Noelio's Blog - Everyone thinks of their *first* now and again!

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The first time I ever laid hands on a computer was in the early 1980s when my childhood friend got their first of many apples.

It was a Apple II with a couple drives and a monitor. How many hours did we spend playing wizardry, lemonade stand, sabotage, dung beetles etc!?

MANY@!

 

I liked the sheer size of the machine which lead me to falling in love with the original Atari 800.

 

Anyways fast forward 28 years and I'm visiting my mother and the next door neighbor's Mother is having a yard sale. Naturally I went over knowing how many Apples they've had over the years and naturally I asked about "my first".

To my amazement they still had it, packed in a crate that they had specially designed for it when they went to England on sabbatical back in 1985. It was still packed in the crate from when they moved back home!!!

 

Last night I went over to get the machine. I offered $100 for the whole kit as I figured now that the family is moving they could use a few meals in their 3000 trek across the country and because I wanted this machine for a price.

 

First thing I did was bust open the crate looking for the original disks which were not there. Fine enough! After a search online I discovered that the particular model had cassette in / out jacks built in that could be used in a rescue like mode.

Hrrrm... After a little more searching I discovered "ADTPRO" which allows you to send a cassette image down to the machine from a PC via the soundcard to get you started.

 

In my glee, I managed to set up a bootable system disk that contains the transfer program to transfer the disk images via tape ports.

VERY cool to play those games again on the exact machine I remembered. Next step is to make a linux terminal out of it/contiki etc.

 

Thought I would share!

 

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