Vital Statistics

In 1979, Atari's new 'home computer' division introduced two machines: the 400 and the 800. They debuted at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Both computers were able to play Atari VCS (2600) games via their cartridge ports.

Designed primarily as a computer for children, the Atari 400 had an "advanced child-proof design featuring pressure-sensitive, wipe-clean keyboard". It had a single cartridge port under the front cover. The Atari 400 boots-up into "Notepad", the only built-in program. Any other programs would have to run from cassette or cartridge, This included BASIC, or any other programming language. Lacking sufficient memory and having an inadequate keyboard, the Atari 400 was best used simply for playing games. Many games were clones of actual video arcade hits, others were original or copies of other popular (or not) computer games of the 80's.

The 800 was 100% backward compatible with the 400, and had two cartridge sockets, a proper keyboard, more RAM (48K or 64K) and it even came with a video cassette recorder socket. It also had a DIN socket built-in to allow connection to a high-resolution colour monitor.

Both the Atari 400 and 800 were designed by a team which included Jay Miner, who later went on to help design the Commodore Amiga 1000.