It was a good computer, a friend had one and I had a Commodore 64. The 64 had better sound and sprites, but the Atari had better color and animation.
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I liked the SIO system. Device independent I/O was nicely done.
K: Keyboard C: Cassette (slooooow) Dn: Disk drive P: Printer
Today, we have a device called FujiNET. It is basically a serial to Internet bridge.
N: For Network
And most programs just work across the Internet despite being 30 years old. Once the N: handler was done, Atari computers basically are networked.
Programming with the Internet works like serial does, and there have been a couple multi player games written in BASIC that perform nicely.
I plan on getting one for my 800XL one day in the near future.
The FujiNET is being made to worn with other machines too. They all vary in how this kind of thing can be made to happen. The Atari will end up a benchmark, or reference.
SIO today is seen as a very early USB type implementation that offered capability for up to 30 devices to coexist on the serial bus.
Pretty damn spiffy, and I feel it is one of the better features. Each 8 bitter has at least one stand out thing. On the Atari, this is one stand out often underappreciated.
The Apple had slots and an assembler monitor.
C64 had great sound, sprites, nice user port.
The designer of the SIO worked on the USB.
And Atari DOS was written by the same people that wrote DOS for the Apple ][. Shepardson Microsystems. The book ‘The Atari BASIC Source Book, written by some ot the same people is still an interesting read today.
Thanks for confirming that. I think I read about those things happening somewhere, and just wasn't really sure at the time I wrote my comment