Unofficial Mirror in
Memory of
Curtis "Curt" Vendel
The original proprietor of The Atari Museum,
the
hugely
respected computing historian Curt Vendel, sadly unexpectedly passed away aged 53 on August 30th 2020.
This website became
inaccessible around a year later when its hosting expired.
Having personally used this website and its predecessor
atari-history.com for research
over the years, it seemed such a shame for Curt's life's work to not
be indexed and
available on
the wider web, so I took it upon myself to mirror it here in as
complete a form
as I could piece together. This mirror is based upon the Wayback Machine's 2021-07-16 14:12 crawl of
atarimuseum.com, the last available before it went offline.
I have made
no changes to the content or layout, only manually checking every
page and fixing broken
links and images where I find them - and adding this explanatory
page. You can see the reconstruction
and cleanup process in the GitHub repo here.
As a fellow fan of Atari history, my only motivation in making this
mirror available
is to make his work as accessible as possible in its original form,
and I hope it is
received by the community as intended. While I have no personal
connection to Curt, he was
a hero and inspiration of mine and we had some good chats on
Facebook over the years,
so I like to think that he would approve. May he Rest In Peace
knowing that his efforts were not in vain.
Update: There's also now a
YouTube video explaining
the
story of this mirror in more detail, as well as showing off some of
the coolest exhibits in the museum!
As explained in the video, this website now has Karl Morris's
blessing as the official mirror. Karl was Curt's cofounder and
partner in the Atari Historical Society. I've also been working on
reconstructing a mirror of the sister site to this one - Karl's
excellent
Atari Explorer, with his blessing,
although it's still missing a few pieces.
