When I was a kid I fell in love with computers. Specifically, I fell in love with the Atari 800, one of the first microcomputers. I wanted to know everything about it: how it worked, how to program it, about the things you could do with it. I was hungry for information about that computer, about all computers, really. I read about them constantly. With every trip to the grocery store, I bugged my parents to buy me computer magazines. With every trip to the library, I headed straight to the Dewey 000s, the computer science section. I sent away for all the free information I could get, in the form of brochures and catalogs that came in the mail. I stored the reading material and the knowledge as long as I could.
Although it’s been more buy sales lead than a few years, that Atari computer remains one of my favorite things, as is finding information about it. So not much has changed there. What has changed is that I can use Internet Archive to share that information with other “retrocomputer” enthusiasts, historians, researchers, and students. The amount of information that’s been archived (by myself and many others) about this niche within a niche of computer history would have boggled kid me. Heck, it boggles adult me.
Here’s the first version of the operator’s manual for the Atari 800 computer, printed in 1979. Only 200 copies were printed. It includes photos of pre-production versions of the hardware and screenshots that don’t match what the released version of the computer would actually display. As a historical artifact, it gives insight into the process of creating a microcomputer and the decisions that the hardware and software engineers were working though. It’s easy to open a couple of windows to do a side-by-side comparison with the more common released version, from later that same year, which trades some of the quaintness for accuracy.