Atari Touch Tablet unboxed 25 years after the fact
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Jan 20th 2009 10:40AM
posted Jan 20th 2009 10:40AM
Are you an artist wishing to unchain the shackles of traditional media, looking for a way to catapult yourself and your work into the 20th Century? A chap named Benj Edwards has been kind enough to unbox for us Atari's Touch Tablet, a classic piece of kit from the bygone age of 1984 that -- alongside the Atari Artist software -- lets users manipulate the size, location and color of shapes and lines. Digitally. The software comes in two versions: the four color version for those of you with 16K RAM, and the 16 color version for those of you with 24K powerhouse workstations. When you're done with your pixel-based Mona Lisa, you can back it up to a cassette -- which will sit in a box in your parent's garage until your older sister gets around to taping an REO Speedwagon album over it. What are you waiting for? Hit that read link.
A+++!! WOULD READ AGAIN!!!
That is the coolest thing! I never new ATARI came out with that!
yeah i know u r not new.
I used to play Bezerk, pong, george of the jungle, donkey kong, and the old pole position.
I think my parents hid anything about this touch screen machine away from me so I wouldn't want one.
Did this show up in Michael Crichton's movie Andromeda Strain?
I just ordered my first Wacom tablet last weekend and was reminiscing about this thing! I remembering drawing a train with it and using the "ray tool" to make the headlight do this trippy effect. What a train..........where are you now.
*remember not "remembering"
Also wasn't there an easter egg where clicking on the ATARI logo a couple of times made it play a little jingle?
Wow! How did you remember about clicking the logo playing a little tune? I can totally remember that now - confirmed.
I personally remember saving every dollar I got all summer so I could buy this for my 800XL. It was one of those gadgets that I had absolutely no need for but I just remember thinking how cool it would be to interface with the computer that way. (This was before I had ever touched a mouse.)
I also just wanted more peripherals to match my awesome computer. I still think all peripherals should be beige and brown with a stainless steel band rockin the brand and model.
Ok... what to say? Just... emm... OK.
ATARI !?!?!?!?
Add USB port and Vista support!
That tape drive was one of the most unreliable pieces of technology that I ever had to deal with!!
I remember typing in a program from Compute magazine that took several hours...saving it 4 times and losing it in 30 seconds. It's what made me switch to a C64 with a REAL disk drive!!
Cassette drives were useless no matter who made them.
The Ataris had a floppy drive too, probably a nicer one than the C64's.
I got an Atari 800XL for Christmas one year, and we had to get the diskette drive for my birthday in April because the cassette drive was such a POS. It was the most expensive present I ever got, but it paid off handsomely for my parents in the 25 years of free tech support that have followed.
Ah, I remember my old C64 with the tape drive and waiting half an hour or so for a program to load only to discover that it had cocked up and I had to start all over again. The Amiga with a floppy disk drive was a revelation in comparison...
i know that program. its the one where you build these pyramid things out of blocks. yeah, i had the same problem with my apple ][e. you type a few hundred lines of code in a few hours and *POOF* its all gone.
I had a Koala Pad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad/Painter) for the Commodore 64... pretty much the same thing but able to save to the 5.25" floppy drive. I wonder if it is still in my parent's garage somewhere? Maybe next time I'm back east I'll take a look for a little unboxing session.
Atari! You might guess I likey.
The Atari computer series was awesome. If Atari had a management team like Apple in the early days things would definitely be different in the gadget world.
If Atari wouldn't have sold the business to Warner Communications then things would have been different.
From what I remember reading Atari had a pretty relaxed atmosphere. However things changed when Warner took over and people started jumping ship. The rest was all down hill from there.
....... but Atari never dies.
I had one of those, and something even more rare. There were to Atari science "kits" developed by Dickinson University. One was a light probe and the other was a temperature probe, with related software and a book of experiments. They would take readings over time, and for fun you could even test to see if the light in the refrigerator really did turn off when you closed the door.
It was really amazing what could be done with 64k of memory.
I donated the two science kits to the computer museum in California. I never came across anyone else who had one.
I also had both of those things, tablet and science kit. I loved them, and used the science kit in particular for a ton of other things besides its intended purposes. But the rest of my family loved the tablet the most.
I never had the science kit, but I do remember cracking open a paddle controller to use the potentiometer for a "lie detector" program printed in Antic magazine. (I loved that magazine) The premise was that you could use tinfoil leads connected to the pot to detect the amount moisture on the fingertips, thereby measuring stress and the probability some one was lying to you. I'd use it on my brother and sister and ask them questions I knew they would lie about and cross the leads so the graph shot way up. I had them convinced it really worked. It really didn't. But it was a fun project.
[Quote=Rene ala Carte]
It was really amazing what could be done with 64k of memory.
[/Quote]
Like send a man to the moon, for example?
Another old-timer Atari 800 (48K!!!) owner here. I, too, chose the Koala Pad for my PC instead of Atari's version.
Ah, 8-bit assembly code...the last time Assembly was easy...
Thank you for the glorious old school goodness! What a beauty that thing was. I never got my hands on one though. I did, however, get a ColecoVision. Later I was given the Adam computer expansion #3. Ahhhh, Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom; it played off of a casette tape, TAPE!!!
Then there was the Magnavox Odessey2. Pick Ax Pete, Gunfighter, Sattelite Attack, Las Vegas Gambling; that beast is at my grandmas house still kickin'! Maybe she'll give it to me now. I would love to show my kids how we did it old school.
I wanted one of these sooo bad when I was a kid...
Triangles, Circles, and squares...Oh My!
These things are lots of fun. I have one, and yes I still use it every once in a while. It is still in great shape, and I have the box. it would be cool if I had an adaptor to usb. (maybe I should make one... need more free time...)
Thats about as old as the Atari 4 pin color plotter I have. Along with my Atari 400 and 800 computers with several cartridges.
5 1/4" floppy drive.
I've still got a TON of Atari swag in the basement. 800 (still my fav 8-bit because of the 4 joystick ports...how else are you going to play 4-player M.U.L.E.?), 800XL, 1200XL (great keyboard, lousy bios), 520ST, 1040ST, Mega4 STe...sadly, I sold both my Falcon 030 and TT030.
Here's more info on the AtariLab others were talking about up above:
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n6/atarilab.html
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/01/8bit_science_at.html
oh no, next it will be an Amiga net book.
10 GRAPHICS 11
20 LL=191
30 RL=79
40 FOR ZEBRA=0 TO 48
50 REM GTIA HIWAY * FAST LANE *
60 COLOR ZEBRA
70 PLOT RL, LL
80 DRAWTO 0,0
90 RL=RL-1
100 NEXT ZEBRA
110 GOTO 110
120 END
:-D
Wow - I'd forgotten but we had one of these - we have an Atari 400, then 600XL and then a 130XE (128kb of ram - it was a BEAST!). My dad's probably still got that table stuffed in a Draw - He's still got the 130XE and I think maybe the 600XL as well. Nothing was as cool as playing Atari Super Breakout with the Paddles! Those were the days!
These were used as padding for the bottom of the landfill that the ET carts were dumped into.
I remember the KoalaPad, which was also launched in 1984, and direct rival to the Atari CX77 Touch Tablet. The KoalaPad was more versatile, it supported Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, IBM PC, etc. The Atari Touch Tablet you could only use with Atari.
Jesus Engadget, I saw this in a magazine fifteen years ago! I thought you were supposed to be a NEWs site??
Man, talk about old news...
It is so strange to look back at that and think that it was once state of the art. 16kb of RAM?? I once had a computer with that amonunt and now I have a computer is 2 gigs of RAM which isn't even really all that much compared to what other people have in their towers.
I had a TI 99/4A back in 1982. 17k of memory, a cassette drive that worked most of the time, and a cartridge slot for video game cartridges. It was pretty awesome at the time but then we received a bunch of Apple II's at school and the little machine from Texas Instruments quickly lost its shine. Still, as my first computer it pretty much rocked! Now, all these years later, I'm a network engineer and have literally worked on thousands and thousands of different computers in my career, but it all started in the early 80's, the true wild west days for the fledgling computer industry. Ah, the memories...
Brilliant! I remember this.
I remember the KoalaPad that you used with Doodle for the Commodore 64!!! XD
This is so fake! Everyone knows that there were no such thing as "Touch Screens" pre-iPhone! Pahleeeeze!
Wow... if only Nintendo went this route with Mario Paint instead of going with the mouse. Maybe current wacom tablets would be much, much cheaper these days...
I had a 1200XL and all the cool stuff back then. I remember playing classics like Lode Runner and Miner 2049'er, Mule, oooo... takes me back.
I can't believe how much I want something so useless!
Ahh all this talk of the good ole' days reminds me of Zork. Now that was a role playing game
I had one of these way back in the day. I actually worked in the Atari booth at a tradeshow when these came out, and Timothy Leary (yes, THAT Timothy Leary) was there in the booth mesmerized by the art he could create with one.