The Home Computer Hybrids

> By June 1979, Atari had sold over one million VCS consoles.

Speaking of an even weirder hybrid before the hybrids... By 1979 Atari released a BASIC cartridge for the Atari VCS (later renamed Atari 2600): the VCS/2600 was a console. No keyboard. So the BASIC cartridge shipped with the most horrible keyboard ever invented.

So in a way the console themselves were the first hybrid.

Believe, I know: it's how I wrote my very first program ever. It was super simple: basically modifying programs drawing colored lines across the screen.

IIRC -- but I was a kid back then and now I'm nearly the mid 50s -- that BASIC cartdridge's keyboard required to be plugged in both joystick ports.

Oh. The. (128 bytes of RAM) Memories.

The fact that the Apple II met the new FCC requirements was a major competitive advantage for Apple, and there have been rumors over the years about how that happened. The higher emissions allowance was why you saw the big shift from monsters like the Atari 800 (heavy cast metal frame, aluminum or pot metal) and Commodore PET to lighter chassis like the Atari XL series and the Commodore VIC-20 and C64.

The UK did not have emissions regulations at the time, and the most popular computer of the early 80s in the UK, the Acorn BBC Micro, had no shielding whatsoever.

Acorn wanted to break into the US market, and so they had to redesign the computer with a massive metal box inside the outer plastic case.

Their attempt to launch in the US was a huge failure, and most of those computers were shipped back to the UK and "unconverted" to be resold in their home market.

But they didn't remove the metal box. So Brits could always tell when they had an ex-US BBC Micro because it weighed twice as much and had a huge metal box inside it.

And I'm reading this article while sitting at an EMC/EMI test facility monitoring the test for one of my products. Certainly an interesting, and somewhat on-topic, read.

I had an Atari 400 as the first computer I bought myself, which I upgraded to a “real” (if small) keyboard that replaced the membrane keyboard. I took it to college and used it with a printer and the Action! cartridge editor to write papers. (My printer was a carbon electrode arc printer that burned marks into regular paper, producing a soft brownish print.)

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