The computing journey of my life

 So about 45 years ago I started my computing journey with the purchase of an Atari 800 that my brother and I paid for by mowing the lawn for our parents over the course of several years. It was this first computer that started me down a path that grew beyond my wildest imagination.  We really did it because we wanted to play video games on it, but also we wanted to learn how to program video games with the grand dream of maybe some day being able to make a living programming games! I mean when you're 10 years old that sounds like heaven!

The Elementary School years

The Atari 800 was an "economical" computer compared to most things at the time, but seemed to be the best value as well, being about to produce through various tricks 256 colors on a composite monitor or via an RF connection to a CRT type television.  I remember thinking back then than 16kbytes of memory was pretty sufficient for an 8-bit computer and being able to store 90Kbytes of data on a floppy disk still seemed like a lot!  We didn't have a large choice of programming languages, either BASIC or Assembly for the most part, and we didn't have enough money to buy a floppy disk drive, so we ended up storing things on cassette tapes which were the most unreliable way of storing data I can remember.  Half the time we wouldn't be able to retrieve what we wrote, so we had to re-write everything multiple times, which was good practice in a way, but also a massive hinderance to making progress on anything long term.

Since we didn't have a disk drive, but had to mow a lot more lawns if we wanted one, we also didn't even buy an Atari Floppy drive, we bought a "Rana Systems" disk drive (made in Chatsworth, CA) which was less expensive but since it took so long for us to save up to buy one (around $300 in 1980) it ended up being double density and could store data on both sides of a floppy disk, so at least and could store a whopping 360Kbytes! It was also lower profile than an Atari floppy disk, the only "minus" side was thtat there wasn't a "happy drive" modification to it where you could do binary copies of any disk to get any game that you wanted!  But because we couldn't, we learned how to tweak the RPM speed of the drive to generate disk errors that were sometimes what game companies used to protect their games, and in the process learned about how disks were "formatted" and how hexadecimal could be used to "recode" things in games if you wanted to!