AI, or artifice intelligence, has been a focus of computing since the early days. In fact, at the beginning scientists thought we would have a computer that could speak intelligently before we had one that could play chess well. That turned out to be completely wrong. Solving Chess was “easy”. Today there are so-called “AI” tools that are becoming more mainstream and a couple that are popular are ChatGPT and Dall-E (from Open-AI). Dall-E creates unique images for you based on text prompts. It’s pretty cool (I’ve used to for some of the images in this post…

In March 1986, Byte devoted its cover to the Atari 1040ST and included a rather lengthy article about it, which they called a product preview. I have this physical magazine and I’ve re-read this article countless times. It was my go-to reference for the Atari ST before I was finally able to purchase my own…

8-bit Wars is a series where I compare other 8-bit systems to Atari’s 8-bit computers. I’m an Atari guy, so there’s bound to be some bias. Please comment should you disagree with my comparisons. The Atari 8-bit computers started shipping in Fall 1979. The entry-level model, the Atari 400, cost $549. The Commodore VIC-20 was released in 1981 at a price of $299 and was Commodore’s first computer with color graphics, as previously they only had the monochrome, all-in-one PET computers. So how did the Commodore VIC-20 compare to the Atari 8-bits…

End of an Era By 1995 I had been working professionally as a software developer for about a year, mostly doing DOS development, but using Microsoft Windows (and OS/2). In 1995, my poor Mega STe was showing its age. Although it was maxed out with 4MB RAM, its 16Mhz CPU was falling way behind current computers. At this point I primarily used it with Usenet to sell (manually, auction-style, pre-eBay) retro video game stuff I would buy at local flea markets and pawn shops…

I was in college for most of my Atari ST days. Since I used C a lot at school for many projects (Unix with gcc typically), I naturally started collected C compilers for the ST. In the ST world, Laser C was probably the most popular C compiler, at least in the late 80s. This was a newer version of the Megamax C compiler that came to the ST from the Macintosh back in 1986 or so…