The Atari 400 and 800 were both announced in December 1978, though they didn’t actually start shipping until late in 1979. Designed primarily as a computer for children, the Atari 400 has an “advanced child-proof design featuring pressure-sensitive, wipe-clean keyboard”. It has a single cartridge port under the front cover.
The Atari 400 boots-up into “Notepad”, the only built-in program. Any other programs will have to run from cassette or cartridge – this includes BASIC, or any other programming language. Game cartridges can be inserted into the cartridge slot in front, starting instantly with no fuss. Many games were clones of actual video arcade hits, others were original or copies of other popular (or not) computer games of the 80’s.
| Manufacturer | Atari Inc. | CPU | MOS 6502B @ 1.79 MHz |
| Year Introduced | 1979 | RAM | 8KB (Expandable to 48KB) |
| Introductory Price | $550 | Storage | Cassette Floppy Disk (external) |
Additional Resources
| Wikipedia | Atari 8-bit family |
| oldcomputers.net | Atari 400 |