Nothing shaped my love of computers more than this slick little black box. I loved this computer! The design still holds up. I think it is one of the best looking home computers ever, but I am bias. I still miss punching in lines of code from a magazine for hours just to play a simple game, my favorite of which was Escape from Epsilon. You can download Escape from Epsilon here, if you are so inclined. The magazines where Antic and Analog and every month they would come chock full of awesome programs written in Atari Basic and Assembly Language. Here is an example of the code.

It had 64k and I was luck enough to get a 300 baud modem, a bad ass indus GT Disk Drive the “Ferrarri of disk drives” and a cassette drive to prevent having to retype those games. Many an hour was spent war dialing for working BBS’s from long print-outs of numbers. There were a few other kids in my class who had modems as well, and a few of them where in the know.

This video reminded me of those days.