Still Mired in the Past

August 15th, 2005

Filed under: General

During my senior year of high school, our family purchased a computer. It was a Zenith computer (yes they made computers back then) that had a monochrome monitor (amber/black), a 5 1/4″ floppy disk drive and a 30 MB hard drive. No mouse, as the Macintosh was fated to be introduced later that year. If you wanted to select text, you higlighted it by using the F8 key. Sure, it was cumbersome compared to today’s computers, but it was still better than a typewriter. We also had an Epson dot matrix printer that could churn out an amazing 2 oe 3 pages per minute.

Still, this was not my first computer. Let’s go back a few years to my freshman year in high school. Upon returning from a marching band trip over Christmas break, I took the money I had left over and puchased an Atari 800XL. This computer was a thing of beauty. It had 64KB of memory and built in BASIC. True to its Atari lineage, it had a video-game cartidge slot on the top and two joystick ports*. It didn’t have a monitor but instead had an RF switch to attach to the back of the TV. No floppy drive or hard drive, though you could purchase a floppy drive separately. I couldn’t afford those, so I picked up a tape drive that utilized regular casette tapes. You’d put the tape in the drive, fast forward it to the point where you thought the program you wanted was and then type “CLOAD” and it would (hopefully) load. This was a simple computer, but that’s why I loved it. I knew exactly how everything worked and what every variable and command did. Now I’m lucky if I know 1%.

The Atari 800XL

*It had very few good games — it wouldn’t play Atari 2600 games, only the 5200. I think I had Donkey Kong, Pitfall II and Space Ranger.

Tags: atari

6 Responses to “ Still Mired in the Past ”

  1. Jon H
    August 15th, 2005 at 11:52 pm

    I made the mistake of asking my parents for the Intellivision computer module. What a useless piece of crap *that* was.

  2. Aaron Sapp
    August 16th, 2005 at 8:03 am

    My family went through 4 Commodore 64s. We’d use it until it died then get a new one. That was the only computer we had before getting a 386 when I was in high school.

  3. George
    August 16th, 2005 at 9:44 am

    Kangaroo and Vanguard were two good games for the 5200. And I had about a hundred others. those two stick out

  4. The Comics Shrew
    August 16th, 2005 at 12:12 pm

    Oh, the good old days. I started off with a TRS-80 with a cassette tape drive and game cartridge port (sadly, I wasn’t really allowed games) and the RF switch for the television. First in a long line of antiquated machines that continues to this day. The Tandy 1000 lasted me through my first year of college, after which I got a(n already obsolete) computer with a hard drive and no longer had to boot to DOS and save to floppy.

  5. mike abbott
    August 16th, 2005 at 3:32 pm

    I used to love M.U.L.E. on my atari 800 , many ,many, years ago

  6. John Nowak
    August 16th, 2005 at 11:23 pm

    1981. A couple of thousand on an IBM PC. With two floppy drives, and graphics card so I could run the APL compiler. I could even run SpellStar.

    Some years later, I remember telling a Xerox salesman that his company out to look into writing a driver for this new shell called Windows, because nobody else was using GEM Desktop.

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