Man oh man… this photo of an 1983-vintage home computer desk, which I just spotted over at Boing Boing, brings back a lot of memories. A lot of memories. I didn’t have exactly this same set-up — I had the Atari 800XL instead of the 800 model pictured here; my peripherals were a bit more spread out around my bedroom; and I never had a set of those groovy Burger King Jedi glasses — but there’s an extremely familiar vibe emanating from this image. I don’t even have to close my eyes to journey back, to once again hear Sammy Hagar blasting from my old Fisher cassette deck as I bang away at the clickety-clackety keyboard (sometimes I miss the weirdly satisfying noise and effort associated with that old keyboard; modern ones are so mushy in comparison…), working on one of my embarrassing early short stories that all seemed to be ripped-off Doctor Who plots infused with some good old-fashioned teenage angst. The hard copies of those stories disappeared long ago, but I think there might still be electronic ghosts of them around, locked away on the dozen or so ancient five-inch floppy discs I know I’ve got somewhere in the Bennion Archives. If only I had a working five-inch drive and the know-how to capture the data to my modern PC! Embarrassing or not, I’d like to see them again…
I never bothered to learn Atari BASIC, and that mysterious activity known as hacking held no appeal for me. I didn’t have any idea what you could do with a computer, really, beyond writing lousy adolescent fiction. It wasn’t much more than a sophisticated toy, so far as I could see. (That attitude probably wasn’t helped by the fact that you used an ordinary television for a monitor; if you got bored with whatever you were working on, you could just change the channel and watch Gilligan’s Island or whatever. Which I guess isn’t much different from hopping online and seeing what’s shaking at Boing Boing, when you think about it…) I was savvy enough to recognize that the Atari Writer word processing program was far more convenient than the old portable typewriter I’d been using in my pre-computer days. I saved reams of paper by editing and perfecting — well, rewriting, anyway — my work before printing it out. But if someone had told me then that our entire economy and a pretty sizable chunk of our culture would one day revolve around these toys… well, people did try to tell me all this was coming and I didn’t believe them. I thought computers would never amount to much more than fancy typewriters. Some would-be science-fiction writer I was, eh?
Oh wow, does that bring back the memories of playing Spy vs. Spy and James Bond on my Atari 130XE!
My monitor was a black and white television I had been given for Christmas a year or so earlier and when I bought the computer, (yes I saved and bought as a 12 year old) my Mom agreed that the television had finally been put to educational use and not just used for watching A-Team and Flying Circus 😉
For me, it was the TRS-80 Model I, then the Apple II Plus, then the Epson Equity II+, which lasted all the way until my first Dell. Along the way, there were Atari’s, Commodore 64’s, Commodore PETs, and even a TI-994a that my next door neighbor’s mother brought home for him to play around with once.
If you ever make it to the Smithsonian, check out the history of computers display. Nothing makes you feel older than looking at all the machines they have in glass cases, and being able to honestly tell your kids that you not only used each of them for productive work, but that you still have a couple of them in a closet in the spare bedroom.
Sigh…
Ah, see, you were serious about computers. As I said, I used to think of them as fancy toys. I farted around with that old Atari all through college, traded it briefly for a dedicated word processor made by Brother (waste of money and time, that — should’ve upgraded from the Atari to a real computer), then finally got my first PC, a Sony Vaio, in the late 90s. I just upgraded last year to a custom-built box.
Not only am I a late adopter, I like to use things until they are unquestionably used up. Must have been my previous life in the Depression or something. 🙂
Oh, and that exhibit at the Smithsonian sounds really cool, if a bit humbling… 🙂
I still have my Atari 800XL, in its original box. I get quite a kick out of reading the package, which says: “64K…What are you going to do with all that memory?” My watch has more memory than 64K!
Derek, it was a different world, wasn’t it? 🙂
I still have my 800XL, too, but the box is long gone and I have no idea if the machine actually works anymore. I had a flood in the basement a couple years ago, and I think the power brick might have gotten wet, so I don’t quite dare to hook it up!