While there were others before it that I don’t really remember, my first computer that truly fell in love with and obsessed over was an Atari 520STE with a Motorola 68000 @ 8MHz 4MB RAM (after market upgrade through a family friend). We didn’t have the monitor but our model had RF output so we could hook it up to whatever TV was free.
My father had a Macintosh Plus at the time which us kids were never allowed to use. To suddenly have unfettered access to an equally powerful computer with dual floppy drives, colour output, joysticks, MIDI input, and an operating system with a GUI was utterly unreal. My father swiftly upgraded to a Macintosh Color Classic and then a Power Macintosh (always trading in so the Atari was in use well into the mid to late 90s).
I learned BASIC, wrote games, composed music, made backups of games and software…(thanks dual floppy drives!), dialled into BBSs, browsed Usenet. It was such a step function up from older computers and in many ways offered a parallel experience to what we have today (Lemmy reminds me a lot of Usenet back in those days).
And when our school got Acorn Archimedes and RISC PCs in the years that followed, I became crazy popular as I ported several games I’d written (clones of Tron, Breakout, Pac-Man, and a very rudimentary clone of Rogue).
I have vague memories of playing a few games on my sibling’s ZX Spectrum but the Atari STE was what truly consumed me and made me the computerphile that I am today.
While there were others before it that I don’t really remember, my first computer that truly fell in love with and obsessed over was an Atari 520STE with a Motorola 68000 @ 8MHz 4MB RAM (after market upgrade through a family friend). We didn’t have the monitor but our model had RF output so we could hook it up to whatever TV was free.
My father had a Macintosh Plus at the time which us kids were never allowed to use. To suddenly have unfettered access to an equally powerful computer with dual floppy drives, colour output, joysticks, MIDI input, and an operating system with a GUI was utterly unreal. My father swiftly upgraded to a Macintosh Color Classic and then a Power Macintosh (always trading in so the Atari was in use well into the mid to late 90s).
I learned BASIC, wrote games, composed music, made backups of games and software…(thanks dual floppy drives!), dialled into BBSs, browsed Usenet. It was such a step function up from older computers and in many ways offered a parallel experience to what we have today (Lemmy reminds me a lot of Usenet back in those days).
And when our school got Acorn Archimedes and RISC PCs in the years that followed, I became crazy popular as I ported several games I’d written (clones of Tron, Breakout, Pac-Man, and a very rudimentary clone of Rogue).
I have vague memories of playing a few games on my sibling’s ZX Spectrum but the Atari STE was what truly consumed me and made me the computerphile that I am today.