Talk:Atari 800

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Atari 800 (Homecomputer)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Ritchie333 (talk · contribs) 13:06, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

I'll give this a go. Hey, it's been several decades since I've seen one of these. I've had a spin through the article and I can't see any obvious reason to quickfail it, so I'll give it the full review. My initial concern is that at 55K of prose, the article might be a bit long compared to contemporary computers such as the Apple II and the Commodore 64, although neither of those have been improved to GA. I see quite a bit of unsourced technical information; that'll need sorting out too.

I tend to copyedit as I go and raise issues as and when I find them. Specific comments will follow. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 13:06, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

General

• I'm concerned there isn't enough distinctive information to spin this article out of its parent, Atari 8-bit family.

Lead

• Why is the article not called Atari 800? There's no need to disambiguate.
• I think the opening sentence needs to be fleshed out a bit. Compare with the GA ZX81, which mentions the manufacturing dates, sales figures, overall response, and clones.
• "The Atari 800 was initially only offered in the US mail order business from the end of 1979" - does this mean the computer was first available only in the US, and only via mail order?
• "it was possible to continuously increase awareness - I don't understand what this means

History

• "The engineers' efforts were mainly focused on expanding the graphics capabilities of the highly integrated special circuit Television Interface Adapter (TIA) built into the Atari 2600." - what does "highly integrated" mean here?
• "still from the high acquisition costs." - what does this mean?
• "cost a total of more than ten million US dollars" - can we get a conversion to adjust for inflation using Template:Conversion?
• The 6 December 1978 launch date and press release in the New York Times isn't cited, I've added a tag
• The "Marketing" subsection is quite small - it could do with being merged elsewhere
• The "Tapping into the education sector" subsection could be trimmed down to something like "Education"

Summary

• I think I'm going to have to stop there. I've copyedited the "history" section, but the following sections have too much unreferenced material, and will need a much more extensive copyedit. I would focus on doing that work, then coming back for a further review when the article is closer to the GA criteria. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 15:40, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

  Hi Ritchie333, thank you VERY MUCH for your time and work in this. I will have a deeper look into it and work on the mentioned points the next days. CommanderWaterford (talk) 16:07, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

  Ritchie333, PS: What would be the most elegant way to move the page now to "Atari 800" (that was a redirect before which I could not delete) - so that we get this page toward "Atari 800" and "Atari 800 (Homecomputer)" as a redirect .... CommanderWaterford (talk) 16:16, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

  CommanderWaterford, I've just moved it, and reversed the redirects. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 16:18, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

  Ritchie333, whenever you have time and motivation I would appreciate your opinion about the current state now, unfortunately the inflation conversion template does not know French Franc. CommanderWaterford (talk) 21:33, 23 February 2021 (UTC)

Unclear why this is separate from the Atari 8-bit family article

All of the Atari 8-bit computer models have the same tech—CPU, graphics, audio—and Atari 8-bit family covers this and the development of the 400 and 800. Having a short article that talks about the specs of the 800 makes sense, but this feels like a parallel version of the existing article. Why put this information in two places? Dgpop (talk) 21:11, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

@Dgpop:; I agree- the justification for a separate Atari 800 article is inherently flawed.

As the "main" original model (with the 400), it forms the basis of the series as a whole, so separate articles for each (i.e. Atari 8-bit family and Atari 800) are inherently going to cover the same ground and overlap massively.

(For others reading, it should be noted that there's a more in-depth discussion on this at the "Atari 8-bit family" talk page).

Ubcule (talk) 22:49, 11 April 2021 (UTC)