I learned assembler, Basic and a bit of pascal on an atari 400. Tried to write some games and even wrote a quasi-music program. Played 1000nds of games and surfed around early dial-up services, usenet and the 'pre-internet'. Even tried a turn at what would now be considered 'hacking', back before the fences and 'law dogs' went up on the early digital frontier (never did anything evil or distructive, just poked around innocently).

A little later due to my Dads computational bent in research, I had access to one of the best/last Atari 8-bit general computer made (1200XL, I think it was), and then PCs- which of course were a whole new universe. I did some Visual Basic on the PCs, but since I was subject to the whims of childhood I never really got deep into the platform (we're talking 3rd-6th grade for the atari experience, and 6th grade on up for the PC experience! So whatever I thought I understood about the 'platform' was probably wrong or incomplete at best!). Or at least, until I came back to computing many, many, many years later.

I know that history has judged the old Atari comps as 'never-wuzzers', but they had some areas in which they excelled. I recall they had a very good random number generator (you may think thats off to point to, but thats really actually quite important in programming, depending on what yer trying to do!) They also had audio capabilities that were comparatively spectacular. IIRC, they had some hard-wired graphics capabilities, too, that were pretty unique. Something about colors and I think early notions of sprites. Can't remember too clearly. I don't know anything about graphics programming anymore.

God. The membrane keyboard on the 400. My fingers hurt just thinking about it.

Anyway. I saw on the web refurb'd Atari 800s, complete with BASIC and PASCAL cartridges and re-printed BASIC manual and a manual for what passed for their OS (in my first 400 IIRC, DOS was an actual CARTRIDGE you stuck in the machine!!!). Brought back memories. We originally had a TAPE DRIVE as the primary storage medium. Waiting for it to save even a small file was muder.

I remember sitting in gradeschool in Perry Oklahoma writing code in my 'composition' notebooks and trying to draw out pixelated game screens with crayolas on graph paper I would steal from my dad. We would have these awful assignments in gradeschool where we had to cut-and-paste things according to directions: "Paste the blue car in front of the white car...." etc. I hated them, thought they were stupid... So I would try to struggle through some little program.

The teacher would come by in tears, assume I was scribbling, yell at me: "If your not going to LEARN, then you can just SIT IN THE CORNER". She would crumple up my program and throw it all in the trash, and off into the corner I would go. Which was still better than pasting frikin' blue cars in front of white cars and watching my classmates eat paste or see how much of it they could stick up their noses.

I would pick my program out of the trash on the way home and work on it during the loooong bumpy bus ride back to my home some dozen or so miles from the town. Often I had to go run out and feed and check the cows (depending on season), but after I did that (and some requisite playing in the woods), I'd drag up a chair and start laboriously trying to program that glitchy machine, and pray the diskdrive would save my program.

So in writing this, I think I know why I want to put a good word in for those hacked-up-game-consoles- cum-attempts-at-general-computing-platforms. When one is a talented kid in school at olitown Oklahoma- you tend to latch on to the things that could entertain your intellect.

By the time Perry got a precious few computers (old apples , C-64s and ataris) for the school library... Hehehe. They were mine for the taking. Oh god! the Havoc I caused. The staff at the school could barely understand how to turn the things on and stick in a disk, they had no idea what could be done to their silly 'academic' software, or what sick twisted things that software could do if cleverly edited... Think of (a dumbed down) Eliza, but with the sensibilities of a bored rebellious 6th grader.

"Ms Crider? Can I do some research for my book report at the library?"

heheeh

DL