The first Atari 800 hooked to a 13" color television.

I love computers. I grew up with computers. I feel I was around during the start of the home computers. I’m a big Mac fan at home but have always used PCs at work. There are just some days where we get those water cooler conversations about how much computers have advanced, how they have changed from the old days, or how we can’t even imagine living without them. I may get into some geek techno babble here (you may need a babel fish! ;-p ), but those of you who understand will enjoy it.

The first computer I ever used was an Apple II+. I was in 10th grade at the time and instantly fell in love. It may have only had a black and white display, using characters like $ and @ in place of graphics, but I knew that I wanted to make a living with computers. I thought then that computers were the way of the way of the future. For this article I want to refer to my favorite computer, the Atari 800. You can probably stick your first computer in here too.

I got my Atari 800 back in the days when it first came out. It was a powerhouse at the time with 48K of memory (upgraded from 16K), an 88K disk drive for storage (much-needed after using the cassette tape storage), and it displayed 16 colors at 320×192 pixels on my 13″ TV. I dabbled in some programming on the Atari and also enjoyed some early computer games. Hey, that was about all there was to do on a computer.

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