A couple years later, we bought a second hand Atari 400 home computer system, complete with a data cassette player.  WOW!  Now I had something with vastly improved graphics and I learned the basics of computer programming, even though I was only in grade school, something totally unheard of in a few years prior.  This was a fantastic device, 16KB of RAM, Atari BASIC cartridge, 8 bit MOS 6502 CPU that ran at a blazing 1.8Mhz.  I spent endless hours trying to learn how to type on a membrane keyboard, play video games (Miner 2049er, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong).  

Followed close behind was the upgrade to an Atari 800 with a real keyboard, 48KB of RAM, and a floppy disk drive.  No more did I have to wait nearly 20 minutes for a game to load from a cassette tape. We followed the progression of models that followed, each with more enhancements (more memory, slightly improved graphics, better floppy drives).  The 800XL and finally the 130XE, which I still have today, sitting in a box in the closet.  The 130XE served me well until Junior High School.  

Something radically different started in the personal computer industry -- the invention of the Graphical User Interface.  This is something most people don't even give second though.  Before we had icons, drop down menus, and windows, everything was text / keyboard based. However, about this time, Apple introduced the Lisa and the early Macs followed soon after, all had just a crisp, but monochrome display.  Atari and its competitor, Commodore, released vastly improved computers with 16 bit Motorola 68000 processors, 8Mhz, and 512KB or 1MB of RAM.  Both had high resolution color displays, GUI based Operating Systems, and high quality sound.  No more simple computer "beeps".

Of course being an Atari user all of those years prior, I opted for the Atari 520ST, which ran an OS called TOS and used Digital Research's GUI, Graphical Environment Manager.  This computer was used through my High School years and several years after.  Unfortunately, due to various reasons, I jumped to the Intel PC platform.  

During the years that followed, I missed the Atari 520ST.  On and off I would try to keep tabs on the Atari community.  I also tried several emulation packages to re-live the good old days.  I had Darek Mihocka's Gemulator, complete with an ISA card containing the Atari ST ROMs.  Unfortunately, its been years since I owned a MS Windows PC with an ISA slot. From there I moved to ARanyM, a software emulator that used EmuTOS instead of the Atari ROM.  It is an open source recreation of the Atari ST ROMs, based on some of the code from Digital Research / Novell / Caldera / Lineo which had been GPLed.

This brings us to the year 2010.  A group of devoted Atari enthusiasts have created a brand new Atari ST-ish Clone computer, called the FireBee!  This isn't an emulator, but a recreation and modernization of the Atari ST/TT/Falcon platform.  The processor is the ColdFire V4e, a direct decendant of the Motorola 680X0 series, running at 233Mhz.  This device has modern innovations such as USB, 512MB of RAM (1024 times more than the original 520ST), IDE port, SCSI port, fast ethernet, PS/2, DVI video port, compact flash, and SD card.  In addition, it still has many standard / legacy ports such as the Atari keyboard/mouse port, ACSI (Atari's variant on SCSI), MIDI, serial ports, and ROM port.  This is all on a tiny 12 watt board, not much larger than a PCI card you may have in your desktop PC.

At this point, the hardware is finalized and most of the OS has been ported and adapted to the FireBee.  It seems the only thing that will change will be software and firmware as drivers are written and refined.  

As mentioned that this has been accomplished by a group of Atari enthusiasts, all volunteering for the project with really no profit, this is a major accomplishment.   Even more amazing is that the hardware design, layout, schematics are all open sourced.  Anyone is free to produce their own FireBee.  The firmware will be based on the EmuTOS (GPLed).  This is an Atari hacker's dream.

I have purchased one of the FireBee units from these guys, Serial Number 53, and I am only waiting for it to be shipped.  I hope to start blogging on my experiences with the FireBee and provide some resources for those that may wish to own and use one of these