April 2010

  • Ah, the Nostalgia

    So I was getting caught up on my reading at Daring Fireball this afternoon, and came across John Gruber’s piece from a couple of weeks ago, The Kids Are All Right. Leaving aside the fact that Gruber is ever-so-slightly dating himself in that piece, I have to admit to an eerily similar experience growing up. My Atari 2600 showed up as a “family Christmas present” when I was about 8.

    My exposure to computers prior to that time had been hanging out in the local Radio Shack while the long-suffering employees kindly let me tinker with the TRS-80s. In fact, I’d go so far as to check out books on programming from the local library and then bring them with me to Radio Shack to experiment. The Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of computer technology that entered my home (my father’s TI-58C notwithstanding) — and in fact in those days Atari even marketed it as the “Atari 2060 VCS” for “Video Computer System.”

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