A sad day for the Atari 400
I went over my brothers house on Tuesday night and picked up the Atari 400. I got a chance to hook it up tonight and found that the power would not come on. It is such a sad, sad day.
I have many fond memories of my Atari 400. My brother and I would run to the computer section at the public libraries looking for books to program games. Back then, you were lucky if you could find such jewels.
My brother and I would type for days on end. One of us would read lines of code while the other would type them in. There is no better way of learning code then debugging why the code in the book doesn’t work. Sometimes it would be our typo’s - other times the book was wrong. But when it was all done, it was worth it.
We had programmed one game where he and I had control over some tanks. We had to shoot the other tank in order to win. The levels would have different obstacles that we could dodge behind.
Man … I can’t beleive all of that is gone now. Now you just walk into a store and buy games that are in 3D and hook up over the internet. There doesn’t seem to be many people that program for fun or to share code anymore. Libraries offer books for programming, but its mostly for business applications. Not much for games.