Atari, in Europe sold a great number of these Program Recorders. A replacement for the original Atari 410 and the later released Atari 1010
Tape drives. The XC12 matched the styling of the Atari XE series of computers released in 1985-1988. The
European computer market consumer did not have the spending dollars of
their US counterparts, so the disk drives were outside the budget of many
eager Atari computer enthusiasts, so an economical alternative was the program recorder.
Due to such heavy use
of this peripherals, many hardware hackers modified the units to increase
their transfer speed to give data saves and loads a
boost in speed.
