Friday, December 18, 2015

Vintage Computers - Atari, Apple, TSR-80 and more

Computers. I was around for basically the dawn of the personal computer.

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!

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