May 3, 1980

First Personal Computer, Sort of…

My first computer was an Atari 800, with 8k of memory.  Yes, that’s 8 kilobytes of memory.  Not megabytes. It cost, after Illinois taxes, $1,149.  In 2013 dollars that would be $3,256.

It connected to a television set, as that was the monitor.  It used cartridges for some of the programs, including the Star Raiders game.  It also had a tape disk drive and some programming capability using the Basic language.

I tried to create a “Wine Cellar” database program.

Sales receipt for the first computer.

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