This blog reminds me of -me- back in the day. I cut my teeth on programming bad Atari BASIC games, but eventually I learned 6502 assembly and wrote my own disassembler, modem routines, etc... heady days!
And funny timing, this weekend I (finally) plugged in and got working an old 800XL I bought on eBay about a year ago -- but after purchasing the machine, it gathered dust while I got distracted with so many other things. :-)
This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk. Previous owner had the machine for decades and was very meticulous. It also came with a 1050 disk drive which makes scary wheezing noises when the disk spins, lol. I don't think I'll use the disk drive much since everything interesting is downloadable nowadays in seconds in ATR image format; I also picked up a SIO port to serial adapter, so I can link the Atari to my laptop. It's pretty amazing, the Atari sees my laptop as a disk drive using RespeQt [1] on the laptop. It is -so- much faster/easier than actually dealing with the disks like back in the day.
And if you thought disks were slow... this machine also came with a cassette drive (!!) but it needs some lube or something, the rotors don't spin at the right speed. I kinda want to show some of my students the slow speed at which we used to be tortured: ten minutes to load a single game, and that only if you were lucky enough for it to load successfully on the first try...
The most interesting aspect of this experiment is the speed at which technology operates now: I had forgotten just how slow everything was. A simpler time.
It sounds like these are homemade collections of software, not off-the-shelf store-bought stuff.
If I’m right, then this is the real gem of your collection, not the hardware. That hardware is much easier to come by than homemade, personal collections of disks. In fact, such collections are exceedingly rare and very expensive if you can find them at all. Sellers will often break a collection and sell one disk at a time for crazy prices like $10-20 each, without even knowing if the disk works.
I sincerely regret selling my collection about 15 years ago. I don’t regret selling the hardware.
This. Please image those disks. You may find you have something that has not been backed up to the Internet until now. Pretty sure I had at least one C64 demo that I have yet to be able to find online in over 20 years of looking.
> This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk.
Please consider taking full dumps of these disks and uploading them to the Internet Archive software collection. Floppy disk data are extremely fragile, and the Internet Archive is one of very few institutions that can take advantage of existing copyright exemptions for libraries to properly store such content for the foreseeable future.
You need an SIO2SD or SIO2USB device. It plugs into the SIO port on the Atari and reads/writes to an SD card. You can then save disk images from the disk drive to the SD card. Transfer the SD card to a modern computer and upload the image files to the internet archive.
There’s lot of info on the web about this, even YouTube videos if you prefer that. But here’s one random discussion:
I'm the original author of AspeQt (of which RespeQt is a fork: the maintainer after me turned out to be hard to get along with, so the guys in the AtariAge community forked it). Great to see it still brings joy to people after all these years.
Contrary to Turkish, Estonian, Latvian and Hungarian are all EU official languages. That means that all EU legislation is legally required to be translated to these languages and it is readily available in all these languages for free to train the AI model for translating to those languages.
Indeed, also see linguee.com which uses (mainly) official EU documents to feed an enormous amount of word and phrase translations. Beautiful site that I've been using a long time - and only learn this minute that they are in fact also owned by deepL.
I am unsure if the support for those languages are better vs. Google Translate, but the small set of languages it used to support a year ago or something is definitely better. I remember French and Spanish being way better. DeepL's Polish is not that great, that I can say for certain! Not sure if better than Google Translate's though.
Not really. Try to have discussions using DeepL and Google Translate. Ask native speakers which one was more accurate and whatnot.
I do not know French, but DeepL allowed me to speak to someone using the language, and apparently at some point some people thought I was a native speaker!
Pretty much same story here -- few things affected the path of my life as much as that one device did. I cannot overstate its impact on my ability to get creative with limited resources, seek out and solve tough problems, and have pride in creating things for others.
I remember really struggling to get the tape drive to work. Sans internet, it was quite a challenge to figure out how to get it going. That was quite likely the spark that made me want to learn anything and everything about hardware.
Ah, my Atari days *swoon*. Learning 6502 assembly on an Atari when I was 14 made me the person I am today. ahahahahah
Atari 8-bit and Commodore machines (and Apple II as well) did share a common 6502 CPU, but the coprocessing chips for graphics and sound are really what separated these machines. Apple's capabilities were far inferior, but it also was released years before the others. (If I remember correctly it was 1977, 1979, and 1982 for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and C64).
Atari developed three specialized chips for these computers; two for graphics and one for sound, building on what they learned from the original VCS/2600 machine. Programming these machines is primarily a matter of mastering these three chips.
Unlike the 2600 game machine, there was indeed a frame buffer on the 8-bits, and Atari engineers did some really neat tricks to make interesting use of display memory, allowing programmers to display things differently in horizonal strips down the screen, trading off memory usage, pixel size, number of colors, and text display. As a kid playing lots of Atari games back then, you quickly noticed patterns in how the screen was always laid out -- scores and status along the top or bottom, fancy graphics in the middle.
Commodore's entry a couple years later was suspiciously similar in capabilities, but in a massively cost-reduced form. A big leap in sound tech, but a step sideways or backwards in graphics. In junior high we sat at different lunch tables, emotions ran pretty hot on our nerdy brains back then.
Jack Tramiel never gave us a shiny, white telephone or mp3 player but he was very much the same conniving, non-technical pitch-man that Jobs was, less the presentation polish and boyish good looks. If you look at Commodore during and after his reign there is a marked difference. They're also both very interesting people who should be respected for what the accomplished and often vilified for how the accomplished it. Neither should be your role model IMO.
In some ways though Jobs and Tramiel are polar opposites:
Tramiel was interested "in computers for the masses, not the classes" so it was all about "rock bottom pricing" and undercutting competitors; Jobs especially in his later days was interested in premium products and eventually luxury products.
Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals.
At Atari Corp they did seem to learn a bit more on this front, with a series of models all compatible with each other... but innovation and development on the operating system basically stalled from 1985 until about 1990. TOS 1.04 was really only small incremental improvements and bug fixes over the original (quite fantastic for its time) release and it came out in 1989, 4 years after the initial launch.
And I get the impression that the early 90s push at Atari towards multitasking and major improvements in the OS might have come at the behest of his sons taking over and their attempt to try to get into the workstation and DTP market.
By 1991/92 it was too late. The Atari Falcon was an awesome computer, and the final versions of TOS/MultiTOS were respectable for their time, about equivalent on paper with Apple's MultiFinder and with Windows 3.11. But there wasn't a community of devs or a broad enough audience for the product, and Motorola had marked the 68k line for death.
> Tramiel never understood or invested in growing a platform or growing, expanding, intercompatible product line. Each Commodore machine under his watch was a brand new machine, not compatible with the others except for maybe a few peripherals.
But, iirc, very very very few computer manufacturers prioritized compatibility in that way in those days though, and for good reason, it would have be stupid expensive. Some manufacturers got around the problem (Commodore did this as a matter of fact) by incorporating all or part of the previous line in the new machines and enabling compatibility modes.
> But, iirc, very very very few computer manufacturers prioritized compatibility in that way in those days though, and for good reason, it would have be stupid expensive.
You don't recall correctly. The only major brand that didn't prioritize compatibility was Commodore.
Maintaining compatibility limited the ability to add new features but it wasn't 'stupid expensive'. What is expensive is throwing out what you have and creating something incompatible from scratch. When you have hundreds of thousands or millions of units out there, not being backward compatible means you risk losing most of those customers.
Nearly everything that ran on the original Apple II ran on the IIe and IIgs, and nearly everything that ran on the Atari 800 ran on the XL and XE models. Nearly everything that ran on the original 1981 IBM PC can run on a modern PC compatible.
c128 was a case of idle engineers with no plan/strategy gluing unsold garbage components (graphic chip left over from earlier failed project and Z80) to c64 and scamming public with misleading name. 2 CPUs, 2 graphic chips, 2 monitor outputs, all in one package.
Even without a C64 mode, the C128 is a cool system. Dual monitor outputs, 128K RAM, 2 MHz 6502, great BASIC, fast floppy drives. The only thing that would have been better would have been to add these things to the C64. Also nice: dual SIDs.
They could have added all of the above without breaking backward compatibility. This would have encouraged programmers to check for the enhanced features and use them if available.
Of course, long term, they would have needed to go with the 65816 and ultimately switch to another processor architecture.
I think if all of the 8-bit and 16-bit systems had survived until today, they would all be running on Wintel hardware but with their own operating systems, just like Apple Macs.
Well, that's simply not true for the Atari 8-bit line (mostly compatible from 1979 right through to the XE series which continued right into the late 80s and even early 90s), the Apple II line (II, II+, IIe, IIc, IIgs, as well as cards that slotted into Macs), MSX and MSXII, and of course the 16-bit era with MS-DOS machines and Macintosh, Amiga and Atari ST lines.
Honestly, Commodore and Sinclair 8-bits are the outliers here? C-128 came quite late in the game.
Commodore did have a fair bit of compatibility within the PET/CBM line.
The C128 is a good example of how Commodore did compatibility wrong. Instead of creating a 100% C64 compatible mode, separate from the C128 mode, they should have taken the C64 and added a second bank of 64K of RAM, an MMU, an enhanced VIC-III with added registers for the enhanced graphics (eg. colors, resolutions, sprites), a second SID, a 2 MHz CPU, an enhanced KERNAL, and an enhanced BASIC that had the same tokens as BASIC v2. While C128 mode was very similar to the C64 mode, it wasn't enough to run hardly any C64 apps and games without modifications.
I don't blame Bil Herd for what the C128 is though. It is a great computer, especially considering he was fighting the top levels of Commodore to get it out the door. If he'd had more support, it could have been better.
I feel like the right way to do it would have been to have shipped a C64 compatibility mode in the Amiga, instead. An A500+ with a 100% C64 compatible mode capable of running a C64 in a window even, IMHO would have been great product that could have sold like gangbusters because the C64 was still a hot selling product right through the late 80s. I can't imagine it would have been that expensive to do given how well understood the C64 architecture was at that point.
Either that or have built the Amiga around a 65816 or similar instead of 68000. Like the IIgs but with even better sound and graphics.
> Either that or have built the Amiga around a 65816 or similar instead of 68000.
This would be a huge mistake. The 68000 was much more elegant and had a way forward, something the 65816 never had. Had they gone the 65816 route, there would never be an Amiga with a better CPU except, maybe, a faster one.
And the whole Amiga 1000/2000/500/600 was saddled with TV signal timing dependencies that made it more difficult to have better graphics and ended up having to play catch-up with VGA and Sound Blaster.
65816 at 7MHz would be faster than 68000 despite 8 bit databus. one modified for full 16bit would fly circles around motorola. Bill Mensch would have no problem extending and growing this chip as long as Commodore was buying. 65816 already has reserved mnemonic for expanding instruction set further.
The 65816 (much like the 6502 before it) punched way above its weight, but that'd not be enough in the long term.
There was a point neither IBM nor Motorola cared about making PPC CPUs for Apple - that's why Apple moved to Intel. Moving to a bespoke, Apple-only CPU, would only precipitate things by making a series of CPUs just for Apple. Not sure WDC would be able to rival the investment of the big CPU shops of the time.
If, instead of tapping WDC they went to MOS with a roadmap that could accommodate both Apple and Commodore, maybe history would be different. In either case, these are parallel universes I'd love to observe.
This chip wasn't ready when they were building the C128. It was later included in the C65.
But, apart from that, there is a lot Commodore could have done incrementally with the C64, making it iteratively more functional without breaking backwards compatibility that the company simply didn't want to.
> he was fighting the top levels of Commodore
The 128 shares a lot of sins with the Apple /// and comes from a very similar story. At least Apple learned something from the /// and made the //e, //c, //c+, and the IIgs (lovely, albeit kludgy, machine, which was an absolutely idiotic project that only took resources away from the Mac). Computer for computer, an LC with Apple //e PDS board was a smarter choice.
IIgs was a lovely machine that was kludged and handicapped because they didn't want to take resources away from the Mac. They could easily have clocked it up 4mhz or higher and had a much more capable machine. But my understanding is they didn't want to eat into Macintosh market share.
But schools here in Canada at least were highly invested in the Apple II, and my school acquired a whole fleet of IIgs machines. They were pretty nice actually. If they'd clocked it higher it would have been a very worth competitor for Amiga and Atari ST. But they didn't.
> handicapped because they didn't want to take resources away from the Mac.
They had resources. The IIgs had a ROM Toolbox, a lot of hardware and was, overall, a very complicated machine that took multiple iterations to be developed. Apple was trying to make a 16-bit Apple II since before the Mac.
That they didn't want it to take sales from the Mac, makes sense. The IIgs was an evolutionary dead-end. There was no successor for the 65816.
No matter what they did with the 65816, it'd still have segmented memory, few registers (somewhat aleviated by the single-byte address trick) and no way forward - no MMU, no FPU. WDC still makes them, and never made a 65832 or 65864. The ST and Amiga were excellent opportunities thrown away. Commodore could have the 3000 be the entry-level Unix workstation Sun would sell and, with that, gain a foothold of the technical and financial desktop market. Commodore had the professional video market thanks to the Video Toaster, but made machines where the Toaster wouldn't fit. Atari, OTOH, made a couple decent workstations, but never invested much in anything beyond gaming machines with tiny monitors. It found a niche in the Music segment thanks to its MIDI interfaces, the same way the Mac survived because if was at the right place to take hold in low-end publishing.
I rode the Atari ST wave back then. Until I bailed and got a 486 and ran Linux in 93. Yes, Atari half-heartedly marketed the TT030 as a Unix workstation, but it never stuck. I still remember the headline of the little snippet in UnixWorld magazine about it "Up from toyland." Not taken seriously in the Unix market, really, and by the time they had a product, that wave (68k based Unix workstations) had crested anyways.
The real problem for both Commodore and Atari in that era (apart from moribund sales, small market, bad management, etc) was that Motorola was already working towards killing off the 68000 by the early 90s. I'm not sure what Atari or Commodore would have done if they could have held on another couple years. PowerPC ended up being a dead-end, too.
Yeah, I don't like programming the 816, either. But in that era it wasn't the worst. WDC made the 816 just for Apple, really. (And didn't do the greatest job imho, but whatever) If Apple had asked for it, they would have made an 832, added more registers, whatever. It would have been a hack... but so was x86.
Apple's problem was that until the LC (93? 94? 95? I forget. My mom bought one at my recommendation) they didn't have a reasonably priced low-end Mac to sell to people or schools who would have gotten something in the Apple II series in the past. They seemed to have lost a big part of the education market when they dropped/failed-to-advance the II line.
> reasonably priced low-end Mac to sell to people or schools who would have gotten something in the Apple II series in the past.
Even with the heavy discounts Apple gave to the education market (brilliant strategy, BTW) the Apple IIs were not exactly competitively priced. So much, in fact, PC clones ate away the educational market with a product with a much higher perceived value (kids would learn to use the computers that were going into offices).
As a Canadian I am surprised to hear schools, "were highly invested in the Apple II". In Ontario and any other province I've heard about, Commodore PET, VIC-20 and 64 were nearly ubiquitous. What province were you living in?
Even if clocked higher, the IIgs didn't have the video power to compete with the Amiga. No blitter, sprites, or hardware scrolling.
What Apple product wasn't priced too high? Always have been, since day one.
ok, I stand corrected, but I will say that the Apple II line represented smaller iterations of the generally same architecture, right?
i.e., Commodore I guess didn't iterate within the same architecture as much, breaking that compatibility more easily.
One of the key difficulties of making a faster Apple II was the time-critical routines involved in reading/writing floppies. It was not sufficient to throttle back to 1 MHz when running time-critical loops, but one would need to emulate the timing of a 6502 doing that. Commodore made a better 6502 for the C65, but it'd wouldn't work on an Apple II because it wouldn't have the same cycle timings.
The IIgs and the //c+ was faster and very compatible thanks to a crazy number of hacks in them to acommodate Woz's brilliance.
In retrospect, Apple should have released a Disk II+ that isolated the timings from the CPU and let software break. Commodore should probably have done the same.
I have to laugh when people call the C128 a market failure. It sold 4.5 million units. The C64 sold 13 to 27 million units (depending on who you ask). The Apple II line sold 5.5 million units. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum sold 5 million. The MSX line sold 5 million. The Atari 8-bit line sold 3.5 million. The Tandy Color Computer line sold 3 million. The Amiga line sold 11 million (6 million were the Amiga 500 model). The Atari ST line sold 5 million.
The C128 only looks like a failure when compared to the C64 which it was compared to a lot for obvious reasons. Compared to the rest of the industry, it was a smash hit, even if most people used it in C64 mode.
If the entire Commodore 8-bit line had been backward compatible like the other manufacturer's computer lines, its total would be 20 to 36 million.
That number is very strange. It'd make it outsell the C64c over its lifetime even though both computers coexisted and Commodore killed the 128 in favor of the still more profitable 64c.
> The MSX line sold 5 million
About 9 million, according to Wikipedia, but I would bet in higher numbers because they were manufactured by a lot of different companies, marketed under lots of different brands in a lot of different countries. We know they sold 7 million in Japan alone (probably counting MSX, MSX2, 2+ and Turbo R).
I remember one of the documentaries he was openly talking about how he locked out competitors when at atari. He did it by buying up fab space in any company that could make something for a competitor.
"After the 400 and 800 launched, power users awed by Star Raiders proved eager to flex the machine’s advanced capabilities. But Atari, following its closed model with the 2600, had never intended to spill the secrets of the HCS architecture outside of special agreements with contracted developers. Crawford recalls, “There were about half a dozen people I knew who’d been bugging me for that information, and I had told them, ‘No, I can’t tell you anything.'”
Ironic that it was the Atari that seemed like the "closed system" then. I had a 400 with the horrible membrane keyboard (hey, it was cheap) but there was no documentation on how to program it outside of BASIC.
For Commodore, we had the Commodore Inner Space Anthology, put out by the wonderful people who published The Transactor magazine (http://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor/).
That book was amazing. The Atari Assembler cartridge and magazines completed the picture of what you could do with the Atari 8-bit. I know there was another book I loved, but I cannot remember its name. I have them in a storage garage along with my 400 and 130XE.
I had friends who had the Action language cartridge but I never got to play with that one. Apparently there was information there about the machines internals.
I had an 800XL myself <3. Because my parents couldn't afford the more popular commodore 64 here. The commodore had a 6510 by the way but it was almost the same.
The display list interrupt was indeed really cool, combining different strips of video modes. The one thing I did miss was combining different text colours on the same line. The commodore could do this, the Atari couldn't.
The sound wasn't as good as the SID, but it was still better than any other sound chip at the time. It had four voices when most chips had three and two of the 8-bit channels could be combined into a 16-bit channel, giving one 16-bit channel and two 8-bit channels, or two 16-bit channels, giving much better sound quality.
The Ataris had Player-Missile graphics, sort of like sprites that were specially/easily handled. I seem to recall that there was one player (16px wide x screen height) and 4 missiles(4 px wide x screen height) that could be cheaply moved back and forth across the screen. There was some collision detection between them and other things that were on the screen.
The Apples had several graphics modes, many of which were strange and somewhat pointless on a green screen (yay for some colors in even columns, some in odd), but nothing special to accelerate games IIRC. On the other hand, they had a lot more memory and they felt about a generation ahead. The 800 seemed like an advanced 2600, but the Apple felt like a real computer.
However, speaking of generations ahead -- the Atari 400 beat the 2016 MBP to the punch in the horrible flat keyboard race.
Ah yes, the player/missile graphics :) Actually there were 4 "players" 8 px wide (although you could of course put several side by side) and 4 "missiles" 2 px wide (the name already gave away that you couldn't draw much more than a bullet with 2 px of width). The width of the "sprites" could also be stretched, but you could only move them horizontally in BASIC - for vertical movement you had to actually move the sprite's bytes in memory, and BASIC was too slow to do that smoothly. I had a 800 XE (the German version of the 130 XE - the same Atari ST lookalike design, but only 64 K) and programmed some games/"demos" in BASIC which I still fondly remember. One of them was a train with a steam engine and 3 carriages (the four "players", the carriages were double-width) which rolled over the screen. Another was a game in which you could bet money on one of four snails (again the four players) - the snails would move a random (small) amount, then pause for a second, then move another random amount, until they all reached the finish line. Nerve-racking action!
Ah yes, I was an OS/2 evangelist for years, trying to get all my coworkers and friends to switch to it after 2.1 came out, I guess around 1992-1993ish.
We used OS/2 almost exclusively at the civil engineering firm I worked for at the time, building computer simulations of traffic flow and transit ridership models for cities around the U.S.; our clients all had regular PCs on their desktops and we needed to run clean 32-bit software since the simulations required a flat memory memory model. Programming for OS/2 (using Fortran, lol) was such a revelation back then. It was my first job out of college and I was so naive and enamored with this amazing tech and couldn't understand why everyone around me was using these clunky and crash-prone OSes from Microsoft!
OS/2 with its new UI and great compilers was a dream. And no one ever mentions how you could make the window for each individual folder have a different background color! I spent a lot of time playing with this instead of writing code :-)
I can't even recall how many weekends I spent at friend's houses trying to get display drivers and printer drivers to work on friend's home computers. It was one of my first real tech disillusionments.
Of course we all know how it worked out in the end: by late 1994 this weird thing linux (slackware I think?) captured my attention, and in 1995 we could compile 32-bit programs at work for our clients that targeted Windows 95.
Together those two things meant the end of OS/2 for me, and like so many others I didn't much think about it ever again.
I remember treating folders with custom backgrounds as "multiple desktops" when maximalized, though that might have been 2.x specific thing as I don't think I used it in 3.0 and 4.0.
For me, OS/2 ended around the time my father finally switched full time to NT4, and sometime later I got my own PC with Win95 OSR2
We had Delphi for OS/2 named Sibyl, we used Describe/2 as word processor, we had ObjectDesktop for prettier Desktop. The excitement that Navigator became available and would replace IBM WebExplorer. I had great times with OS/2.
> RTFM is an initialism for the expression "read the fucking manual".
> RTFA ("read the fucking/featured article"—common on news forums such as Fark.com[6] and Slashdot, where using "TFA" instead of "the article" has become a meme)
I don't know of any studies looking specifically at smoking vs non-smoking, but its been highly speculated to be a strong risk factor. Apparently, there is a big gap in prevalence of smoking between men and women in China (close 50% for men, closer to 5% for women), which is thought to be at least partially an explanation for the differences in deaths (2/3rds of deaths were male, 1/3 were female).
"Low prevalence of smokers, and no allergic diseases despite of drug hypersensitivity and urticaria was self-reported by any patients, indicating that allergic diseases and smoking history may not be the susceptible factors for COVID-19."
"Together, this study indicates that smokers especially former smokers may be more susceptible to 2019-nCov and have infection paths different with non-smokers."
> The field is weakening over South America, and the red area over North America is losing strength.
This nonsensical caption, saying the exact same thing twice while using different words, wins the award for the worst writing I've read today. And I read a lot today.
Sigh, another garbage clickbait headline pointing to a scaremongering article with nothing new to say.
Wow, I'll take a look. Looks awesome! This particular dataset was very small because the agency which did the data collection aggregated everything into neighborhoods before they gave it to me. So, performance hasn't been a problem at all yet. We'll be tackling some larger datasets soon, so we'll see!
Nice things: simple tool that does one thing well. As mentioned above, it lets the database itself decide on permissions. If you want SSL support, just put it behind an NGINX reverse proxy. It lets you get creative with queries in the query-string part of your url.
Lacking: I didn't really find anything lacking; it was able to do everything I needed. I'm a pretty basic end-user, not an expert. At first I was confounded by the limitation of one schema per PostgREST instance; but that's easy to work with or work around. I created a single "api" schema which contained nothing but views of tables that lived in other places. You can also just run more than one instance of PostgREST if you want to expose more than one schema.
single schema was discussed before. the idea behind it is that it's a simple mental model (what's in the api schema is accessible to http) so it catches errors like exposing things you don't want to especially since the webdev community is not very big on strict database permissions per role.
One trick though, if you specify the schema as an empty string "" then entities in the query will not be fully qualified, so this will give the search_path the ability to do it's work
And funny timing, this weekend I (finally) plugged in and got working an old 800XL I bought on eBay about a year ago -- but after purchasing the machine, it gathered dust while I got distracted with so many other things. :-)
This Atari came with 100s of floppy disks and a folder with dot-matrix printouts cataloging the files on each disk. Previous owner had the machine for decades and was very meticulous. It also came with a 1050 disk drive which makes scary wheezing noises when the disk spins, lol. I don't think I'll use the disk drive much since everything interesting is downloadable nowadays in seconds in ATR image format; I also picked up a SIO port to serial adapter, so I can link the Atari to my laptop. It's pretty amazing, the Atari sees my laptop as a disk drive using RespeQt [1] on the laptop. It is -so- much faster/easier than actually dealing with the disks like back in the day.
And if you thought disks were slow... this machine also came with a cassette drive (!!) but it needs some lube or something, the rotors don't spin at the right speed. I kinda want to show some of my students the slow speed at which we used to be tortured: ten minutes to load a single game, and that only if you were lucky enough for it to load successfully on the first try...
The most interesting aspect of this experiment is the speed at which technology operates now: I had forgotten just how slow everything was. A simpler time.
[1] RespeQT - https://github.com/RespeQt/RespeQt