Ad on page 73 of the Oct 1985 (Issue 65) of Compute! (Vol. 7 No. 10)
http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/163640696477/pages-from-the-80s-ad-on-page-73-of-the-oct-1985
The above ad is from the October 1985 issue of Compute! In 1985, the Atari 130XE had recently been introduced as the successor to the Atari 800XL. Here, it looks like we have Computer Direct trying to unload the rest of their 800XL inventory…
As I recall, I had pretty good results dealing with Computer Direct back in the day, though it was for Commodore related stuff, not Atari. Their advertising is a little questionable though. I like how they advertise the 800XL as an “88K Computer”. I believe they are just combining the 64K RAM size with the 24K ROM size but that’s a weird way to do things. Bigger numbers make for a better ad I suppose. They do the same with the Atari 130XE in this ad. It’s a “152K System” because of its 128K RAM and 24K ROM.
Even though the 130XE is newly released, it is the 800XL being pushed in this ad, particularly as a package with a bunch of XL themed peripherals. While XL peripherals were generally compatible with the 130XE, the color scheme changed from browns to greys. They were offering the same deal for $50 more with the 130XE instead of the XL. However, this would have still been with the older peripherals. I’m not sure if the newer XE versions were out at this point. No doubt they were also trying to unload their remaining XL stock before it became too hard to get rid of. Ironically, by this time Atari 8-bit computers weren’t really doing that well. There was very little software support compared to what was available for Commodore and Apple. The XE systems would continue to sell through the early 1990s though.
