This was the first and only officially sold Atari 80 column video system.   Although there were several 80 column cards by 3rd party manufactures for the Atari 800 computer and 80 upgrade chips for the XL/XE computer systems.   Many Atari users who had heard the rumors and press leaks about the Atari XEP80 were eagerly awaiting and more importantly hoping that Atari would release the interface as the first officially released PBI/ECI Interface module (Parallel Bus Interface on the XL, Extended Cartridge Interface on the XE).   This would have just plugged directly into the back of the XL or XE computers and give them both 80 columns and a parallel interface.

        What users got was yet another "kludge" device that hooked up to one of the joystick ports and required a driver to be loaded into memory on startup each time you wanted to use the 80 column video or printer interface.    If the unit had been a PBI/ECI module, the driver would have auto-loaded into memory (Atari Plug N Play) and the interface would have always been ready for use.

        The Video quality was quite good and the interface had some very nice built-in special effects and character attributes.    Atari released AtariWriter 80 which was a very good 80 column version of the popular wordprocessing program AtariWriter.    ICD Also produced special drivers for use with its ROM based MS-DOS functioning clone called SpartaDOS X to use the XEP80.      Most Graphics Mode 0 programs could use the XEP80 and several people wrote their own 80 column terminal programs.