I happened into a thrift shop and they had this sitting there 3 bucks. It was a familiar looking keyboard, but it was detached from it's computer.  Now, I remember way back when I tried to get into the "real" computer world, I bought a floor model AMSTRAD PC compatible that was dirt cheap at my local BEST store. It came with what it had, which I thought would be enough to enter the basic computer world in a strong way. I took it home, hooked it up, and it proceeded to make noise and show lots of letters on screen, but didn't make an ounce of sense to me. DOS. Duhhhh. It was a computer that needed even the slightest bit of programming knowledge and did not have BASIC like I was used too on my Atari that made Atari Dos rather easy to learn and use. Therefore, it went back to BEST. What was I thinking? It was a bastard product anyway. AMSTRAD didn't have a very big following here in the U.S. It would be years and years before I dipped my toe in the real PC computing world.  However, I was only interested in word processing for a few years when I came across this oddity. It was a detachable keyboard, hooked to a cartoony 80's styled thing.

WTF was this? Better yet, $3????? I didn't even care if it worked or not! It was $3! It's an Atari 65XE Game Console! I guess it's fairly rare, I don't know. I owned about 4 Atari 800XL units and by this time, I really didn't care to own any other units, but $3!!! So, in Atari lore, Atari had released the 5200 game system with odd keypad joysticks. It was a gaming console that could have easily been used as a computer, but was sold as the next VCS. It played all the games that my 800xl played. All the software made previously would work on this. No improvements other than the 80's colors that were all the rage for electronics at the time.  So this was the 5200 game system with basic computing abilities.  Atari was re-marketing low end machines in the image of their "fake windows" operating system ST computers. Too little, too late.

Here's a closer view of the body of this unit. I took it home, hooked it to my old familiar black and white TV which served as my computer monitor, and it worked like a charm. I never tried running it past the familiar test screen and running the only cartridge I own, Donkey Kong. It's very faithful to the arcade game, but I was never a huge fan. I think I got it with the Atari disk drive I bought from a friend.  No biggy. I was really far from using this as a computer system, since I had the Smith Corona word processor. It was $3!!! How could I not buy it? Uh oh... Dead weevil in the cartridge slot. Pictures don't lie.

It even looks like an 80's Mall. Zig Zags were popular in the early 80's. It implies HIGH TECH. I know of one small shopping center that still sports this design, but I remember when Westgate Mall here opened their new "extension" wing which was set up like a zig zag and did have a Radio Shack and an arcade in it. It was a 10 store addition plus rest rooms and a new entrance. When the mall was waning, it was a nail shop and a community room, so other than when it was built, it was never a very popular wing. It was a better way to put two joysticks into the game rather than flat sided. If you pulled on the joystick, you had an easier time pulling it out rather than pulling the whole computer up and across the room and hitting your winning friend in the head with it. Or, you just trashed the joystick... 

I believe you can hook this to a monitor via RCA cables. Don't know if I'd tried this, but it makes sense because monitor style TVs were becoming a thing in the 80's, It did have Atari's peripheral cable that was an Atari thing. The "round" jack was I believe was for the keyboard. Sure looks like a PS/2 jack. I wonder if I could use the keyboard on a PC with an adapter. Who cares. 

A little bonus content. Here is the worst way to store programs, however, it was a way to store programs. Now, I had the one that matched the 800xl. It was the 810 or 1040 or 69 hehhehehehhehehhehehhe. Ahem. I think I got this one cheap from a thrift shop as well. It was the recorder designed for the Atari 400 and 800. You know, when disk drives  were half the price of the computer you buy. These drives were only about a 1/4 the price or less, so I was lucky to have one. I only own one pre-recorded program file "Bruce Lee", and it took 20 minutes to load into 48k of memory! Slow slow slow was the speed. You had to use a better tape, because cheap tapes I used were only good for a few tries until they wouldn't load. This moved at the same speed that you listened to tapes normally. It did allow the making of games where you started the game loading, then it tripped a load sequence that played the tape. Of course, you would hear a high pitched loading noise over what was playing, but in 1985 tech, that was worthless :) It's why I never looked back once I had a disk drive. Ahhh yes, computer debris. BBBBBzzzzzzzz SQUEEEEEEE  Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz SQUEEEEEEEE. Of course, when Colecovision decided to make their new computer system called ADAM use tape as a primary storage system, they tried using a high speed version. It made all tapes shred their magnetic materials pretty quick. Spent $60 on a spreadsheet program? How come it doesn't load after using it 10 times???  1982 video game crash. We all fall down.

ARF! -Ric