Creating the Atari 800
Meet the architects of the 400/800, explore ANTIC, CTIA and POKEY, and read Joe Decuir’s original engineering notebooks.
Read the history →The people / The machines / The original records
A different kind of home computer.
From the Atari 800’s custom chips to the ST’s graphical desktop: explore how these computers were made, who made them, and what their creators recorded and remembered.
Follow the development
Hardware and software histories
Each history brings together the development story, named contributors, design decisions, and annotated sources. The software pages distinguish the 8-bit OS, DOS, and BASIC from the ST’s TOS, GEM, and GEMDOS.
The 8-bit OS, DOS & BASIC
How Atari’s systems programmers and Shepardson Microsystems built three distinct pieces of the home-computer experience.
Read the history →Creating the XL series
From the 1200XL to the 600XL and 800XL: industrial design, engineering, expansion, compatibility, and the pressure to reduce costs.
Read the history →Creating the XE series
Follow the XL’s development into the 65XE and 130XE, the use of banked memory, and the later 800XE and XE Game System.
Read the history →Creating the Atari ST
The ST’s origins and later models through the Falcon, including TOS versions, hardware milestones, and US availability.
Read the history →Creating the ST operating system
Atari and Digital Research’s work in Monterey: hardware bring-up, graphics, GEM, boot disks, and the struggle to fit TOS into ROM.
Read the history →Creating GEMDOS
The DOS beneath GEM: its Digital Research origins, Atari’s adoption, the programming interface, and its place within TOS.
Read the history →At the engineering bench
Joe Decuir’s notebooks preserve work from 1977 and 1978, before the Atari 400 and 800 reached customers. They contain handwritten engineering logs, diagrams, calculations, testing notes, and meeting records. The 1977 volume also includes earlier VCS work, so these are broader engineering records rather than two books exclusively about the finished Atari 800.
The Atari 800 notebook guide identifies sample pages and links the Internet Archive records. The scans do not contain a useful searchable text layer, and PDF page numbers differ from handwritten sheet numbers.
Read the software, too
The local collection also preserves the 400/800 OS source listing, Atari BASIC Source Book, Inside Atari DOS, XL OS addendum, and Atari ST Internals. The individual histories explain where these documents fit and whose work they describe.