Old Computers

Rick's Atari Shrine

This site got me thinking about the old computers that I have had through the years.

It is true. I was a Commodore 64 guy. That machine ruled our house for several years. We had the computer and a couple of game cartridges for several years before we got a disk drive. We never had a tape drive. So, unless we wanted to play the cartridge games, we had to type in the Basic or Assembly programs and then debug the program and then run the program and then debug and then... Until we got the disk drive all of the games ended the same way, eventually we would have to turn off the computer. POOF!, another game gone. We had a modem, but I was never able to hack into anything.

Bro and I burned out a couple of these machines over the years. I typed my college papers on a C= 64 for the last time during the fall semester of 1990. There might be one still in the closet at The Queen Mother's house.

While in High School I also had a Tandy Model 100 that I would tote to my Algebra II class. The teacher allowed calculators, so I would write programs to solve the formulas. No wonder I made it through college without any math credits! I knew when I got it that the Tandy was hot, so The Queen Mother made me give it back. Luckily, I got to keep it until summer. And no, I did not steal it, the guy I was working for bought it cheap and gave it to me in lieu of pay. It still had the metal inventory tags on it. COOL!

Granny bought a computer - a speedy 16mhz with monochrome orange monitor (and a color ribbon printer!)while I was living with her. I finished the school year with Granny's machine. And I frequently turned in cover sheets with 4 color printing.

The Boss Lady and I bought a 50mhz Compaq computer with integrated monitor that lived at my apartment while at UNT. That was the last computer I ever had with on-site warranty repair. When the 3.5 drive died, Compaq sent one via next day mail and then they sent someone to install the drive the day after that. The Compaq was good for Doom, JB will testify to that! I think I did some course work on it, but mainly I wasted a lot of time on the internet with that machine. It is sitting in The Mother of the Bride's garage.

We bought another Compaq that died a horrible death. All I remember was it was black, it started smoking green smoke and I sent it away. Someone rebuilt it enough to run a few games and it is still at the Recreation Center.

We bought a Dell while The Boss Lady was in Grad school. It is still running, but the modem died. I run a couple of graphics programs on it to design toys and I use it to burn CDs because my burner never got XP drivers. It is in the garage/workshop.

The HP we use now is a something or other model that I don't care about. I long ago gave up caring what is under the hood of the computer, only that it works. This one only works sometimes.

Gosh I miss that C= 64. It never got viruses or blew out modems. Microsoft never tried to upsell me software every six months and the C= 64 was just bad ass, especially compared to those Atari pieces of junk! The guys that had those were real nerds!