When I was young, my family would weekend brunch near a mall. After brunch we’d visit the mall because the only place open in the mall on a Sunday was a model train store.
At home we had an Osborne 1. In the mall there was an Apple dealer with an Apple Mac on display in the window. It held no interest for me at all.
There was another shop that had an Atari 1040ST on display. It was gorgeous. It held such a mystique for me that I would ride my BMX after school over to the mall to get some hands on time with the ST. The shop owner just let me hang out and bang on the machine, like you can at an Apple store today. I really wanted one.
But my father was cheap and he anguished over purchases. We never got an Atari, and some years later my dad picked up a Sinclair QL instead. That was a sad turn of events.
My bittersweet story is in the same circle from another side. I grew up making games on the Atari 8-bit, living and breathing the machine. The spiritual successor was the Amiga Lorraine which my friends and I were following intensely. It had a slow/rocky start, was funded by Atari for a while, and seemed could be the actual successor. The '83 videogames crash shuffled everything with the head of Commodore leading Atari and Amiga becoming part of Commodore. This mattered a lot because my family had a computer store in a mall selling Atari computers and games. A place where people hung out and chatted about all such things.
Well anyway when the 520ST came out I was to get one but had to choose between the color or monochrome monitor. For some reason this felt like a crucial choice and it was: med/low color or hires monochrome. Surprising to myself I picked monochrome. It was fun learning to program a new computer but it wasn't exciting the same way as on the 8-bit. There wasn't any low-level hardware tweaking, it was more about CP/M 68k, GEM, etc. One thing I did do was try some C compilers with Megamax being the most usable (for floppies). I missed the 8-bit's support chip programming which was lacking in the ST and living in the Amiga. Getting interested in MIDI (with Amiga dropped but the ST picked up) would have been great but I wasn't musically inclined. Well that was largely my cross-over from dreaming of becoming a great video game developer into more of a business professional programmer. Later at a co-op job I did use it again to prototype fast line joint computations for the 68k without an FPU to be used in PostScript firmware in EiconScript[0]. I also wrote the PCL 5 (most not all of 5e) compatible firmware (all except the macros) for their EiconJet (first with a hardware blitter then without). Turned out well in the end, with my interests shifting to OS/2 and multi-threading rather than only games.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I started out incessantly wanting the Timex Sinclair 1000 kit. My father flatly refused and eventually I got the Atari 8-bit. Which I thought was way cooler than the C64. I learned so much programming on that machine--with no way to save my programs for the first year.
When I was young, my family would weekend brunch near a mall. After brunch we’d visit the mall because the only place open in the mall on a Sunday was a model train store.
At home we had an Osborne 1. In the mall there was an Apple dealer with an Apple Mac on display in the window. It held no interest for me at all.
There was another shop that had an Atari 1040ST on display. It was gorgeous. It held such a mystique for me that I would ride my BMX after school over to the mall to get some hands on time with the ST. The shop owner just let me hang out and bang on the machine, like you can at an Apple store today. I really wanted one.
But my father was cheap and he anguished over purchases. We never got an Atari, and some years later my dad picked up a Sinclair QL instead. That was a sad turn of events.
My bittersweet story is in the same circle from another side. I grew up making games on the Atari 8-bit, living and breathing the machine. The spiritual successor was the Amiga Lorraine which my friends and I were following intensely. It had a slow/rocky start, was funded by Atari for a while, and seemed could be the actual successor. The '83 videogames crash shuffled everything with the head of Commodore leading Atari and Amiga becoming part of Commodore. This mattered a lot because my family had a computer store in a mall selling Atari computers and games. A place where people hung out and chatted about all such things.
Well anyway when the 520ST came out I was to get one but had to choose between the color or monochrome monitor. For some reason this felt like a crucial choice and it was: med/low color or hires monochrome. Surprising to myself I picked monochrome. It was fun learning to program a new computer but it wasn't exciting the same way as on the 8-bit. There wasn't any low-level hardware tweaking, it was more about CP/M 68k, GEM, etc. One thing I did do was try some C compilers with Megamax being the most usable (for floppies). I missed the 8-bit's support chip programming which was lacking in the ST and living in the Amiga. Getting interested in MIDI (with Amiga dropped but the ST picked up) would have been great but I wasn't musically inclined. Well that was largely my cross-over from dreaming of becoming a great video game developer into more of a business professional programmer. Later at a co-op job I did use it again to prototype fast line joint computations for the 68k without an FPU to be used in PostScript firmware in EiconScript[0]. I also wrote the PCL 5 (most not all of 5e) compatible firmware (all except the macros) for their EiconJet (first with a hardware blitter then without). Turned out well in the end, with my interests shifting to OS/2 and multi-threading rather than only games.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I started out incessantly wanting the Timex Sinclair 1000 kit. My father flatly refused and eventually I got the Atari 8-bit. Which I thought was way cooler than the C64. I learned so much programming on that machine--with no way to save my programs for the first year.