Let's hear it for the Amiga's ancestors, the Atari 400/800/XL/XE Series!

[Foebane]

Before he worked on his magnum opus, the Amiga, Jay Miner headed up the development team at Atari in the 1970s. His engineering and custom chip design skills led to the development of elegant, unique and powerful hardware for the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-Bit series of computers that made them unique and sought after.

In particular, the Atari 8-Bit series, launched in 1979 with the Atari 400 and later 800, were especially powerful 8-bit machines that held their own against similarly powerful competition that came out a few years later, namely the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The expensive price given to the 400/800 by Atari didn't help sales, however, although they were worth it.

I myself had an Atari 600XL and later 800XL, and they proved to be excellent machines, with a whole series of games unique to the system, as well as those that were "born" on it, before being converted to other platforms, namely Boulder Dash, Blue Max and Bruce Lee. I loved every minute I had with them.

So let's hear it for the relatively unsung predecessors of the Amiga, the Atari 8-Bits!

[roondar]

In a very real sense, the Amiga is the ultimate Atari 2600/VCS.

Great ideas for the time and I do love the 8-bit Atari's, though I've never owned one until years after the fact.

[saimon69]

And, same as Amiga, Atari machines met a fate of bad marketing practices that prevented them to really shine

[Daedalus]

The 800XL was my first computer and served me well for many years before developing a couple of faults. I moved onto the Amiga after that, but never got rid of it. Recently, I rescued the 800XL from my parents' attic, did some repairs and got it working again. Cleaned the keyboard and case, fitted a "Biggus Dickus" (an excellent SD card disk drive emulator from Lotharek), gave it a couple of minor video mods and it's running happily again connected to my 1084S monitor

[ptyerman]

Still have my 600XL and 800XL, both are unmodified currently but I do have a boatload of peripherals for them such as disk drives, tape drives, serial/parallel interfaces and even a XEP80 80 column graphic display addon.
The 800XL gets some use from time to time but the 600XL hasn't been switched on for a few years now, the last time I hooked it up the keyboard was messing around with keys sticking and repeating. Never bothered looking into it and keep intending to sell it on but never got round to it.
The 800XL is a nice machine still all these years later, the only problem is the space you need to set everything up, with all the peripherals attached you can take up an entire room!

[Coagulus]

I still have an 800XL and 130XE. Wish they had been more successful in the UK as they missed out on a lot of good games. The conversion of Space Harrier in recent ish years proved what could have been done.

I loved the sound too despite bass notes being a bit pitchy!

[aeberbach]

I had a 400. Great games machine but not one that a programmer could ever love!