The ATR8000 was a truly amazing addition to any Atari owners computer system. Literally it was all that you would ever need. The ATR8000 provided any Atari 8-bit computer with a high speed serial interface, parallel printer interface with 64K printer buffer and a standard IBM type floppy disk controller which allowed you to hook up 5.25" disk drives of any size, 8" disk drives and even 3.5" disk drives. Another wonderful feature of the ATR8000 was its ability to use an Atari computer as a terminal which would communicate with the ATR8000 while it ran in CP/M mode so you suddenly had access to thousands of programs like WordStar 2000 which at the time was a fantastic word processor and many, many other application packages. With the addition of a CO-Power-88 add-on card, you now had limited IBM PC compatibility which gave your Atari computer even more power and access to applications. The ATR8000 was a self-contained system and didn't require the need for an actual Atari computer, but could run from a standard serial terminal as a stand alone CP/M system. Atari itself began to take an interest in the growing CP/M software market and had planned on released an ADD-ON peripheral called the Atari 1060 CP/M box and also planned on selling a CP/M expansion card for its 1090: XL Expansion System. However neither one of these products made it to market.
