ScuzzBlog: Diaries October 2019 Entry 7th October 2019: Post 01: Atari 130XE - In need of a floppy. Atari 130XE - In need of a floppy. By the time Atari got to the Atari65XE and 130XE they must have realised the limitations of the kit given that it still had no formal integrated data saving facility. Hence I guess why this little computer was abandoned so quickly in favour of the ST. It is worth remembering that at the dawn of this machine computers like the Amiga 1000 were about to be launched onto the world and they came integral with floppy. Obviously a good deal more expensive but the pressures of data were all too real and soon the ST range would dominate with floppy incorporated. First thing I do with any computer system is establish how I can save data. It is so important that my most strictest of rules when using a computer is never do anything twice. Man does that annoy me so much if I ever have to repeat the same functions. So when I picked up this little computer first thing I did was look to the side to try and find the floppy drive. Second thing I did was buy an Atari 1050 drive and cassette drive. It took me an absolute age to get the DOS disk necessary to use the drive. And so when I dusted the 130XE down today to test the 1050 I decided to take a little peek inside. Truly nothing remarkable. Given that Sinclair was producing about the same with half the space there was good reason to expand this unit with a floppy and compress much of the wasted space. Also by 1985 we were already beginning to get the GUI itch and when you fire this computer up all you get is the READY notification. Not even an Atari welcome or details of the memory capacity etc. It takes the floppy boot to even bring up a basic menu. It's incredible to think that MSX machines with cartridge slot had at least some built in functionality as did the humble Commodore Plus/4. Anyway, I have a few 130XEs and a 65XE. They are basically the same as the 800 but with a bit more memory. 130 represents 128K and you guessed it 65 is for the 64K. Saying all that the size of the computer is kinda cute and I prefer to use this with the 1050 as it gives me more space on the bench. Atari 65 and 130XE by Atari using a MOS 6502C CPU at 1.79 MHz. Atari 130XE - In need of a floppy.

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Last updated 7th October 2019

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