| The Atari 810 disk drive was
introduced at the unveiling of the Atari 400/800 computers
at the Winter CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas.
January 1979. There are
two versions of the Atari 810. The MPI version which has a
door handle that swings up and you slide in and out the
5.25" diskette. The other was the Tandon version
(shown above) which has a spring loaded up/down door that
when opened would eject the diskette out about 1 to 2 inches
out of the drive opening for easy removal.
The Disk drive is a SIO
device with 2 ports on the rear of the unit to allow "Daisy
Chaining" of other peripherals onto the SIO bus.
Up to 4 Atari 810's could be connected together, each drive
having its own unique Drive Number ID from 1 to 4.
On the rear of the 810 next
to the Power connector is a round window opening, inside of
the opening are 2 slider switches, one behind the other.
Visual directions for setting the switches shows how to set
the drive number of the disk drive. Drive number 1 is
always required to allow the computer to have a disk drive
to "boot" from to load the DOS (Disk Operating System) that
allows the Atari 400/800 computers to access and use the
diskettes.
The drives are single
sided/single density disk drives that can store 90K of data
(88K once the diskettes are formatted.)
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