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I had an Atari 800. Went into hock to pay for that pitiful thing, but man was it great. Two of my favorite games for it were SCRAM, a nuclear power-plant simulation, and an Avalon Hill (I think) wargame where you built up a military industrial complex until one side attacked and then you nuked it out. Think Battleship, the Armageddon edition.
The Atari was also the last PC that I knew intimately. In those days if you wanted to do anything beyond primitive BASIC gaming you had to be familiar with the chipsets and command sets available. Hell, I wrote a simple parser/compiler and a disk drive controller using BASIC.
The "bible" for Atari geeks like me was called De Re Atari. All About Atari. I owned a copy, well worn in a 3-ring binder. It's cool that you can still reference it, but now it's online.
Posted by Ted at January 18, 2005 12:04 PMMy first computer was a Tandy Color Computer 2, or CoCo 2 as they called it. I wrote basic programs for it, I even remember peek and poke values for memory prodding... So much for that these days, all I do is blog and play games. Sad... Sad...
Posted by: Oorgo at January 18, 2005 03:03 PMAn Atari 800? Ha! I deride your Atari! A Tandy Color Computer 2? A mere dressed-up calculator!
No, for a real computer, there was the Exidy Sorceror. A Whopping 16k of RAM (which I upgraded to 32 with another 16 memory chips). 40k or more of ROM, much of it removable, so you could run BASIC, or a Macro Assember, even FORTH and not eat in to your RAM.
I even managed to program SPI's After the Holocaust into it, just for fun.
Posted by: Alan E Brain at January 19, 2005 10:07 AMIt took a long time to convince my parents to buy a computer. When they finally relented, we ended up with the Coleco Adam, a glorified game console that would do BASIC. I wrote a lot of string program Mad Libs. I miss that clunky hunk of crap...
Posted by: Derek at January 19, 2005 01:23 PM