Happy Computers

Happy Computers (HCI) was a small company producing disk drive enhancements for the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST computer families. Happy Computers is most noted for the add-in boards for the Atari 810 and 1050 disk drives, which achieved a tremendous speed improvement for reading and writing, and for the ability to back-up floppies. Happy's products were among the most popular Atari computer add-ons. They are still in use and active in the aftermarket today.

History

Happy Computers was formed in 1982 by Richard Adams under the name Happy Computing. At that time, the 810 Happy was hand wired on the internal side board The name was changed to Happy Computers or HCI in 1983 when the company went from a sole propiertorship to a corporation. HCI stopped shipping these products in 1990, and since then many other Atari Enthusiasts have reverse engineered and replicated the products because they were so popular and fun.Richard's brother, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer Scott Adams of Adventure International] created the first graphics game created at home for a home computer on a [http://exoticsciences.com/sa.htm computer that Richard built in 1974]

Atari 8-bit Products

810 Upgrade

This was the first product released in 1982. The customer sent in either their 810 drive or the internal sideboard, and the upgrade was wired in. This consisted of a few extra logic chips, a different eeprom and point to point wiring.In addition to the buffered reading and writing with zero latency and faster serial i/o, it made backups of floppies.

810 Enhancement

This version of the 810 Happy board was a plug-in board with a better data separator and used sockets already in place on the 810 internal board without the need for any soldering or permanent modification.In addition to the buffered reading and writing with zero latency and faster serial i/o, it made backups of floppies.

1050 Enhancement

After the 810, Atari released the more reliable, double density 1050 drive.In addition to the extra storage, the serial I/O could be cranked up a notch even faster than the 810 Happy product by the faster speed of the 1050's 6502.The 1050 Enhancement was also a plug-in board, and could be installed without soldering or permanent modification.In addition to the buffered reading and writing with zero latency and faster serial i/o, it made backups of floppies.

1050 Controller

The 1050 Controller was a small board that was installed inside the 1050 Happy drive that had 2 switches and an led that allowed enabling or disabling disk write-protect to overide the notch in the disk. It also allowed switch selection of a slower mode to provide compatibily with some picky programs. Some commercial software only ran in the original slow speed mode.

IBMXFR Program

This program was included with the Warp Speed Software. It allowed transferring files back and forth between an Atari and an IBM disk using a 1050 drive. The IBM disk could even be formatted on the 1050 drive.

Atari 16-bit Products

Discovery Cartridge

The Discovery Cartridge was a device that plugged into the cartridge slot of the Atari ST Computer.It backed up floppies and had connectors to allow a 3rd and 4th drive to be hooked up. The original ST computer only allowed for two floppy drives, and the extra drives were handy.There were 4 different options available. Options included a pass through for another cartridge, a switch to bank select larger cartridges, and a switch to select/deselect the extra drives. There was also a battery backed up Time of Day clock option in the Discovery Cartridge, a significant oversight the Atari ST lacked in the stock configuration.

One of the features was to let standard Atari drives read the unusual Macintosh varaible speed disks without needing a variable speed drive. The disks were then re-written in a stanard "constand speed" 3.5 inch compatible format called Magic format. This allowed using the various Mac emulator products that would run most efficiently with Magic format disks. At least one of the Macintosh emulators also had a circuit to read Mac disks, but could make the emulations slower and less reliable. It was faster and more efficient to convert Mac disks to Magic format first.

Q-Verter Cartridge

This was a smaller version of The Discovery Cartridge that plugged into the Atari ST cartridge slot and had a cable for 1 drive that allowed converting Mac disks.

Trivia

* Due to a lawyer dropping the ball, a patent deadline for Richard's zero latency disk reading and writing invention deadline was missed and no timely patent was issued for this.
* The word Happy became a slang noun in the Atari community where saying you have a "Happy" meant you had had a disk drive equipped with the HCI enhancement board invention.
* According to Richard Adams, Happy Computers sold over 20,000 units (total of everything).

External links

* [http://www.cyberroach.com/analog/an12/contents.htm Analog Magazine #12] {Product Review)
* [http://www.atarimagazines.com/v6n10/NewProducts.html Antic Vol. 6, No. 10 - Feb 1988] (new product announcement)
* [http://www.atarimagazines.com/v2n5/ioboard.html Antic Vol. 2, No. 5] (Q&A)

* [http://www.atarimagazines.com/v2n9/Missionredux.html Antic Vol. 2, No. 9] (product review)

* [http://www.atarimagazines.com/v2n4/productreviews.html Antic Vol. 2, No. 4] (product review)

* [http://exoticsciences.com/sa.htm Richard's graphics game and 16-bit computer built in 1974]