Atari Master Saves The World

pretty neat for us old ones who remember it. 😊

Not quite Battle for LA but a nice retro-artistic-thingy.

You played Atari didn't you Expat?

@Patty

What do you mean old? I bet I have you beat by a country mile. I remember when, in my early 40's, I bought my first home computer. It was an apple II and it had 16 color graphics that consisted of rather large brick shaped color blocks. Gamers who graduated from that to games like space invaders thought they had died and went to graphic heaven.

I started on a Commodore 64 when I was close to 30.

I started playing games on a REAL pinball machine (1 ball, no flippers, & you could win money). By the time flippers came out I could go all day on a nickle. My best arcade game was QIX. I still do FPS on my PC and FC2 is the current stress reliever.

And Yogi, you've got to be the "old man of the mountain" if you were 40 in 1969-70. Kudos dude.

Expat, the Apple II didn't come out until the very early eighties. I divorced my first wife in at 39 YO 1979 and bought my first apple II a couple of years later after I was already married to my second wife. But I am still no young pup. I will be 72 in July. I think Apple may have had a very primitive computer before the Apple II but it was the Apple II that really opened up the home computer market. That and the first spreadsheet program for the home user, VisiCalc, which made it a serious machine. By the time I bought it I was already in business and I kept my double entry cash journal on a spreadsheet I created in VisiCalc.

BTW and FYI - I am happykat, I just remembered that I had an old account here as yogi and re activated it.

So, where was this guy on 9/11?
Btw, I don't remember some of those things above, but my first and fav arcade game was Asteroids on a machine at the mall. Sunk many quarters there. Pinball was always my forte, esp with the nickle machines that gave you five balls you could launch at once, and only had five places on the mechanical point counters.

Sorry about that Yogi! Still you've got to be close to the top of the list. You've got me by 9 year or so.

If the Apple II didn't come out til the 80's, then the Atari was out before it... The 2600 (which used controllers like the one in the video) was released in 1977, if wikipedia is to be believed.

Here is a quote from the "Apple II History" web site.

A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to write it in software now. So that was the reason that color was added in first — so that games could be programmed. I sat down one night and tried to put it into BASIC. Fortunately I had written the BASIC myself, so I just burned some new ROMs with line drawing commands, color changing commands, and various BASIC commands that would plot in color. I got this ball bouncing around, and I said, “Well it needs sound,” and I had to add a speaker to the Apple II. It wasn’t planned, it was just accidental… Obviously you need paddles, so I had to scratch my head and design a simple minimum-chip paddle circuit, and put on some paddles. So a lot of these features that really made the Apple II stand out in its day came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program a BASIC version of Breakout and show it off at the club

You can visit the site here - http://apple2history.org/

So you are right about the Atari preceding the Apple II. There was, however, an Apple I that preceded the Apple II.

I bought my first Apple II before they even had disc drives. You had to use a tape recorder with a data tape to save your work. When they introduced the first Disc II drives I thought I had died and gone to computer heaven.

My personal computer history goes back well before the Apple Computer days. I cut my computer teeth programming by modem on an IBM Mainframe in Compact II which was a machine tool programming language based on Scientific FORTRAN. Compact II used most of the native commands of Scientific FORTRAN and just had added special operators specific to machine tool programming. BTW - The Compact II manual was the size of a Chicago telephone directory.