Atari 800 XL - Part 1 (cleaning & test tape/disk drives)
As mentioned in a previous post, I was doing some loft-digging and I "found" some old Atari hardware that I believe I purchased around the 2007/2008 timeframe and they have sat in boxes (and a house move) ever since. As these are sturdy, good old fashioned pieces of kit, I fully expect them to still work absolutely fine - unlike todays hardware that, if you had the right power supply available would attempt to connect to an out-dated WiFi protocol to get to the internet to download updates before allowing you to use it - think about that more for a moment. The Atari 800 XL devices were primarily "invented" in about 1979, as you'll see in a photo later - I have one of those, and then were made for about 5 more years, up until 1984-ish. We're now in 2022 (on the cusp of 2023), 2023-1979 = 44. That means this hardware was made between 35-45 years ago - I'm including the tape-drive(s) and the disk-drive(s) in that range band. I will be the first to admi...