Read this:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_list
The Atari could certainly do that split-screen stuff via the "Display List". The Amiga was partially based off of the Atari. Some of the same engineers worked on the Amiga. It even has a more advanced version of the Atari's Display List functionality.
And screen tearing stopped being a problem with the Atari. But usually only games try to v-synch with the screen. Those, and some text file viewers which support smooth scrolling. Of course you won't see anything like that in a window system; only full-screen programs. And remember that if you try out one of these old machines in an emulator, that your monitor's refresh rate must match, or be a multiple of, the emulated computer's refresh rate to see smooth scrolling.
(make sure to activate the emulator's "vsync" feature as well)

Bouncing a ball while formatting a disk? Hell, we could do that on a Atari 800 back in 1979! And, from what I know about the Commodore 64, you can do it there too. And the TI-99/4A could probably do it too; what with it having a graphic co-processor that could efectively (albeit slowly) act as a CPU.

Wasn't the full title of the original Atari 800 "Atari Home Computer System"? Just like the game system was called the "Video Computer System".
("video" being code for "video game" back then)

Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

What's wrong with regular HTML video (i.e. the OBJECT tag)?

If your company's video site actually is YouTube then this kind of problem probably doesn't affect you all that much. However, for normal web sites that are just trying to take advantage of multimedia as part of the presentation, HTML5 audio and video are a bad joke, and the punchline is that all the much better technologies that used to be viable alternatives have been deliberately killed off anyway.

I hope that you didn't consider Shockwave Flash a "viable technology".

Golden Ration? Damn Minecraft! Stop teaching people to eat gold!

What, no love for w3m?
q.v. Emacs/W3 at that same link.
n.b. I also seem to remember a version of w3m that could display pictures when run in an xterm.

Yeh, but it's like one emerald for 10 cookies! Easier to make your own.

Yeh, but all you need is a Shield of Reflection and have disintergration resistance and you'll be fine!
(or if you let that purple worm swallow you before-hand!)

"XP" was the sequel to "2000". "ME" is regular MS-Windows, "XP" is WinNT V5.1.

Isn't "csh" usually just a link/symlink to tcsh?
(which is what I actually use normally)

Not sure what a "memory stick" is (you mean a SIMM?) but I've used a 40GB HD along with numerous flash carts larger than 2GB with no problems. Are you sure you're using the "FORMAT/FS:FAT32" command and not just "FORMAT"?
Or else use fat32format.exe.

Once again Iceland precipitates a Sci-Fi Channel Disaster Event!

What filesize limit? I have a nice big DVD disk image far in excess of 4GB. I remember downloading ncftp in my UMSDOS Linux mini-installation specifically to get around the 32-bit limit that the binaries that came on my circa 2004 Slackware CDs had.

I used to use my Atari 800XL to get on the Internet all the time. You just need a terminal emulator and a modem (and it's software handler). Now-a-days you can have an actual IP connection via Contiki. It's not Atari's job to support device-specific stuff. The IBM PC wasn't designed with IP in mind but people still read net-news and net-mail on the IBM clones.

The ALT text is always the same as the title of the page except without the "xkcd: " at the beginning.