My first experience with a computer was with the old mainframe at the university in the 1970's. Where you had to use punch cards to enter data into the computer. I was too young to use it, but I did enjoy using the punchings from the card punch machine as confetti.
Around 1980 was when things really started to get interesting. My friend David had an Atari 2600 console. We played adventure -- a little box you move around the screen, LOL. And weak versions of Defender and Pac Man -- not much like the arcade games. He was one of the few people in the world that actually bought the "E.T." video game. I saved up $100 to buy an Atari 2600, but then blew it all in one night playing William's Defender at the arcade. I'm still not much good at that arcade game, sigh.
Eventually I bought an Atari 400. With the "chicklet" membrane keyoard. Cartridges you could plug into the top to play good games, like Defender, Pac-Man, and Centipede that was kinda like the arcade -- much more so than on the Atari 2600. I remember buying a cool game on audiocassette and waiting for 6 minutes for it to load from tape... I only got it to load once, after that it never did load correctly so I got to wait 6 min for nothing. There was a great video game from the Atari Program Exchange (APX) called "Galahad & the Holy Grail" based loosely off the Monty Python movie. Can't find that title ANYWHERE now.
My best friend Greg shared a Commodore Vic 20 with his brothers, Jim and Dave. Jim learned to program that thing inside and out, using "peek" and "poke" commands to directly affect particular memory values and eventually turned his skills he learned on the Vic20 into a lucrative programming career. They had a speech synthesizer that we used to make prank phone calls. That was a laugh.
My grandfather had a TRS-80 Model III. My school had a TRS-80 Color Computer and a PL/1. I remember them trying to teach us to program. HEY! I wrote a BASIC program that adds two numbers! Quite a far cry from the video games I wanted to write.
Our friend Paul's older brother had... a portable computer! Imagine! He had an Osbourne computer. Kinda clunky, but you COULD take it with you wherever you went. Of course it didn't really play any games, so I wasn't interested in it at all.
Eventually Greg & family upgraded to a C64 and I upgraded to an Atari 800XL. Ah, power!!
I still remember my first IBM PC. It was just that... an IBM PC. Not a PC AT. Not a PC XT. But the original, 8088 microprocessor running at a blazing 4.77 MHz. I remember thinking that I was special because instead of the 20 MB HDD that most people had at the time, I had an enormous 30 MB HDD.
We had CGA graphics, and longed for EGA or... dare we say it... VGA! Where the pixels were so small at something like 800 x 600 resolution, that the images seemed completely life-like! Ah, to live the dream of resolution that high.
Hope you've enjoyed this trip down memory lane. I certainly have.
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