Talk:Atari 800

Atari 800 was nominated as a good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (February 20, 2021). There are suggestions below for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.

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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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

@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)[reply]