BASIC on the Atari 2600 was a great way to prepare for modern computing. Spend hours tweaking an underpowered program using a fiddly interface, then lose all your work when you turn off the power.  Just like when Windows crashes today!

They designed a real programming system for the 2600 once that would have turned it into a bona fide home PC. It plugged into the cartridge slot and added a chicklet-style keyboard as well as BASIC. It never saw the light of day, though. Perhaps they feared it would pirate Atari 400 sales.

I too have a 130XE in the attic, but haven't plugged it in in years. I'm hoping the floppy still works and that the disks are still readable so that my college ouevre will not be lost to history.

The oldest working/still useful PC I have is a Gateway Handbook 486. It's a notebook PC slightly larger than a paperback book, with one of the best small-size keyboards ever invented. (Oh, you thought the eee book was a new idea?  ) I've actually got 2 of them - one runs Win 95 and the other runs DOS/GEOS. If only the dead batteries weren't so expensive to replace, I'd probably still be using these.

BASIC on the Atari 2600 was a great way to prepare for modern computing. Spend hours tweaking an underpowered program using a fiddly interface, then lose all your work when you turn off the power.  Just like when Windows crashes today!

Best analogy ever

</comic book guy voice>

sazzen - which computer system are you referring to?! Also, what replaced the PB Multimedia M415 in daily use? Enquiring minds want to know... 

deozaan: I figured he was referring to this guy: Comic Book Guy^w.

deozaan: I figured he was referring to this guy: Comic Book Guy^w.

Correct.

If you live in Santa Cruz, CA, that has GOT to be my old computer. Across the room is its successor, a Packard Bell Multimedia M415 that was purchased in 1995. Until August of 2004, it was my only computer. Until September 1st of this year, it was still used daily. I can't bring myself to dismantle it.  I confess, I loved Windows95. I was comfortable with it, didn't mind trying every tweak I came across and didn't mind digging around in the registry. If something went awry, I just dug out the Windows95 disk and reinstalled over everything. No problem. If I needed help I phoned Microsoft and a real person walked me through the solution. The phone calls were free -- for a year.  Best of all and the reason I can't let go of it, was the software. If I need to do really serious work, I can always walk over to the corner and fire up WordPerfect 6.1 or Excel 97.

Hehe, I'm a ways to the east (Glendale, AZ) - I love Windows 95 (A, never tried the B version) - we had a Compaq with 95a on it, my first computer, when I was about 3 - we got rid of it before we moved, when I was about to turn 7. Loved that machine. Screwed everything up all the time (dad reformatted constantly). But thats how I learned probobally 50%+ of what I know now about Windows. There was this one time where I went through and ran a disk checking program to see what files/folders were taking up the most space, and whan I found out "Program Files" was the culprit, I concluded that because I know shortcut files are ~1kb and EXE files are big, I should make shortcuts to all the EXEs and delete the EXEs!

A shortcut filled desktop and empty Program Files later, I know not to do that

Does anybody have one of these? I got mine as a Christmas present way back when I was a kid. It's called a Digicomp and it was sold by a terrific company (now long defunct) called Edmund Scientific.

It's not really a computer per sce. It's actually a set of mechanical flip-flops that could be programmed and initialized in various ways using little plastic programming lugs (they were one-inch pieces of drinking straw) such that some rudimentary logic circuits could be set up and played with. The most interesting part of it was the "clock" which consisted of your hand pushing a plastic plate back and forth to create the "clock cycles" that drove your "logic circuits."

One of the most intellectually satisfying things that ever happened to me was when I was able to set it up as a count-up register device - and more importantly, understood why it worked! That experience was what initially got me hooked on the whole "computer thing."

Here's what it looks like:

[attach]

Hey I can put together a 486-dx in a hearbeat and don't try me!  I still have all my Windows for workgroups 3.11 disks and I was running AOL and found a girlfriend in 1996!  ha ha.  no joke.