March 2025
•March 2025 Edition•
Welcome to the latest edition of the SPACE newsletter. After last month’s meeting was canceled due to slick roads thanks to the weather, this month we try again for our second-ever meeting at the Wilder Center in St. Paul. Hopefully no more wintry weather to contend with!
NOTE: Due to the fact that the SPACE Meeting for February 2025 was cancelled due to unfavorable winter weather conditions, there will be no Treasurer’s Report for February. There will be a Treasurer’s Report in the April Newsletter. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
SPACE website indexing has improved slightly since last report, with about 10 additional pages indexed. That puts us at 288 indexed pages, with 190 not-indexed pages, compared to 277/200 at last report last month. If it’s going to proceed at that rate, we should be fully indexed within 16 years!
HELLO WORLD! Since we had no SPACE Meeting because of the weather last month, this will not be a Secretary’s Report in the truest sense because there are no minutes to report. But, I want to express again my thanks for being your Secretary and Newsletter Editor. As always, I am happy to oblige. Anyway, I have some cool news. There is a new upgrade for the Mega ST, Mega STE and TT computers called the ATW800/2 card. It turns your Atari into a Transputer workstation, giving it more power and speed like the old Atari Transputer Workstation.
Maybe I’ll keep reporting each month for a while, and we’ll see if there’s a trend or not.
To find out more about this fancy upgrade, go to this URL: https://www.geekdot.com/atw800_2/. So, if you are into that sort of thing, it’s a really cool upgrade to get. Also, I have been frequenting the website for Wizztronics, a computer business in Long Island, NY, specializing in Atari hardware.
In other Google complaints, the hotel where I stayed the other night offered a convenient way to tip housekeeping via Google Pay. Hey, I have a smart phone with Google Pay on it, I’ll try it! Well, I couldn’t get it to work, and I’ve tried various things this weekend and I still can’t get it to work. “Phone number can’t be blank” it says, without asking for a phone number.
It just so happens that the computer techs at Wizztronics are working on a remake of the Falcon computer. It’s still in the prototype stages, but the specs are promising. More news on this development will be posted on their website over time.
My latest hunch is that I’m having issues because both Google and the credit card bank have both my landline and cell numbers, and they’re not lining up. I’m imagining few people have this issue because most people dropped their landlines long ago.
To find out more, go to https://wizztronics.com for more info and click on the Falcon Rebuild link under Atari in the website’s drop-down menu in the right-hand corner of your browser window.
But, this latest hypothesis remains untested for now. All I know is, I should have just left cash, if not for the progress of technology!
Well, this concludes the Secretary’s Report for now. I will be back with another Secretary’s Report in April, as I will be at the next SPACE Meeting, weather permitting. See you al soon, fellow SPACE Cadets and Atarians!
Thanks, keep using that Atari, and come to your next SPACE meeting: Friday, March 14, 2025. And don’t forget, we are meeting at the Wilder Center!!
In the words of the late, great artist Stan Lee: EXCELSIOR!
TRIVIA TIME! A microchip nowadays can have up to a staggering 146 billion transistors or more, depending on the chip, whereas the MOS 6502 CPU running your Atari 8-bit computers only had 4,528 transistors.
Message from Captain Irata: “I am the MVP! Master Videogame Player!” HOO-RAH!
The Atari 2600 has a scaled-down version of the 6502, named the 6507. The 6502 is a 40-pin chip, while the 6507 has only 28 pins, and the 6507 was created this way for cost-effectiveness, making the Atari 2600 much more affordable.
–TABLE OF CONTENTS– PAGE ONE: The President’s Corner Secretary’s Report PAGE TWO: Tech Talk PAGE FIVE: SPACE Comics Section
NOTE: Because of the cancellation of the February SPACE Meeting, there will be no Atari 8-bit DOM Review this month, but we will have a double-DOM Review in April, for the February and March DOMs. I apologize for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding. ERROR NOTICES: Last month’s Newsletter stated in the Table of Contents that on Page Four there would be Recent Atari News, and on the last page it was incorrectly stated in the text that Wilder Center was located at 454 Lexington Parkway, when it is 451 Lexington Parkway on the map and the Recent Atari News was put in the TOC by mistake. These oversights have been corrected for future issues of the Newsletter. I apologize for the mistakes and for any inconveniences that arose from them. Thank you. TECH TALK By Steve Peck Welcome to a special edition of Tech Talk! This will be a brief article, and in this edition we will talk about mass storage devices, from records, cassettes, and hard drives to solid-state drives, and how they have evolved over the years to be the versatile items that they are now. Well, for starters, it all goes back to 1877, with Thomas Edison and the cylindrical Talking Machine that he invented. Sound was recorded on a tin foil cylinder that was specially made to capture the sound and play it back. After refinements were made, Edison developed the Phonograph, which was of course the record player. The records were made of wax, which proved better than tin foil to record sound. Eventually, in later refinements of audio records, vinyl was used in place of wax. It was far more durable that way, so it makes sense. Magnetic recording devices were invented in the 1890s, and magnetic tape was first developed in the 1920s in Germany, modelled after magnetic wire recording techniques developed in Denmark previously. Over time, as magnetic storage technology improved, people developed magnetic tape reels used in audio and, ultimately, video recordings. Eventually it gave rise to audio cassette tapes, and VHS and Beta videocassettes. Commercial hard drives in the past were very large and bulky, cost thousands of dollars, at max were maybe 250 MB and would weigh hundreds of pounds! After time elapsed, they were miniaturized and were able to store higher memory capacities, even terabytes in size, and would eventually fit in the palm of a person’s hand. Without this advance in technology, we would not have the computers we have today. Solid-state drives, the next enhancement in storage, do not use magnetic media at all. Instead, they have no moving parts and use NAND flash technology to store data, allowing them to be longer-lasting and faster than magnetic hard drives. We also have to give credit to the people who developed flash drives and SD cards, which can store thousands and even billions of times the amount of data that a 1970s commercial magnetic hard drive could store, and a 64 GB micro SD card can fit on the tip of a finger! I can see in the future technology advancing storage medium to the point that perhaps we could store data on light and even smaller particles, improving speed, efficiency and making things smaller and more compact. It seems the sky’s the limit when it comes to improving storage tech. As it gets better, storage media will be cheaper as well over time, and also much hardier. This concludes Tech Talk for now. Thanks for reading and I will see you at the next SPACE Meeting! TTFN!
HAPPY SAINT PAT’S DAY, FELLOW SPACE MEMBERS AND ATARIANS EVERYWHERE! :)
UNABLE TO MAKE IT TO THE NEXT MEETING? Then, sign into our Discord server On the night of the physical Meeting! Here is the permanent invite link To the SPACE Discord server: https://discord.gg/r9Q4AxuNmQ You can copy and paste this URL link from this PDF onto your browser in the search bar. Once on the SPACE Discord server, Go to the Meeting Stream in the sidebar on the Discord page. There is a screenshot of the sidebar on this page with the Meeting Stream link circled. THANKS FOR COMING VIRTUALLY AND PHYSICALLY!
If you wish to channel your inner F. Scott Fitzgerald and want to send in an article, please feel free to send them to the SPACE Newsletter Editor! Please try to send your articles within two weeks of the Club’s occurrence every month. They then will be posted. The SPACE Newsletter Editor’s contact information is, of course, on the back of every SPACE Newsletter! Thanks for posting and for supporting your SPACE Club! We hope to see more articles soon!
SPACE COMICS SECTION The Misadventures of A-Man and C.D.
Ferret Fracas!
Opinions
Vice President: Brian Little E-Mail: demomantna@gmail.com
https://space.atari.org The next SPACE meeting And Election will commence on Friday, March 14, 2024, At 7:30 PM, local time! We hope to see you there! Thanks for coming!
OUR MEETING LOCATION We meet at the Wilder Center at 451 Lexington Pkwy. N., in Saint Paul’s Midway area. You will need to check in with security if you come to the building after 5:30 PM. We will meet on the second floor in the Merriam Park Room (room 2410). The Meeting time is allocated from 6-8:30 PM, every second Friday of every month. Thanks for coming to SPACE! The map below shows the location of the Wilder Center.
E-Mail greglites1@outlook.com S.P.A.C.E. (Saint Paul Atari Computer Enthusiasts) C/O: Gregory Leitner 3407 78th St. E Inver Grove Heights, MN 55076-3037
(Map courtesy of Google)
Another Message from Captain Irata: “That’s all she wrote, SPACE Cadets!” HOO-RAH!