Re: Atari 8-bit hardware
  By: Chris Patti to Damon A. Getsman on Fri Oct 25 2013 10:27:23

 > Saved up paper route money FOREVER to buy the thing.  Then had to save up fo
 > the BASIC cartridge.

	Muah.  I skipped the 400, which is a good thing, because I've 
tried working on membrane or rubber-clad keyboards before and OMG I cannot 
stand it.  The tactile feedback is very important for me, I guess.  I like 
the ancient old clicky XT & 8086 keyboards, too... Heh.
	Sounds like you got that at about the same age that I had my 600XL 
donated to me, though, which was my first machine.  Never had to load an 
external BASIC cart, although I did toy around with the 6502 assembler and 
BASIC XE carts a little bit, as I learned to write more of my own 
programs.

 > With *cassette* for storage! And Atari's Cassette drive was dumb, you couldn
 > just say "cload foo.bas" and have the drive search for it,
you had to positi
 > the tape JUST RIGHT to laod the program, and it took forever :)

	Yep.  I had the standard audio cassette storage drive for my first 
storage, too.  It took me FOREVER to get the 1050 floppy drive.  I still 
remember keeping a notebook full of all the cassette tracker numbers in 
order to be able to position that damn tape just right.  Heh.  I still 
remember, too, trying to work with a program that would dynamically load 
portions of the code after the initial 'cload' and running of the main 
program...  It would've been sweet, if it wasn't for the fact that you had 
to manually cue the tape, hit the play button, and then press enter on the 
console again to let it start trying to pull the code in from the storage 
with the 'ENTER C:' statement.  heh.

 > Those were the days :)
 > 
 > Typing huge programs in from COMPUTE! magazine :)

	Oh I remember that very well...  The part I hated the worst was 
the programs that had to be edited a bit in order to fit in the 16K of 
RAM...  Then I'd spend all day typing them in, forgetting to save every 
15-60 minutes, because I was still new at the computing at that point.  It 
never failed; sometime right before the last few lines of code went in the 
power would go out, somebody would knock the outlet out of the wall, or 
else a power supply would overheat and glitch out wiping out all of my 
work.  God the RAGE.  heh.  I would sometimes skip a whole day at school 
in order to sit and type that crap in, too, because it was utterly 
impossible to get any software in Bismarck, ND, for the Atari.  ;)  
Finally I got a 300bps modem and racked up huge long distance bills 
downloading things from an Atari BBS list that I'd found somewhere.  
*grin*
	I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers the glory days.


-The opinions expressed are not necessarily an advocation of any of the
aforementioned ideologies, concepts, or actions.  We still have the freedom of
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a
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