Ah, Jason. You are a man after my own heart.
What model was it?
An Atari 130XE with a MOS 6502 CPU, running at 1.8 Mhz and 128K RAM (http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/MachineInfo/Atari_130XE.html), and a model 1050 5-1/4" disk drive, which stored about 127K of data on one side of a disk.
My mom got it for me, using some of her money, plus what I had saved up for it, around the time I graduated from high school.
I had used other models of Atari 8-bit before this one at my local library for years, since it took a while for me to save enough money (as a teenager) to buy one.
One thing that got me about the 8-bit technology is that the disk drives were always about the same size as the computers themselves! The Apple II being the exception.
Where did you buy it?
From a local, independently owned and operated Atari store (it sold both video game systems and computers).
How much did it cost?
The earlier models (Atari 400 & 800) cost about $500-$800 each. By the time the 130XE came out, the price had come down to about $180, I think. The disk drive I got with it cost as much as the computer, or more, as I remember.
What kind of stuff did you do with it?
I was an avid subscriber to Compute! Magazine. It had type-in programs for applications, games, and utilities. It was a great software hobbyist magazine. They came out with a new issue each month. Every month I'd find programs I liked and I'd type them in to my Atari. The BASIC programs they published were a great way to get me comfortable with programming. They published machine language programs too, which were not instructive at all. You just typed numbers in all day. I wish they had used assembly. I had been doing this long before I bought my computer. This was one way I built up my technical skills. I also wrote a few of my own programs (I did my most prolific programming on Apple IIs they had at school).
I got a word processor for it and used it to write papers for college. I got a P:R: Connection from ICD and hooked up a Panasonic dot matrix printer to it, and an Atari 1200 baud modem (don't remember the model). Eventually I upgraded it to a 2400 baud model. And of course I played games on it. My favorites were Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus from Lucasfilm Games, The Great American Road Race (from Activision I think), and The Halley Project (from Mindscape I think). The Halley Project was cool because it was kind of like a flight simulator in space. They modeled the size, distance, and motion of the planets accurately. They had a hyperspace feature in the game, otherwise it would've literally taken YEARS to go from one planet to the other! The planets were totally featureless (what do you expect?), but they were 3D objects in the game. They even had shadows.
While in college I became resourceful. I was a computer science major and I wanted to access the computer science Dept's systems to do my work from my dorm room. I needed terminal emulation. By searching on the internet via. newsgroups and FTP (specifically Atari Archive at the University of Michigan), I found an 80-column VT-100 emulator, "VT-10-Squared", that ran in Graphics Mode 8. Fortunately I had a black-and-white TV for my display (a monochrome monitor would've been better I suppose), or else looking at the text onscreen would've been impossible. What I remember is I had to go through a sequence. I had to first load an RS-232 handler (essentially a device driver), and then load the VT-100 emulator. It worked! I also got a commercial VT-52 emulator, "Chameleon", that gave me X-modem binary transfer capability so I could download binary files from Unix to my computer, or vice-versa. I used my connection to the school's Unix systems to send/receive e-mail and read/post news on the "text internet". I've been on the internet in one way or another since 1989. I didn't hear about the "world wide web" and "browsers" until about 1995/96.
Typically I used the extra RAM (the higher 64K of memory) as a RAMdisk.
Once I learned C in college, I thought it would be neat to try programming in it on my 8-bit. I found CC8, a fairly complete C compiler on Atari Archive, and tinkered with it. I used MyDOS with it so I could set up subdirectories on my compiler disk (there were a lot of files involved), and I used a RAMdisk to house some of the compiler/linker tools, since they loaded slowly from physical disk. Plus I kept my source code on a separate disk, and disk swapping was a pain. Once I got it set up it was a joy. I wrote a series about my experience in Atari Classics magazine.
I also undertook writing the documentation for CC65, an open source C cross-compiler for the Atari 8-bit written by John Dunning. Last I checked CC65 along with my documentation is still on Atari Archive.
How long did you have it?
I still have it. No joke.
What did you eventually replace it with?
An Atari Mega STe...of course. :) http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_atari.html?Atari_MegaSTE.html. I got it in 1991. My memory is fuzzy, but it cost me around $1,200-$1,400 w/ monitor. I got it from a small Atari/PC dealer called Run PC. They're still around.
It had a Motorola 68000 CPU, running at a switchable rate of 8 or 16 Mhz, 2 MB RAM, and a built-in 3-1/2" MS-DOS-format-compatible floppy drive that stored 720K per disk. And I got a color monitor. It ran on TOS 2.06 (the name of the operating system was TOS, or "The Operating System". Original, huh?) burned into 256K of ROM. In actuality what Atari called TOS was CP/M 68k from DRI. It also used the GEM GUI from DRI. Ataris were using GEM long after it died on the PC.
I eventually upgraded it to 4 MB RAM and a 40 MB SCSI hard disk. I used it for word processing and terminal emulation. I brought over the 2400 baud modem and the dot matrix printer from my 8-bit. Eventually I upgraded the modem to a 14.4Kbps model. The graphics/sound demos for it were pretty cool for its day. The most exciting thing I did with it was load MiNT on it (the name stood for "MiNT is Not Tos"), an open source pre-emptive multi-tasking OS-9-like adjunct kernel to TOS (quite a mouthful). I did some C programming and data processing on that using GNU tools.
I didn't get my first PC until 1996. It was an old, used 33 Mhz 386DX with 4 MB of RAM. I expanded it to 8 MB. It had DOS and Windows 3.11 on it. I brought over the 14.4Kbps modem from my STe, installed a RS-232 serial card, and installed Trumpet and Netscape on it. I signed up with an ISP and I finally got the "world wide web" experience on my home computer. It was pretty darn slow going though. I continued using my STe until 1997. I still have it...and the 386, though I hardly use the 386 anymore.
