THE ATARI 1400XL COMPUTER SYSTEM
Atari began its "NEXT GENERATION" of home computer systems with the all new Atari 1400XL home computer system. This system featured all the standard features of the Atari 800XL, but also included several new enhancements. The first was the inclusion of the new custom chip called FREDDY which handled bank switching functions more efficently then the standard set of TTL chips that were being used in the 600XL and 800XL computers. The next new enhancement was the inclusion of a SC-01 speech synthesiser chip and modifications to the OS to allow for a V: handler for VOICE. Included with the new system was a cartridge called The 1400XL Telecommunicator which utitlized the voice synthesiser to announce changes in the configuration of the terminal program such as baud rate, line feeds, wrap around and so on. The last feature which was giving away by the note of the cartridge was a built-in 300 BAUD modem. This is my option was a bad decision. Atari had the right idea in seeing that telecomputing was definitely the way of the future, but was still playing the "We'll sell them a closed box and if they want more features next year they'll have to run out a buy a whole new one". What Atari should have done was make the modem a slide in module which could have been removed and replaced with a 300-1200 modem or faster as time went by.
The best non-enhancement was the fact that Atari went back to using the Atari 1200XL type casing again along with that wonderful keyboard. The 1400XL was truly what the 1200Xl should have been from the beginning.