The Age of the Microcomputers
Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s I thought computers were just amazing. Spectacular. I liked playing games on them, but even more so I liked making games on them, programming in basic and seeing, you know, stuff happening. This, I felt, gave them an edge over consoles like the Atari 2600 or Colecovision. Or even the Colecovision with the adapter that let you play 2600 games on it.
So I was a bit of a nerd
I’d spend hours alone in my room, typing in procedural code found in magazines like Rainbow or books checked out from the library. It was the way I learned, seeing how other people did things and then trying to tweak or adapt the code.
There was a certain purity in figuring it out, in hunting bugs, in making it work. I remember designing different iterations of text parsers in BASIC that were able to break apart input into disparate words and compare them to list of understood phrases. Crude, probably, but I was like twelve and it felt like a huge accomplishment.
What I used
My parents were supportive to the point of picking up cheap microcomputers at garage sales when they weren’t too expensive. these were little more than keyboards that you hooked up to the back of your television, though sometimes I’d have a few peripherals.
Time and nostalgia have faded my memory, but as clearly as I can recall, these were the machines I cut my teeth on.
TRS-80
I can’t say that the TRS-80 (affectionately known as the “Trash 80”) was the first microcomputer I owned. It very well may have been, and I used it longer than the others in this list, despite how terrible the “chicklet” keyboard was. I learned BASIC on one of these things.
It didn’t, if I recall, have a hard drive, so I could never actually save any of my work. But that didn’t really matter to me.
Atari 400
Had one of these, too. That flap in the middle opens up, and you can put a cartridge inside. The one cartridge I had was “ATARI BASIC” and you really couldn’t do anything without it. The keyboard is one of those flat membrane keyboards… they’re really awful.
Timex Sinclair 1000
Another computer with a membrane keyboard. The thing plugged into the back of it… I don’t remember what it’s for. Extra RAM? A hard drive? No idea.
Commodore 128
The C128 was probably the most impressive, because at the time I got it you could actually still buy games for it in stores. I remember vividly playing Wasteland and figuring out that if you reformatted the discs you saved your progress on, you could revisit the same locations and complete the quests over and over again.
In addition to the external floppy drive, I also had a cassette tape drive for the machine. You could use ordinary music cassettes and record computer programs over them. It was pretty neat.
Best part, though? Real keyboard. Surprising how much that matters.
Others?
There may have well been others, but I don’t remember any of them. The age of Microcomputers passed quickly, as Apple and IBM upped the game considerably. In the end, for me, they were mostly toys and tools upon which to learn.
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