Pay special attention to the pricing. Although the prices of these computers all look reasonable through today’s eyes, when you factor in inflation, they were all incredibly expensive, much more so than most computers today.

1979

The Atari 400/800 computers were announced at Winter CES in January. They didn’t start shipping until late fall of 1979.

The Atari 400 had a debut price of $500 (about $2200 in 2026) and came with 8K of RAM. It originally was intended to come with 4K of RAM (which is why it was called the 400), but RAM prices dropped enough to start with more RAM.

The Atari 800 had a debut price of $1000 (about $4500 in 2026), which included the BASIC programming cartridge, which was a separate purchase (about $80) for the Atari 400. It shipped with 16K of RAM, up from the 8K it was originally planned for (also why it was called the 800).

I’ve recently acquired an Atari 800. It’s a tank and I’ll be writing about it in more detail soon. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!

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1980

For a short time in 1980, the Atari 8-bit computers outsold the Apple II.

1982

In December, Atari announced the 1200XL computer, as a replacement for the Atari 800. This 1200XL had a sleek design that looked far more modern than the boxy brown tank design of the Atari 800. It debuted at a price of $900 (about $2900 in 2026) in early 1983.

The 1200XL sported 64K of RAM, to compete with the Commodore 64 that had been introduced in August, function keys and a self-test mode. The OS was updated as well.

Unfortunately, the 1200XL had significant compatibility issues with some 400/800 software and peripherals. Its price was also too high for what it offered and it was discontinued quickly.

I have recently acquired an Atari 1200XL. It’s in rough shape and unfortunately not fully functional, but I’ll be writing about more it here on Goto 10, so be sure to to subscribe so you don’t miss anything. Maybe I’ll be able to get it working!

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1983

At Summer CES in June, Atari announced several new computers: 600XL, 800XL, 1400XL, and 1450XLD. These were all styled the same as the 1200XL, which was discontinued.

At $200 (about $650 in 2026), the 600XL, with 16K RAM and a real keyboard, was the replacement for the Atari 400.

The 800XL, with 64K RAM and a $300 price (about $980 in 2026), was the replacement for the Atari 800. This model went on to become the biggest-selling Atari 8-bit computer.

The 1400XL was never released. It also had 64K of RAM and was about the same size as the 1200XL. It’s main feature was that it had a better memory management chip and a built-in modem.

The 1450XLD was planned to have the features of the 1400XL, with the addition of a built-in floppy drive. This computer was also never released, although prototypes do exist and have been shown at Atari shows.

1984

Atari, Inc. is sold to Jack Tramiel and renamed to Atari Corp. This new Atari inherited the existing stockpile of XL computers and sold them at heavy discounts to generate revenue while the Atari ST was being developed. Atari 800XL computers would be sold for $150 (about $470 in 2026) or less during this time.

1985

At January CES, Atari announces the XE line of 8-bit computers to replace the XL computers, the 65XE, 130XE and a 65XEM.

The 65XE, with 64K, is the direct replacement for the 800XL and retailed for just $100 (about $300 in 2026). Due to the large remaining stock of the 800XL that were sold off first, the 65XE is not common in the US

The 130XE, with 128K, retailed for $150 (about $450 in 2026). This model became available in spring of 1985 and was a popular upgrade for existing Atari 8-bit users.

The 65XEM was expected to be a 65XE with the powerful AMY music chip, but it never shipped.

I own a 130XE and I personally really like the styling of the XE computers. I think they do a great job of matching the ST styling and making for a unified product lineup. It’s unfortunate that the keyboards are so bad, however.

1987

In an effort to milk the last bits of value from the 8-bit computer line and to take advantage of the resurgent video game console market in the US, Atari repackaged the 65XE as a game machine called the XE Game System (XEGS) that sold for $200 (about $575 in 2026).

This system also separated the keyboard from the game console, making it the only Atari 8-bit with a detachable keyboard.

Unfortunately the XEGS did not make a dent in either the video game console market or the home computer market. Many current 8-bit users did upgrade to it to get the detachable keyboard, however.

1992

On January 1, 1992 Atari officially discontinued the 8-bit computer line. By this point the Atari 8-bit had really run its course with most people having switched to 16-bit systems or PCs.

Legacy

With a 12-year run, the Atari 8-bit line of computers was surprisingly long-lived. Considering how well-designed they were, this is not all surprising.

By the mid-80s, it made sense that Atari would mostly focus on its new 16-bit ST computers, but I am thankful that they kept the Atari 8-bit line around for as long as they did. The 130XE helped extend its usefulness and they even produced some useful peripherals, including the XEP80 80-column box, XM301 300 baud modem and XF551 double-side floppy drive.

Today, an Atari 8-bit computer is a great retro computing system to own. There is tons of software and games for it and plenty of original hardware that is still available at reasonable prices. Add-ons such as FujiNet make it easy to load software from SD cards or a network. Plus, there are lots of cartridges that you can use with original hardware without needing any other peripherals.

For most people, the 800XL is the best one to start with. It is plentiful, reliable, inexpensive and compatible with most software.

The Atari 800 is great for being the original, but it is bulky and its 48K means it can’t run some more modern software. Its keyboard is amazing, however!

The XE machines look great, but are far less common and much less reliable.

The 1200XL is really nice and might be the best system for a serious collector or retro computer enthusiast, but it is also the most expensive one to acquire since so few were made. It also will benefit from some modifications to improve compatibility.

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Did you like this retro computing content? Here are some more articles you might enjoy.

Read on to learn how this program caused some controversy in the Atari computer world and to watch a video of it in action.

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Some computers had a command-line, such as those that used CP/M or DOS. Others would use BASIC as the interface, such as the Commodore 64 or Apple II. With the Atari 8-bit computers, you typed DOS in BASIC to load the DOS menu or command line (there were lots of variations).

The problem with having to type commands is that you have to know what the commands are. This made early computers inscrutable to people that were not tech nerds and was a big detriment to overall computer usage.

This problem had been known for a long time and many people and teams had been working on an alternative. Nearly all of them since have been based on a tech demo from 1968 by Douglas Engelbart. This demo was called “The Mother of All Demos” because it introduced so many concepts that we still use today, including the mouse, hypertext, video chat, networking, a graphic user interface and much more.

This video is absolutely worth the watch. It is truly hard to believe the things in it that were demonstrated in 1968.

From the amazing things pioneered in this video, the next group to make some inroads into graphic user interfaces was Xerox at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). They designed a graphical user interface and computer (the Xerox Alto) that refined many of the concepts from the Mother of All Demos into something more practical.

However, being a research facility, PARC was not able to turn its computer or creation into an a commercial product. Famously, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates each got wind of what PARC was doing and were able to get a tour and demo of the research.

These concepts were eventually used to create the original Mac OS and Windows operating systems.

The Macintosh was the first low-cost computer (relatively speaking as it was $2400 in 1984, which is about $7800 in 2026) with a graphical user interface, but Apple had actually released another computer a year earlier with a GUI. This computer was the Lisa and it was a flop, mostly due to its $10,000 starting price. It did however serve as a great proving grounds for the concepts that allowed the Macintosh to eventually succeed.

During this time Microsoft was working on its own GUI, which it called Windows. Work on Windows was slow, but Windows 1.0 did ship in late 1985, almost two years after the Macintosh. Windows 1.0 was mostly terrible, but it was refined over the years and by v3.0 it was able to get market acceptance in the PC world.

But Apple and Microsoft were not the only companies interested in graphical user interfaces.

IBM had a product called TopView that was a GUI that was released in early 1985. Like Windows, it ran on top of DOS, but unlike Windows it never really caught on. It was abandoned around 1990 as OS/2 had the focus by that time.

Another lesser-known GUI was Visi On, created by VisiCorp the makers of the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc. First announced in late 1983, it beat most other GUIs to market but it may have had the problem of being too early. As it was released before the Macintosh, few had any idea what a GUI was or why it was better than the command lines of that era. Just a month or so later, Macintosh debuted and stole any momentum it may have had. And then VisiCorp itself ran into troubles in 1985.

Perhaps the GUI with the best chance to compete with Macintosh and Windows was Digital Research’s GEM (Graphics Environment Manager). Released in early 1985, GEM showed great promise. Unlike VisiCorp, Digital Research had years of experience in OS development with its popular CP/M operating system. At the time, Digital Research was a well-regarded company.

And GEM actually looked pretty good for the time. Unfortunately it looked too good. Apple sued Digital Research for copyright infringement and the settlement forced DR to sufficiently alter GEM enough to make it less appealing. That, combined with Microsoft Windows continuing to be revised and improved, led to GEM’s demise.

On notable thing about GEM is that it was chosen by Atari to use as the OS for its ST computers. In late 1984, Atari and Digital Research engineers ported early versions of GEM from x86 to the 68000 CPU used by the ST and had a working version by early 1985. When the ST shipped in the summer of 1985, it was running an OS that used GEMDOS and GEM as its foundation.

These days, GEM is open-source and their is an project called EmuTOS that is an open-source version of the Atari ST OS (TOS) with GEM compatibility.

Around the same time the Amiga was introduced and it came with its own GUI called Intuition. I never really liked the way the Amiga GUI looked, but it was apparently highly functional and did work with the multitasking Amiga OS, something that was unique as the time.

For the most part, GUI systems needed powerful computers and high-resolution graphics so were largely limited to 16-bit computers. But for a little while, a product called GEOS brought a GUI to the 8-bit Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I always thought GEOS was more of a gimmick on the C64, but it worked OK on the C128, assuming you were able to use it with an RGB monitor to get the better graphics resolutions.

Even the Atari 8-bit had a GUI, although it was not well-known. Diamond Graphical OS (Diamond GOS) was released by a 3rd party in 1988 and was designed to look like GEM.

The mid 80s were largely a void of GUI acceptance in the PC world. DOS was king and PC users would often belittle any GUI as a toy. It really wasn’t until Windows 3 in 1990 that GUIs on PCs started to gain traction. Essentially, Windows outlasted everything else to become the PC standard!

But GUI development didn’t stop in the 90s. NeXT came out with NeXTStep (and then OpenStep) a GUI that ran on top of Unix and that became the foundation for today’s macOS.

BeOS burned brightly for a short while, but when it didn’t get selected as the basis for the next Mac OS, it fizzled out.

IBM OS/2 was a competitor to Windows for a while. I actually used IBM OS/2 Warp and liked it a lot, but it got crushed when Windows 95 was released.

In fact, Windows was so dominant after Windows 95 was released that it almost made Apple and the Mac irrelevant. Windows 95 was certainly not as elegant as Mac OS, but it was good enough for most people and readily available on much cheaper PCs. By 1997 Apple was in dire straits, but was fortunately able to turn things around just in time1.

I use a Mac most of the time these days, so I’m glad Windows didn’t completely win, but at least from a desktop GUI standpoint I guess it did win. Mac OS accounts for about 16% of computer usage, Linux for 4% and Windows at a whopping 71%2. The remaining 10% is scattered across unknown OSes, which could be one of the above or something like Chrome OS.

Of course, GUI development evolved beyond desktop computers to mobile computing devices and Microsoft did not fare so well there…3

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The paddle controls were a somewhat interesting controller. The style first became popular with Pong and the original Atari VCS included joystick and paddle controllers.

You spin these dials to move something on the screen, the “paddle” in the case of Pong. The controllers were not free-spinning; they would stop when they reached their max left and right positions.

Atari did make free-spinning paddles for the Indy 500 game. I think that might be the only game that use them.

Unfortunately, the paddle controllers were not always reliable. The small potentiometer that they used would wear out quickly resulting in “jitters” that would cause the item on the screen that was being controlled to jump around on the screen slightly.

One particular oddity is that two paddle controllers connected to a single control port on the 2600. That meant you could have up to four players for some games!

Now, on to the games.

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I don’t usually write about such recent topics1, but 25 years is a long time and Mac OS X was a Big Deal. It was a big deal to me personally because I got my first Mac in 2001 shortly after the release of Mac OS X. It also was an even bigger deal for…

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• True BASIC

• Fast BASIC

• DBASIC

• REAL BASIC

• GFA BASIC

But I’ve never written about the official Atari ST BASIC. This is the BASIC that came on the ST Language Disk with the computer, at least in the US.

MousePad Fun

Are you looking for some fun retro gear to adorn your workspace? Then check out the Goto 10 store, which has some cool Atari-themed merch. The GEM desktop mouse pad has been the most popular so far. These will bring joy to your life and help support Goto 10!

Visit the Store

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The Odyssey 2 was Introduced in 1978, just about a year after the Atari…

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Also about this time, the Mega ST was available and it had the Blitter chip that helped speed up graphics operations, which helped give them improved performance over a standard ST that otherwise had the same 8Mhz 68000 CPU.

Although GEM was nice and easy to use, no one would call it speedy. Since it was quickly ported to the ST in late 1984 and early 1985, there was not a lot of time for optimizations. And because it is embedded in ROM as part of TOS, updating it is not trivial. By this point there had been only a single update after the 1.0 ROMs became standard in late 1985: TOS 1.02, which was the version that shipped with the Mega ST and eventually made it into the other ST computers. This version was mostly bug fixes with few performance improvements.

My 1040STfm that I got in January 1989 had TOS 1.02.

However, developers figured out that they could optimize things themselves and soon software accelerators started appearing to help speed up GEM. The first of these was Turbo ST.

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Zoom meetings are held twice a month and I attended a recent…

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I don’t recall hearing anything about this book back in the early 90s, but perhaps it just was not commonly available here in the U.S.

Published in 1993, it covers newer hardware and software topics that had no obvious source of information elsewhere. In particular, it covers the Falcon030, its audio and DSP subsystems, GEMDOS/MiNT, AES enhancements and SpeedoGDOS. There are appendices for The Atari Style Guide, Object File Formats, The Cookie Jar and more.

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Intellivision Style

The first big competitor to the A…

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As far as any other details about ST Business, I have nothing. A Google search turned up basically no information about it. The only thing that came up was a no-longer-available listing for the December 1986 issue on eBay, which might have had the cover story of “Atari Goes Public”, which they did do in November 1986.

Well, it turns out that the listing re-appeared later last year and I snagged it. So I now also have the December 1986 / January 1987 issue of ST Business magazine.

Keep reading for some thoughts, highlights and a PDF scan of the entire issue.

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It first started in 1985 with the computer industry in relative doldrums. This was the year the 16-bit Atari ST and Amiga were introduced and before PCs had put a stranglehold on the industry. As a transition period, fewer computers were sold that year and RAM prices dr…

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The most exciting for me is that Goto 10 became a Substack Best Seller in the spring. Thank you so much to those of you that have subscribed, free or paid! I really appreciate it.

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Top 5 Posts

The most popular post this year was Atari Means Business with the …

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I wrote this program in standard Atari BASIC and it is (pun intended) pretty basic. It uses graphics mode 2, which is just 40x20 pixels with four colors. This gives things a nice, …

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Certainly the Atari ST suffered from weak programming documentation right from the start. Atari, always looking to keep costs low, didn’t produce a nice set of programming manuals for the ST like Apple did for the Macintosh and Commodore did for the Amiga.

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Back in 1995, the computer world was a vastly different place. Sure, Windows was on its way to becoming the dominant OS. But Mac OS was still loved. A…

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The first personal computers were built-your own, basically just a bunch of parts that you typically stuck into a simple metal case. To reach more customers, companies realized they needed to provide a more complete solution with a case.

The variety of weird designs is really remarkable. Let’s take a look at some and be sure to share your favorite strange computer designs in the comments!

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