as far as the cassette tapes go - I remember being BLOWN away by "States and Capitals!" A long loading sequence replete with tones, beeps and boops - and if you were lucky, it loaded without any problem. I don't know how many other programs did this, but "States" actually recorded audio that synced up with the program on-screen presentation! Professionally recorded voiceover and music track that lead into the drawing of the map of the U.S - and then the quizzing on all fifty states and captials. As you could probably imagine, I learned these pretty quick. I can still hear that voice and the music, even today, naming a few random capitals "Or, how about Juneau..." The first time I heard redbook audio in the mid 1990's with a CD-ROM game, I remember thinking back all those years to that specific moment. The in-line use of audio with other cassette programs might have been common, but I certainly didn't encounter any other programs that managed to pull it off quite that well. Cassette loading was cumbersome and rife with errors...too hot, too cold, humid, dry, the tones had to be just right - originals fared better, but we frequently used the cassettes to store BASIC programs, and using household cassettes and "taping over" was a recipe for errors and frustration. I remember thinking that the tones were very similar to the emergency broadcast tones heard on radio and television, too. We did have a few of the early cartridge video games too - Star Raiders, Missile Command and Pac-Man are the three carts that we had with that 400. More on that in a little bit! Our hardware setup was pretty typical of most users - we had a small color TV that required use of the signal converter, an early dot matrix printer, a few paddles, a few joysticks, the cassette loader/recorder, and that was it. The membrane keyboard was replaced with the brown tactile keyboard, and that was a group effort. While the keyboard was off, George and I increased the system memory from 16K to 32K (verified with a tidy PEEK and POKE statement in BASIC) and that saw us through that first year. The computer camps were successful and Atari machines were deployed in various university departments for faculty, staff and students. The equipment of choice changed to the Atari 800 - which eventually replaced the 400 at our house as well. The 48K Atari 800 a big step up and brought with it the advent of floppy disk drives, additional memory, two cartridge slots and four (!?!) joystick/hardware ports. The stock keyboard seemed to take its cue from the electric typewriters of the time, with large keys and a silent keystroke (not including the audible, slightly jarring cursor noise that came through the TV or monitor.) I jumped right into programming in Atari BASIC, LOGO and Pilot quite early on, and I'm told this was a big motivating factor in me actually learning to read. Assembly language calls were accomplished with "DATA" statements in Basic, and there were Assembler/Hex Editors available...I remember using Action! to do a crude starfield (inspired by Star Raiders, of course!) but moreover, things like faster joystick routines, direct access to Port 3 for Modem Access, and loading custom character sets as "sprites" in Graphics Mode 3 (?) and animating them...all of that with the "DATA" calls in BASIC. We also bought our first modem to use with the 800 - the venerable MPP 450 baud model - a true 300 baud connection, pushed to 450 if you were interacting with a fellow MPP on the other end, but even that was far from trouble free. Of course, I'll cover BBS specific stuff in the next message, but the action of dialing the University mainframe and then, the first BBS - was something quite remarkable. Both my Dad and I were amazed that there was this great system, organized, interesting, and open - download something, if you'd like, and, of course, upload something too...what a deal. I mentioned it before, but the intro screen for the CLAUG (Chicagoland Atari Users Group) BBS mentioning the XMODEM protocol by Ward Christensen. Of course, I didn't know it then, but being in the Chicago area and dialing in at that early point in BBS history really connected me to a living piece of incredible computer history. The MPP worked well, but it did get pretty warm if used for longer than half an hour - at some point, we also had a Volksmodem (I get the joke, now, many years later), and burned up an old Atari 810 disk drive with the "Direct to Disk" download function...sigh. The other drives fared a little better. Pinball Construction Set was the culprit, if memory serves! I have chosen to focus on the Atari 400 and 800 because they were at the forefront of my computer education and use. We did have Apple products too - we had a IIc for Appleworks and purchased a IIgs, new, in its maiden year. By the time the IIgs came to the house, the 800 wasn't used as much, but it was never really retired, if that makes sense. Stepping back from this and viewing in a different way - more specifically, to the actual 6502 and its history -- I'll talk more specifically about features and functionality, software, and my sense of how the 6502 and the Atari fit into the rest of the computer world. I became aware of the origins of the 6502 a few years ago as a bit of a tangent from researching early home computer kits (4004/8008.) From Motorola to MOS and back again, lawsuits, settlements, cross-licensing, and, then, to Commodore. This CPU powered the jewels of the 8-bit computer age, in my view. The Atari (of course), the Commodore 64, and growth versions powered the NES and SNES and eventually the IIgs with the 65C816. Shifting back to the Atari, the tumultuous "journey" of the 6502 provides an appropriately sad foil for Atari's corporate history, which I'll talk about in just a bit. Atari, with the 400 and certainly, the 800 -- allowed its users to do things that just couldn't be done on the early IBM PC machines of that era. Sure, the processor was slow - 1.79mhz, and, yes, you didn't have an abundance of system RAM. But, how, then, were the early cartridges - like Star Raiders -- able to accomplish fluid graphics movement, complex worlds, good player/missile and joystick inputs? Why did the PCjr, which came out years later - lag behind in this regard? The Apple II line (II, II+, IIc, IIe) also utilized the 6502 but didn't have the ANTIC chip or robust 4-voice sound processing...better, still, than anything IBM had to offer in the "PC" space, but, in my view, just not quite as complete as the Atari platform. Certainly, the Commodore 64 could boast of many things the Atari 800 could not - and while we did have an 800XL and 130XE in the later years, they never really replaced the 800. I know that the "Machine Wars" have been documented, filmed and written about - please don't take any of this as a call to arms or anything of the sort. I do still feel, though, that the Atari never really got a fair shake. "People" looked at its spec. sheet and said "There's no way that will be powerful enough to do what I want" - or "There's not enough memory to do what I want." This leads me to an entirely different subject but one that is relevant. Constraints! How did we do it with only 48k at a time? Hell, how did THEY do it on hard coded 8K carts? Are you kidding me? Every character, every bit, every byte - literally - had to be accounted for. I see, in this, an elegance that goes to the very core of computing and machine language (or assembly language). I'd love to see some of the code for "Star Raiders" (and, to be fair, I haven't looked for it) because it _had_ to be super-optimized. Some tricks that I remember had to do with storing variables - if you had a statement like this: 10 FOR A = 1 TO 100:NEXT A You could save space by defining that "100" as a letter - let's say "D" 5 D = 100 10 FOR A = 1 TO D:NEXT A The syntax here isn't perfect - it's close, I think, but you get the idea. How difficult it is not to put a semicolon at the end of those lines...wow. Certainly, each different computer owner will boast about what his machine can do that yours can't -- and we were certainly not the norm having a mixed bag of Atari and Apple - but there was something compelling about the constraints of the 800, the 48k memory and the 6502. Part of it, too, was the processor's flexibility. Interfacing with the ANTIC routines for graphics and the sound handling certainly seemed ahead of its time. Early stage 3Dfx or Nvidia, if you will. Amazing things could be done with straight machine language but I keep coming back to the fact that much of this was possible in Atari BASIC, too. How great was that? This gave us games like any of the J.R. Kastens (spelled wrong, I'm pretty sure but actually written and run in BASIC) or the early Sid Meier/Microprose titles like Floyd of the Jungle or Solo Flight that actually needed the BASIC cartridge present to run. These things were all so accessible. Accessible to young programmers like me, all the way up to the big software houses like Sierra or EOA (remember that?). My hat is truly off to the MOS pioneers - their story reminds me of the AT&T guys creating UNIX on non-sanctioned off time and then showing it to the bosses. I spoke rather passionately about how the 6502 powered my beloved Atari 800, but, it says a lot that this technology could be adapted to such different and varying platforms! I'm going to bet that very few people know one chip or a close variation powered the early Apple, Commodore and Atari systems - not to mention the early consoles. I enjoyed programming in the 6502 environment more than on anything else, without a doubt. Nothing comes close. I know it is truly an object-oriented world now, and I can understand and appreciate the best-practice model of code reuse and modular-style programming. I have, though, still, after all these years - a sense of dread writing methods in C++ or Objective-C because, well, it doesn't matter what order they are in - and growing up in a line number/subroutine environment, that's a very difficult thing to let go of...don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the hell out of creating an iOS app, getting back into the programming world through XCode and the Mac, but, with line numbers came a sense of order. Some would say a confining environment - I say one that was logical, understandable - while still allowing for boundaries to be pushed...see also CES Demos (Robot, Spaceship, Bouncing Ball, Cycling Atari Sign.) Really, it made it enjoyable. It was easy to have fun - you didn't have to invoke a foundation class or library to access any of this - sure, to get to the enhanced ANTIC modes you might have to call a Graphics mode that was a bit our of the ordinary, but it was all there...somehow, in 48k. This is getting long, even for you, Jason, I fear - I'm going to touch on some of the watershed software packages that I really remember, including games - again, maybe some of these are more appropriate for your "Arcade" documentary, but I'll just shotgun through them and I can certainly expand if necessary. I mentioned Star Raiders already, but, Missile Command...faculty in the aforementioned R&D department would play this on their lunch break and after hours - if you really, REALLY got far, the screen colors would shift - background colors too... Wizard and the Princess...Adventure...Canyon Climber...Solo Flight...Floyd of the Jungle...Track and Field...Temple of Apshai...Miner 2049'er...Blue Max...River Raid...Zaxxon...Qbert...Pole Position...Pitstop...The Great American Cross Country Road Race...Pinball Construction Set...Racing Destruction Set...Atari Music System (AMS)...Touchdown Football...Snooper Troopers...In Search of the Most Amazing Thing...F-15 Strike Eagle...Elektraglide...Raid Over Moscow...and, an all time favorite...Jet Set Willy. Many of these titles were not unique to the Atari - many were ported to the C64, some started there, some started on the Apple II...this is, by no means, an exhaustive list. Atari Music System deserves a bit more mention because of how incredibly full featured it was - wow. We actually transcribed (read, entered every NOTE) a few songs straight from piano sheet music...the Love Boat Theme, I think? Sign of the times, indeed. Lastly, a bit of history as I remember it, back then and now, and that'll be it for my 6502 musings. Certainly, the 6502 has been successful - across many computer platforms, in cars, appliances, etc. IBM is still cranking along as a strong company and Apple is too - yet, Commodore and Atari are gone as we knew them, and so begins the "Tramiel Schism" that, to this day, is still a little baffling. Tramiel comes from Commodore to Atari and accomplishes some great things - the Atari ST product line is a perfect example, right? A great machine - way ahead of the Mac, but with a common CPU (the 68000). Midi capability, good graphics and sound, more system memory, all the things that IBM PC, Commodore and, to some degree, Mac owners could point to and say "I have a real computer, not a game system." Was this Tramiel's fault? Certainly, some of the blame lies with him - I'm sure books have been written and more specific historical pieces filled in, but despite all that, looking back, the 6502 was solid, reliable, scalable, adaptable and more damn fun than anything else out there, in whatever platform you liked. Whew...that's enough for now. If nothing else, I hope this was enjoyable to read, and I look forward to expanding on my BBS memories a bit. Best regards, -Chris Olson