Atari 810
Third-party enhancements such as the Happy 810 address these problems, as do replacement drives like the Indus GT with more storage and other features.
The machines that emerged as the Atari 8-bit computers had originally been designed as part of a project to develop a driver chipset for a new games console.
[1] Atari, recently purchased by Warner Communications, had placed Ray Kassar in the CEO position in March 1978.
The interface was based on a system Steve Wozniak had previously built while working at Hewlett-Packard to control a Shugart Associates SA-400 floppy drive.
This precluded the idea of having expansion slots that could be connected to external equipment, like on the Apple, as the openings would be difficult to shield property to avoid RF leakage.
[4] This led to the introduction of the SIO serial bus, a system that allowed devices to be daisy chained to a single port.
Most notable was the entry of several other manufacturers to the drive market, including Alps Electric and Micro Peripherals Inc (MPI).
This is one reason the machine was never considered seriously in the business market; applications like VisiCalc were not competitive with the Apple II when run on the Atari or Commodore 64.
[3] In a 1982 review for a third party replacement, InfoWorld described the 810 as "noisy, slow and inefficient by today's standards, and it had some reliability problems" and then described the sounds as "At times it almost seemed sick, the groans and creaks were so intense.
[13] While the 8-bit machines were first being introduced, the first MFM double-density drive controllers were appearing, allowing the same disks to store twice as much data, 180 kB.
Small numbers were hand-built using Tandon drives during 1980 and a few shipped to customers starting in June, but full-scale production never began.
It added a buffer able to cache one entire track of data, and along with the associated Warp Speed software, increased read performance about three times,[17] making it very competitive with the Apple II.
[7] The performance and reliability problems with the 810 also led to a thriving market for third-party drives like the Rana 1000 and Indus GT, along with a wide selection of replacements for Atari DOS.
[19] Containing "no true innovations",[20] the most notable change was the introduction of a new design language from Regan Cheng using off-white and black plastics will brushed metal overlay on switches and other fixtures.
It offered the new "enhanced" or "dual density" option that improved formatted capacity to 130 kB, although it was some time before DOS was upgraded to support it.
The back of the case had two SIO ports to allow daisy-chaining, a ring jack for the external power supply, and two pin switches to select the drive number from 1 to 4.
It also attempted to address the motor control speed issues, which required the Side Board to be replaced and the voltage of the circuit to be increased to 12V.
This added an entirely new card, the Power Supply Board, which included a tachometer that finally solved the speed problems.
A handle-like extension on the front of the door allowed the user to pull it down to close it, which latched when reaching the bottom of its travel.
