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Part 2: More than meets the
eye.
The Atari 800
expansion bays were originally meant for just an OS "Personality Card"
and up to 3 16K Memory modules to give the computer system a total of
48K which for a computer system in 1979, was a very large amount of
memory. Also the CPU of the the system, the 8-bit 6502
processor was capable of a total of 64K of linear memory, so giving
the system 48K was an admiral amount of memory for this budding new
computer system.
However some
interesting things were hidden in those expansion bays.
Capabilities that even the very engineers who designed it never saw
possible at the time. However just as programmers had unlocked
numerous unknown capabilities to make the little Atari 2600 VCS do
magical and wonderful graphics that were never thought even remotely
possible when it was designed, so too were some magical secrets and
powerful capabilities just waiting to be unlocked within the Atari
800.
Companies such as
Axlon, Mosiac, Intec, Newell, BIT-3, Austin Frankin, CMC and many
others would develop and sell an assortment of OS boards, memory
upgrade boards, RAMdisk boards (the very first SSD drives), Video
boards and Parallel/Serial boards.
Even today on the
Internet's most active Atari community:
http://www.atariage.com there are dozens of
independent and small group hardware hackers continually developing
new boards for the Atari 800, everything from the original MYIDE
boards to Incognito OS boards to RAM boards, some have IDE hard drive
interfacing, others even have Western Digital 65816 CPU upgrades
bringing the Atari 800's into the 16-bit world of computing at up to
7mhz of speed.
The Atari 400 and
Atari 800 computers also have another very special expansion system
called SIO (Serial I/O) which is a very early version of what would
eventually become USB which is used today. An interesting fact:
The designer of the SIO port is Atari engineer Joe Decuir who is
today, one of the patent holders of the USB interface, so it would
seem his design would continue to evolve and in a sense ever PC and
MAC user has a little bit of Atari in their systems today, thanks to
Joe.
The SIO, just like
today's USB allowed a great amount of power and flexibility to be
added to the Atari 400 and Atari 800 computers. Connecting
devices (called Daisy chaining, essentially plugging one device into
the next and next and so forth) onto this SIO chain allowed for the
use of everything from Disk Drives, tape drives, Printers, I/O boxes
with Serial and Pararell ports, Voice synthesisers, MIDI interfaces
and other devices. The downside to the SIO design was that
is was an intelligent communications system, and each device required
its own CPU to communicate and work on the SIO bus, so this made the
devices inherently expensive. The other downside to the
SIO bus was its speed: 19.2K communication rate. Though
later hardware hackers were able to push the SIO to 38.4K speeds which
greatly helped.
Another avenue of
Expansion for the Atari 400 and Atari 800 computers were its front
controller ports. This were connected to the PIA chip (Parallel
Interface Adapter) and many devices such as Modems, Real Time clocks
and voice synthesisers used these ports. Corvus Systems,
makers of Hard drives and networking systems had an interface box that
plugged into Controller Ports 3 & 4 on the Atari 800 and allowed the
computer to use a hard disk system. Corvus also sold boxes
called MUX's that allowed multiple Atari 800's with Corvus interface
boxes to plug into the same hard disk. Up to 8 mux's could plug
into a single 8 port mux allowing for a whopping total of 64 Atari
800's to be able to connect to and boot from a single Corvus disk
system.
Once such commercial
installation of a 64 Atari 800 computer mux network was set-up at
Fordham Prepatory School in the Bronx, NY. Run by Father
Nick Lombardi, this network ran for many years. A
complimentary 3rd party OS board designed by David Small called The
Integrator, replaced the Atari OS board and allowed the Atari 800's it
was installed into to boot directly from a Corvus hard drive without
the need of booting from Atari 810 or other floppy disk drive to load
the Corvus driver to access the hard disk through the front controller
ports.
Continue to Part 3...
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