S1EB1 Atari Portfolio

This episode features the Atari Portfolio, originally released in June of 1989. It was developed by DIP Research.

Podcast: Download

Atari Portfolio

Supplement Scans

Atari Portfolio artwork:

Two page ad from May 1990 of Compute!

Two page ad from August 1990 Compute!:

Atari Portfolio in Action

Booting. It hits the prompts instantly, only slowed down by you:

Applications menu:

Address Book

Empty address book:

Address book with entries:

Address book menu:

Address book Cards sub menu:

View cards in PAGE mode:

Calculator

Using the calculator:

Diary (Calendar)

New empty diary, default view is calendar (month):

Diary day view with a couple of entries:

Diary menu:

Moving a diary entry, new time, then new date:

Updated entries showing new time stamps:

Calendar (month) view. Note * denoting days with events:

Day view with window frame turned off (a little extra screen real estate)::

When exiting, if you haven’t saved, your asked to. This is the same for the other applications as well. This also shows the calendar (month) view with the window frame turned off:

The Alarm going off:

Editor

Empty document:

The editor with some text I had loaded for VCFSE 3:

Same document but with the window frame turned off (trade off of screen real estate for editing attributes):

Spreadsheet

Empty spreadsheet:

Same empty spreadsheet with window frame turned off. Again more screen real estate:

Spreadsheet menu. Note the menu calls the application GRID:

Spreadsheet Files menu, this is basically the same in the other applications as well:

Loading a file. Enter the name, or use wildcards, or use just the drive letter and it will expand to wildcards:

With wildcards, you can browse matches before selecting. You can navigate directories as well:

Final selection:

Loading a worksheet from the VisiCalc tutorial I covered in season 1 episode 8 (VisiCorp VisiCalc) here: https://inverseatascii.info/2015/01/13/s1e8-visicalc/. Note the recalculation at load:

Spreadsheet loaded (with VisiCalc example):

Setup

Setup main menu:

Setup DISPLAY menu:

Setup SOUNDS menu:

Setup APPLICATIONS menu:

Setup PRINTER menu:

Setup RS-232 PORT menu:

Setup FILE TRANSFER menu:

File Transfer communication error (no peripheral attached):

Files

The Portfolio uses DIP DOS 2.11 which is compatible with MS-DOS 2.11. It does include a few MS-DOS 3 enhancements as well.

Checking the filesystem of the C drive (with default partitioning). Note 79K free system memory.

Checking the filesystem of the A drive (with a 64K card inserted):

Contents of the “empty” C drive. Note 29K free:

Contents of the SYSTEM directory. This shows 2 of the 3 system generated files and the diary (calendar) file. PERMDATA.DAT is the system configuration data, UNDELETE.DAT is the undelete data, and DIARY.DRY is the diary file:

Special Functions

Graphics

And it can display graphics. Here showing a PGC file of the Fuji symbol and Atari logo:

Applications (& Games)

Running the PIN program from Terminator II:

Custom Applications

Here are the results of following the manual coding instructions found on the RS Key Programmable Calculator Portfolio page:

Keyboard

The keyboard has 63 keys including 2 special hot keys and 4 arrow keys. The hot keys are the Atari key and Fn key in the lower left. The Atari key is used to access the applications main menu and shortcut for launching each application. The Fn key is used to access the PC keyboard equivalents of F1 through F10. These mini chicklet keys have a slight notch out of the top left corner:

Layout:

Boot Files

The Portfolio has an unresolved bug which can cause data loss. To prevent it, you simply need to define the following in your CONFIG.SYS file on the C drive:

FILES=20
BUFFERS=32

If you want to see the directory path as part of the command prompt, include this in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file:

prompt $p$g

Instructions

Technical Reference Manual: download

1989 Manual download

1989 Manual (cover image only):

1991 Manual download

1991 Manual (cover image only). ~~I could not find a digital copy, maybe I will scan one of mine~~: (I sacrificed one of my manuals to scan it. The pages that are not straight, are printed that way. This is an obvious low budget version of the manual.)