Atari 400 and 800: More K's, Less £'s

Excepting an egregious use of "less" instead of "fewer", this advert nicely shows Atari's 400 and 800 machines, which had been launched in 1978 but didn't make it to the UK until 1981 or so.

The project to build them had been started after the success of Atari's 2600 "Woody" console from 1977. The design included the first custom co-processor to be used in a home micro - the ANTIC fast 2D graphics generator.

The model numbers were originally meant to indicate the amount of memory each machine had - 4K and 8K. However, by the time they launched, memory was much cheaper so the 400 launched with 8K, whilst the 800 went from 16K to 48K, as the advert mentions.

[picture: atari_discount_percw_apr83.jpg|A flyer, which appeared in June 1983's PCW, announcing a price reduction on Atari's 800 model, from £499 to £399]

The two machines had very good graphics, however they were considered overpriced. 

In particular, the 800, initially at £500, or about [[500|1982]] in [[now]], was up against the Commodore 64, which was better specced and cheaper, although the Atari did nominally have a faster processor - a 1.8MHz 6502B versus the 64's 1MHz 6510, itself a derivative of the 6502.

By the early summer of 1983, the 800 model was down to £399, or [[399|1983]] now.