Computers, Now and Then
As a professional developer, I often chafe at the limitations of the technologies we work with. From time to time, though, it is nice to look at how far we’ve come and appreciate it.
I was at home syncing up the calendar on my phone with my laptop via bluetooth last night and thought “man, here I am, taking all of this for granted, when we’ve actually come such a long way.”
When I was about 11 years old Atari came out with the Atari 400. It was listed for sale in the Sears Christmas catalog and I went nuts over it. The ad was a full two pages, with pictures of a family using the computer for a wide variety of things, all of them apparently giddy as schoolgirls. I read that ad repeatedly, thinking of how much I could do with such a thing.
My parents couldn’t really afford to buy me something like that (it cost $400, a hefty price tag for what they thought of as a toy). I was obsessed though. I finally got myself a paper route and saved my money zealously. Eventually I was able to buy (barely) an Atari 400.
The 400, for those who do not know, was an 8 bit computer with a flat membrane keyboard and 16K of RAM. It was generally (and rightly) considered to be inferior to the much more expensive Apple ][.
I was completely enthralled by my Atari. Since I had completely exhausted my resources buying the computer, I had *no* peripherals what so ever. If you booted the computer up without a cartridge in it you were presented with a blue screen you could type in, and nothing more.
Sometimes I’d just type in it. Just experimenting, desperately wishing that it could do more.
Eventually I got an Atari BASIC cartridge, which let you write simple programs. I used to check out copies of Compute! and BYTE magazine and type in the programs. This was fun, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough money to buy anything to store the programs on, so once the computer was turned off, those programs were gone, gone, gone.
Eventually I got enough money together to get an Atari 410 tape drive, which was inexpensive and completely unreliable.
My enthusiasm for computers was contagious, and my best friend’s parents got him an Atari 800 and an Atari 810 disk drive. We ended up spending a LOT of time at his house playing Zork. Those were fun times.