I had an Atari 400 rather than an 800, but that was a fun computer to program. There was good documentation on where to poke and peek values in memory to make the graphics work. I wrote a few video games for it (they games sort of sucked, but hey I was in middle school and/or early high school at the time).

Hmm... we had a II, my cousins had the TI99, friend had the TRaSh80, dad's work got an IBM pretty early on, and uhmm, someone (that kid across the street from grandma's that I used to hang out with all summer?) had the Atari.

(Yeah, it was probably him. He also had the most awesomely complete set of Star Wars action figures I've seen before or since. Geek.)

The fun part about going back that far, of course, is how particular it all is -- one person had a computer, so you'd have a chance to play with that model.

(Also, as an educational technology nerd, I just love that your da was doing the stuff back then.)

I wish I'd had more patience for learning programming at that age. I think I'd be much better off right now, financially, anyway.

I used to go to stores and write programs on Commodore 64s. Then I'd run the program, walk away and watch from a distance. The screen would say, "DO NOT PRESS ANY KEY." Then when someone did press a key, the screen would start flashing all sorts of colors while this hideous, siren-like wailing would blast from it.

(Also, as an educational technology nerd, I just love that your da was doing the stuff back then.)

Oh me too. It didn't quite register that early on, but by 1990 or so, I had really clued in to just how important my dad's work was, and how far thinking he was (and still is) trying to be. I'm very, very proud of him.

One of my games was a fencing game. There were people (well blocks) with swords (rectangles) facing off. You had to stick the computer controlled block while not getting stuck. The 'AI' mostly was a lot of jerking around randomly like the computer player was have a seizure.

Also, we had a Mac from one of the first batches released, by Fall of '84, due to the partnerships Apple cultivated with educational institutions around the country.

Also also, tommyrot was a punk-ass kid.

I worked out the eject thing finally (it wasn't working when I got home). After much prodding, I realised the DVD was on the floor. It turns out I left a program open overnight which ejected the DVD, which fell out the machine and bounced down the back of the table.

Huh. So the tech would close that Help request off, noting ESO?

Equipment Superior to Operator.

You'll get used to it. Macs is smarter than peoples. That's why I switched to pcs as I got older. Couldn't stand the competition.

I remember having two monitors for my Apple II like the article says, one for color and another black and white one so that I could read 80 column text.