The Atari 65XE computer of 1985 is one of nine 8-bit Atari microcomputer models manufactured in 1979-1987 as part of the XL and XE series.
Atari was established in 1972 and mostly produced electronic arcade game machines. In 1975 it began manufacturing home gaming consoles that connected to a TV set. One year later the company was acquired by Warner Inc., but the crash of the gaming market in 1983 weakened the company’s position. After a year, Atari was purchased by Jack Tramiel, who had left its competitor – the Commodore company – which he himself had founded. Atari’s expansion into Central and Eastern European markets was possible thanks to cooperation with local importers. Tramiel found a perfect business partner in Lucjan Daniel Wencel, owner of Logical Design Works (LDW), which operated in California, and its sister company – Karen, which was established with the Polish market in mind. This solution resulted in LDW becoming the sole distributor of Atari computers in Poland. The devices were sold in the Pewex chain of stores.
The Atari 65XE is a computer equipped with 64kB of RAM, 24kB of ROM memory, and a MOS 6502C CPU. It was manufactured in four versions, differing in the motherboard used. During The Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 1985, Atari announced other models of this device apart from the 65XE: the 65XEM (XE Music Computer), a specialised music computer, and the portable 65XEP (XE Portable). On its launch, the 65XE was behind the far more modern 16-bit Atari ST series. It was equipped with the Atari Basic “C” interpreter, i.e., a program for parsing and execution of other programmes. It was the improved, debugged version of the Atari Basic “B” programming language. The Atari Basic dialect was developed in 1978 by Shepardson Microsystems, which used a pre-existing high-level programming language called BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) developed in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz.
In the Atari 65XE, in line with the design standards of the 1980s, the main components are enclosed in a housing that also contains a four-row keyboard with a space bar in a separate line. To make the device work it was necessary to use the ports at the back to connect a monitor (or TV), a storage device (cassette tape recorder, a floppy disk drive, or a cartridge reader), and peripherals such as joysticks. The latter were based on the hand controller mechanism developed by Louis Blériot in 1909.

Author: Filip Wróblewski