My First Computer - Atari 800XL

@celler

Would you be surprised to know that hardware AND a software are still being made for just about every 8/16/32 bit computers from the 70s onwards? Those dates are by no mean rigid, but there is a lot of retro-activity going on. Additionally, there are podcasts for many of those computers as well. The prices have soared in the last 10 years.

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It is probably the same fascination that draws people to vinyl records. :slight_smile:

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My oldest technology until a year ago was a Pfaff sewing machine made in 1942 (so presumably in Nazi Germany). I made a lot of tents and camping bags with that machine in my life. There was a transition in the last couple of decades with modern manufacturing techniques perfected by the Chinese that have made it cheaper to buy new hardware than repair old hardware in many domains. Since that has become the approach it made sense to make the devices themselves less durable. Optimally all the parts would fail at the same time. One result is a lot of full landfills.
My beautifully built and expensive HP computer was really over-engineered in the sense that progress was so rapid in that era that a 4-year-old computer was totally outclassed by the “new” ones so in. some sense a machine built to last 15 years did not make much sense. But it “felt” and looked great.

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Here’s my favorite piece of 43 year old tech:

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I had a part time job in high school writing software on one of those. Saving to cassette was very unreliable, so that put a damper on things.

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Heh. memories. This was my second computer. I spent hours playing Boulder Dash, and then DAYS playing Alternate Reality.

My first was a TRS-80 Coco2 equivalent. Learned BASIC on that thing. Best game of the age was Dungeons of Daggorath. It still holds up today as the OG of first-person adventure games.

I keep wanting someone to do an iOS port of that game. I bet it’d rock. At least there is an online version.

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I quickly added the expansion unit and a couple of floppy disk drives. I made enough side money programming these things that paid for every home computer I had until I switched to a Mac in the early 2000’s. I’ve never written a Mac program.

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I talk about my computer origin story, of which the Amiga 500 is my precious on Hemispheric Views 015.

There’s even an OmniGraffle timeline in the show notes!

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Equivalent? A Dragon?
You can download”Dungeons” and most other coco games and play them in coco emulators

I have several fountain pens that are around 50 years old and see regular use (I have one that’s going for 100 years but seldom use it); a couple of safety razors too.

I guess computers evolve much faster that fountain pens and razors, though.

With razors and fountain-pens…for years, if not decades, we have devolution.

I had a TRS80 model II, sold and bought an Atari 400 (membrane keyboard!), sold and bought an Atari 1200XL. That got me through college and having one of the few word processors and printers in my dorm, I supported my substantial beer consumption typing and editing papers; I think I charged 75 cents per page.

One good thing about moving is that you uncover boxes that haven’t been open in years. We recently moved and I uncovered this gem:

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You were in some good, sensitive company back then…

I started here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 with a ZX81, 3.25Mhz and 1Kb of memory, applications came in magazine form and used to spend weekends typing them in…

man im old!

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I learned to program thanks to having to type in applications and games on the Spectrum! I went through every book in my library for the platform and ended up with hundreds of games.

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I learned to program, or at least improved my programming skills because after typing the programs, they sometimes didn’t work. And the correction appeared 1 or 2 issues later. Oh, “GOTO 110” instead of “GOTO 100”. :smiley:

you can tell BASIC programmers as lines numbers go up in 10s

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And even then, you sometimes ran out of 1-9 when inserting something… :confounded:

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