The Atari 400 is comming home
My brother and I have always been jealouse of each other (or at least, I’m always jealouse of him). Last night, we were talking and he asked me if I wouldn’t mind holding on to the old Atari. I was shocked! Apparently, he is trying to clean up his condo and didn’t really have anywhere to put it. He was actually going to throw it out if I said “No”. It is a good thing that I have an attic.
The Atari 400 has a lot of sentimental value. It is truely the beginning of my programming hobby that lead up to the profession that I work in today. He and I would get blisters as we would spend days programming code. We would switch turns, one would read the lines out of a book while the other typed them. I still remember how we didn’t know what a colen was, so we would say “double-dots”.
We also had a 410 cassete recorder. You take a normal audio cassete and hook it up to the side. Then you press record. Next, you type “CSAVE” and you would wait, and wait, and wait. The thing sounded like a phone ringing. To load, you use the counter and fast forward or rewind to the area you started recording in the first place and then type “CLOAD”.
I would always wish that we had an Atari 800 because the keyboard wasn’t flat. The flat keyboard was mostly the reason why we got blisters. My hands would hurt, but I would still keep typing as they burned. If it got too bad, I would use my other fingers.
I only used two fingers max to type since I didn’t know how to properly type. I had plenty of fingers to spare. By time I took typing as a blow off course in high school, it was amazingly easy to surpass the class. Still, my brother could type faster then I could. He was recorded somewhere in the 80’s, and I was in the 70’s. I believe the average score was around 56 words per minute.
Tags: Atari, Atari 400, Sentimental, Programming, Hobby, Antique, Atari 800, Typing, Cleaning