A8 users... Where do you live

[Wilheim]

Looks like I'm one of the youngest, except for BRK...

 

29, from Chile, South America. Here we have a ever-slowly-growing community at www.retrogames.cl

 

My first Atari came from 1985, when I acquired my first Atari 800XL with a 1010 tape drive. Then in 1989 I had my first disk drive (a 1050). Since then I slowly started to collect Atari stuff, and developing some small things.

 

Greetings.

[atarifan49]

I'm 41 and currently live on Vandenberg AFB in CA. My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1, 16k, level 2 basic, and cassette. It wasn't until 1983 that I got my first expansion interface and disk drive (single) for it. I was finally able to acquire an Atari 800XL in October 1984 at the Base Exchange at Lowry AFB in Denver, CO.

 

I later went to my first duty station near Spokane, WA (Fairchild AFB) where I was at for over 7 years. I was a member (later 8bit V.P.) of the First Atari Computer Club of Spokane (FACCS). We used to meet at the Big Brother's / Big Sister's Bingo and later at a small computer store on the north side of town.

 

Over the years I acquired a 1400XL, 1450XLD, 130XE, several 1200XL's, and some 16bit machines (1040STf and TT030). I got involved with repairing a lot of the 8bit hardware and still have a lot of my diagnostic equipment still along with service manuals.

[+kheller2]

Let me see if I got this...

Most peole here are between 30 and 40 (mean 35), and started with their systems in the early 80's, (82-84).. ages 10-13 we'll say. The mid 90's, as I recall, was a major flurry of collecting for Atarians, ages 23-27, and today its getting harder to find and more expensive to purchase.

 

So if I wanted to make some money off the collectors of non-Atari systems, who would they be? What is the prime collecting space now? I've sen a lot of SNES, Genesis sales going on.

 

Moving to things more recently, PS1s were introduced in 2000. I know EB stores in the USA are closing out their used inventory of PS1 CDs for over 75% off the low price of $5. Seems like a prime candidate to horde for another 7 years -- if we can believe there will be a similar trend to Atari 8bit collecting.

 

Think of all those people who didn't buy NIB Vectrex systems at close out for less than $50.

 

I'm not in it for the money, but I sure will need money to feed my collecting habbit.

[Plastron]

Well i am 39 and from the Atari captial Nottinghamshire UK now living near Southampton.

 

First was the 400 then 800 then 800xl then 65xe then 130xe but the MAC 65 was the best ever purchase.

 

ok lets see how many people disagree with me about Nottinghamshire

[Heaven/TQA]

brk... cool...the legendary "caught somewheeeeeere in tiiiimeeee....." not bad but powerslave and number of the beast rules...

[Almost Rice]

34, Houston.

 

I got to use my uncle's 400 while living with him back in 1982 and 83 in San Francisco. I got my 1st Atari 600xl in the summer of 84 and moved to Houston. He bought me and my bro an Apple //c in 84. We got lots of use out of both. I got a 800xl and 1050 pretty soon afterwards. gots stuff here and there from the local BBS.

 

I have met 3 people from here. Warerat, Metalguy, and Bruce Tomlin. Actually my brother and warerat worked on his tetris clone together back in the late 80s.

Edited April 23, 2007 by Almost Rice

[Albert]

I'm 37, born in New York and now living in Lorain, OH, having moved here recently from Austin, Texas where I lived for 10 years (and I plan on going back there..) An Atari 800XL was the first personal computer I ever bought (or owned), and it got a hell of a lot of use. Ultimately it would be used to run an 8-bit BBS (Phantasmal Alchemy), and I had a TON of hardware attached to it:

 

- 800XL modified with 256K of RAM

- 1MB ICD MIO board

- SpartaDOS X cart

- R-Time 8 cart

- Rev. C BASIC cart

- Two 1050 Drives with US Doubler mods

- Two Indus GT Drives

- Adaptec 4000A hard drive controller board

- Two 20MB hard drives (Seagate ST225Ns I think)

- PC XT HD case containing Adaptec card, hard drives and power supply

- XEP-80 80 column adapter

- Commodore 1702 monitor

- Magnavox 80 column monitor (both monitors hooked up and used at the same time)

- Okidata dot matrix printer (for printing logins)

- Various and sundry modems (as they evolved)

 

Over time I'd also acquire other 8-bit computers, such as a 130XE that I used to do lots of development work on. Later in life I'd graduate to the Atari ST, but that period of time wasn't as long as with the 8-bits due to Atari's lackluster support of the ST here in the US. Eventually I got frustrated and started using PCs. I think Wing Commander and Ultima VI had a lot to do with that.

 

The Atari 8-bit computers will always be close to my heart since that 800XL I bought was what really got me into computers and what I began doing serious programming on (using both BASIC and 6502 Assembly).

 

..Al

[lbaeza]

Hmmm....lemesee...

 

2007

-1972

--------

35

 

I'm 35 years old, born in San Antonio, Chile, Southamerica, now living in Santiago, Chile, Southamerica.

 

I have a dislexic heart, I love both Atari and Sinclair! Please don't hate me...

 

Regards

[pseudografx]

Hi, I'm 30, living in Czech Republic, and have recently moved to Ceske Budejovice town (hey, that's where the original Budweiser beer comes from!).

 

Personal computer milestones:

around 1985 - got mesmerized with arcade machines like Moon Patrol, Phoenix or Donkey Kong and wanted my own computer since then

1990 - got my first Atari 800 XE

1993(?) - got Atari Portfolio with 512 kB onboard RAM, 128kB memory card and parallel interface add-on (this in fact wasn't mine as it was borrowed from my mom's work. However, I still have it somewhere around - they never wanted it back :-)

1995-97 - got a C-64 and entered the c-64 scene in a group called Unreal

1997 - got my first Windows-based PC

1999 - got a SAP player from SoTe and started collecting SAP files to form the ASMA collection - http://asma.atari.org. Now it contains over 2000 SAP files.

2007 - released my first true Atari game Mind Blast (as a graphics artist and musician - code by Fandal). See Fandal's site ( http://atari.fandal.cz ) for it :-)

 

I haven't turned my old Atari on since about 1997 and currently only use the emulator for my Atari activities. I still have it under my bed in my parents' home though.

[+RetroElectroDad]

I'm 40, born in Washington (UK, near Newcastle Upon Tyne) and I'm about to relocate to Belgium (Brussels) in the near future.

 

My first computer was a ZX81 which I didn't see mentioned in any previous posts, followed by the TI99/4a (fond memories of an underated machine though a bit restrictive with no machine language access), then my first Atari was a 600XL with 1010 tape deck. I really got hooked when I bought a used 1050 drive and upgraded to an 800XL when Dixons in the UK were more or less giving them away with the 1050 in a bundle. The 800XL lasted me a good while until the very day I bought an Amiga 500. Once the A500 entered the house the poor 800XL must have assumed that was the end for it and just refused to boot up.

 

A few people here seem to have the collecting bug and I too have most of the 8 and 16 bit machines that in their heyday I could only read about along with most consoles though really the only one I ever use is a 1200XL or a PAL 800XL with SIO2PC. I think my Atari 8-bit loyalty comes from having programmed in machine language on it and really got to know it and respect the design.

[carmel_andrews]

Sorry forgot to incl. my details (silly me)

 

As per me intro bit (see introduction forum)

 

37 years old, born on the same day that an english king literally 'lost his head' and a certain austrian/german became 'kancelar' of germany

 

Born, Bred and still live in ISLINGTON (finsbury district, previously a separate london borough) (Central/North London)

 

Still own most of my A8 collection hardware only, less any working 1050's (see intro bit on the introduction forum's for other things i've owned), though there are a couple of missing things, firstly an Intellevision (prior to owning my first atari), also i think it was a binitone 12 in 1 tv games system (v. early 80's) and a Philips g7000 (UK/Euro version of the Oddysey 2, which i was given by an old colleague of myine in the late 80's)

 

I bought my first Atari (800xl) with one of my first pay packets (may/june 1986)

 

As for orpheuswaking...get back to South London

 

As for Plastron....what are you doing moving out of nottingham, UK highest percentage of single women to men ratio

 

Mind you, plastron is sort of right about Atari in the UK, Atari were more popular north of watford with only sporadic support in london/south east and home counties

 

Atari claim to fame....Saw Bob Gleadow at the Atari 90's shows, passed up the opp. to meet with him (law of averages an all that), friends with Noel Daniels (Thunderfox/Sidewinder A8), also I used to work with someone that went to school with Tony Crowther (famous Speccy/C64 games programmer), i've seen Les Ellingham (Page 6) a couple of times (AMS show), Freddy Offenga (Mega Mag) when he was Exhibiting at one of the last AMS shows i went to, Colin and Graham from Gralin Int'l/BaPAUG, Jeff Minter (Mostly at the Atari user shows) I remember the Harlequin Stand at the Atari 90's show (don't know who was manning it) Pete Mattock (LACE and formerly of Computerhouse/Gladdin House) as well as some of the computer house staff (as i used to buy things from them regularly)...and ofcourse Algie...also of LACE

 

Wrathchild...Nice to see your'e still in reading... heard anything from Dean and richard lately

Edited April 23, 2007 by carmel_andrews

[Wrathchild]

Hi Carmel,

 

Weather's been good so I'm actually outside and its currently "Using Java Server Pages and Servlets"

 

Haven't conversed with Dean for many a year since we stopped helping out at the AMS shows many (many) years ago. I do remember you coming down to Reading to quiz me on tape to disk conversions, probably around 1994/95, I said at the time 'learn 6502' and ten years on you've let me down

 

I order the odd item from Dean's site every now and then (annually I think) - Quick, SCART/RCA cables - actually I wouldn't mind a Din-2-svideo cable to make it easier to plug into a capture card - but he doesn't do those. Guess I could hack one of the existing cables onto a plug? Didn't know Richard (Gore) other than seeing him at the shows, hopefully he still dabbles - he made the "Yorky" IIRC amongst other things.

 

Mark

[Tezz]

Mind you, plastron is sort of right about Atari in the UK, Atari were more popular north of watford with only sporadic support in london/south east and home counties

I can add that there was a heathly number of Atari users here in the Northwest too. There were a number of groups in and around Manchester and of course the Atari World shop in the city centre which had Red Rat within it. Ocean Software was based in Manchester although they did not produce much for the A8 range, A freind of ours who was a big Atari 8-bit fan after working for a number of other software houses, eventually went to work for Ocean producing Graphics for the C64. I've not seen James for about 12 years now but the last I heard, he found a full Atari 800xl, with a 1050 etc stored at Ocean which they allowed him to keep and I subsequently then gave him a bunch of his development disks so he could retreive his work back.

 

I was lucky to meet a bunch of "Legends" at the original Back in time live event in Birmingham several years back.. David Whitaker, Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, Jeff Minter to name a few.. I found that David Whitaker actually used to live in Bury, a town not too far from Manchester which I used to frequent often. It was a fun end to the night chatting and getting very drunk with David !

 

I was very sad to read online yesterday that Richard Joseph died last month. We had a good chat with him at the event there also.

Edited April 23, 2007 by Tezz

[carmel_andrews]

Wrathchild

 

I only had a few probs with some of the tapes...mostly the non standard loaders (EA and english s/w resp), thunderfox ( i can't follow what it's doing) Domain o/t undead (uses different cass. load loc's and like thunderfox, can't figure out what'it's doing) and also the binary version of Jocky Wilson's Darts that i did (correct run address, $6000, all that happens is that the start screen flashes for a second and then goes black, then only way to get it working is loading it through omnimon and trapping the reset key to only doing a warmstart and running it at $6000 again and this time the start screen stays and you can play the game

 

Mind you, i did convert Zybex, Rockford, KDSM (but you can't select the team you wish to play as) and red max from tape to Binary (as well as draconus and loads of others)

 

I also figured out the format used by Digicomms 'the freezer' and Computerhouse's superdump III/IV

 

From sector 4-104 is some sort of O/S or program and sector 105 or 6 to the end is a dump of user memory (600-bfff), John E of TGR/AURA fame reckoned that he cracked all the tape games that used 'bank switching' using little more then 'the freezer'

 

I've only bumped into Richard a few times (mostly AMS shows) i sold him an 810 whilst helping out on roy and LACE's stand (I almst gave him a free disk game as i didn't realise it had a disk inside

 

Colin/Graham from Gralin/BaPAUG were showing of at the Atari 90's show (with a 1200xl, i heard that one of them had a 1400 or was it a 1450)

 

I'm still waiting for a pristine condition version of Atari roots (like what noel D. was going to give me his copy of)...can't be bothered with the online version

 

Now that Deathtrap has all my tapes and the fact that i've no working 1050's i'm mainly restricted to using emu's on a PC

 

I though that the Twaug version of Mapping Atari was ace, still got my two volumes of it

[Gury]

I was 32 this month and I am living in Smarje-SAP, near capital city of Slovenia, Ljubljana.

[Bill Lange]

39. Grow up in Toms River, New Jersey. Used to connect to the Bill (now Paula) Kaiser's BBS in Forked River, NJ. Live in Denver, Colorado. Currently working in Glasgow, Scotland for the next three months.

 

1979 Atari 2600

1982 Atari 400

1984 Atari 800XL

1986 Apple IIc

[+warerat]

I'm currently 32, originally born in Viña Del Mar, Chile, South America (saludos a los otros Chilenos que estan aqui tambien). I've been in Houston, Texas over 20 years and I'm proud to call Texas home.

[Albert]

I just have to comment that it's pretty remarkable how many posters are from outside the US. Gotta' love the internet!

 

..Al

[dwhyte]

32... somewhere in Alberta, Canada...

 

1981 - Vic-20

1984 - 800XL w/1010 recorder

1985 - 1050 Drive

1988 - 130XE/XMM801

1989 - 520STfm/SC1224[samsung]

1992 - Falcon030

1997 - PC

2006 - Mac

[Jetboot Jack]

Well I'm 40...

 

I live in Farnham Surrey, and I work for Microsoft (no throwing things please)...

 

I got given an 800 in 1980 on my Birthday by my Dad who came across them in US - I still have that NTSC 800 today and it works - 27 years young!!!

 

sTeVE

[Bill Lange]

Well I'm 40...

 

I live in Farnham Surrey, and I work for Microsoft (no throwing things please)...

 

I got given an 800 in 1980 on my Birthday by my Dad who came across them in US - I still have that NTSC 800 today and it works - 27 years young!!!

 

sTeVE

 

Hey Steve,

 

I am working up in Glasgow for the next few months. I'll be taking a day trip down to London this Saturday to pick up a few things for the wife at Harrods and Paddington Station (not sure why these particular items can't be more easily purchased on the internet, but there you have it). If your going to be around London, I'll buy you a pint.

 

Bill

[Tickled_Pink]

37. Got my first 800XL, 1050 and 1010 all together with Dropzone, Ghost Chaser, Bruce Lee and Decathlon for Christmas 1985.

 

There were a group of us who had 800XLs around that time on Anglesey (village of Rhosybol and around the Amlwch area). I'm the only one who still has them.

 

Now living in Cardiff. It's a dump.

[deathtrappomegranate]

I am working up in Glasgow for the next few months.

In that case, I'd be happy to buy you a pint.

[atarimac]

I'm 43, from Kansas City, Missouri, USA (Although I was in Phoenix for 20 years, and grew up in Nebraska, which is where I started using Atari's)

 

First computer was an Atari 800 with an Atari410. (Although I used other's Apple II's and TRS-80s quite a bit also).

[DigitalDaredevil]

I'm 37 from Cleveland, Ohio. I received my first Atari 800Xl in 1983. Several years before that I had an Atari 2600 and Atari Video Pinball. I still use my 800XL and play the 2600.