My parents had that pong game that Sears sold. It only played Pong. And then of course we got the Atari 2600, which began my lifelong love of Atari.
But then...
I can't remember the exact timeline, but somewhere around 1980 my parents got us(my brother and I) an Atari 400. It was this clunky computer whose keyboard was a flat piece of plastic--no individual keys. It made typing a challenge.
But my dad showed me some Basic commands, and I was off to the races. I started teaching myself Basic from books.
Shortly thereafter we got Apple II computers at my school. Our teacher showed us a text-based adventure game and man, did it even blow my brain up. I could MAKE games like this. Basically, create stories that people could play.
Creative-me was super excited.
We got the Atari 800XL soon after that. My buddy got a Commodore 64. Much as I hated to admit it, the Commodore had much better graphics but was SO much harder to program. At this point I was tinkering between Basic and Assembly language, and had programmed some Infocom-like games.
(If you don't know what Infocom was...man...good times...)
But I wanted to move more into things like Alternate Reality or Bard's Tale, where there was graphics and text.
Anyway, I could bore you with pages and pages of my adventures in computing. But I temporarily forgot this is just for vintage ads, so there you go! Some of the late 1970's-1980's computers!
