[The 8-Bit Guy] tells us how 8-bit Atari computers work.

The first Atari came out in 1977, it was originally called the Atari Video Computer System. It was followed two years later, in 1979, by the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The Atari 800 had a music synthesizer, bit-mapped graphics, and sprites which compared favorably to the capabilities of the other systems of the day, known as the Trinity of 1977, being the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80. [The 8-Bit Guy] says the only real competition in terms of features came from the TI-99/4 which was released around the same time.

The main way to load software into the early Atari 400 and 800 computers was to plug in cartridges. The Atari 400 supported one cartridge and the Atari 800 supported two. The built-in keyboards were pretty terrible by today’s standards, but as [The 8-Bit Guy] points out there wasn’t really any expectations around keyboards back in the late 1970s because everything was new and not many precedents had been set.

[The 8-Bit Guy] goes into the hardware that was used, how the video system works, how the audio system works, and what peripheral hardware was supported, including cassette drives and floppy disk drives. He covers briefly all ten of the 8-bit systems from Atari starting in 1979 through 1992.

If you’re interested in Atari nostalgia you might like to read Electromechanical Atari Is A Steampunk Meccano Masterpiece or Randomly Generating Atari Games.