Welcome to Goto 10, the newsletter about retro computing with an Atari focus.

Computers have always interested me, ever since I saw my first one: An Atari 800. I’ve told this story in a few places, but as I remember it, it was summer and I was outside, practicing my baseball swing with a wiffleball bat. I’m thinking this was 1982.

My Dad had a friend from work stop by and shortly after he called me in the house to come check something out. His friend had brought over his Atari 800 and hooked it up to our TV. He typed in a quick program, the same one that likely got lots of young kids hooked on computers back in the early 80s:

10 PRINT "PAUL"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

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My name scrolled down the TV screen! This was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. I bugged my parents for a computer regularly after that, but they were still pretty pricey and with four kids, it wasn’t something they could afford just yet. We ended up getting an Atari 2600 (called the Atari VCS at the time, for Video Computer System) instead, which kept me quiet for a while.

Some of my favorite Atari 2600 games were Asteroids, Adventure, and even Pac-Man. Although the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man is notoriously derided for not looking, playing or sounding like the arcade Pac-Man and also having some bad, flickering graphics, I still loved its simplicity and played it a lot.

Asteroids was probably my favorite overall game. It’s hard to beat flying a spaceship and shooting things. I would play that game until my thumb went numb, which it definitely did. There was no auto-firing in those days.

I also enjoyed Adventure, even with is blocky graphics (the main character was a square and the “dragon” looked a lot like a duck). With the help of a guide book, I was even able to find the hidden dot to display the famous easter egg, considered one of the first put into a game.

The Atari 2600 was fun for a while, but I quickly learned that I just was not that big of a game player. Plus, most of the Atari 2600 games just were not that good. And even though it was originally called the Video Computer System, it was not a computer as far as I was concerned.

I still have an Atari 2600 with many games sitting in my basement. I’ll be setting it up to talk about it and its game in future posts.

Keep reading:

• My first Atari computer: The Atari 400

• Upgrading to the Atari 800XL

• Getting the 1050 floppy disk drive

• Revisiting the Atari 2600