Atari Lockup Revisited

Several readers have responded to the issue raised by Greg Kopp in Ask the Readers, May, 1982, about the occasional "lockup" where the Atari will, mysteriously, "go away" and no longer respond to the keyboard.

Bill Wilkinson, COMPUTE! columnist and one of the authors of Atari BASIC, responded that "all substantial software has bugs. If it's in ROM, the bug can't be repaired unless a new set of ROM chips are brought out. For whatever reason, Atari has never brought out a new ROM set. To be fair about it, there are bugs in the original TRS-80 which have never been fixed either."

We might add that the new IBM computer has a bug in the division routine. Also, the several fixes which Commodore has made to its BASIC in ROM have cured the original bugs, but brought about new problems of software compatibility between versions.