My third home computer was an ATARI PC2 XT. It was an IBM Clone (we call those simply "PCs" nowadays) and had built-in vEGA graphics. I had a "massive" 20mb hard drive on mine, and spent many a weekend riding my pushbike to the Western Australian Institute of Technology (W.A.I.T., now Curtin University) to copy free and shareware software from the CD-Rom archive distributed from a repository at (if I remember correctly) Oakridge in the USA??? The Internet was in its infancy at that point, and services like ARCHIE were still being used.
I would have a certain amount loaded on the hard drive, and the rest archived to floppy. There were useful programs back then like Telnet, YARN (a newsgroup reader) and LYNX (a text web browser), games like Captain Cola and Helicopter Rescue (where I killed more hostages than saved on average).
Thereafter all my home computers (except one) were PCs of various sorts. But this was the last pre-mouse computer I owned.
#atari #pc2 #homecomputer
http://retropages.uw.hu/Lexikon/Atari/Atari_PC2_Large.jpg
The one PC exception was a classic Mac that a boarder gave me In lieu of
ReplyDeleterent. For several years I used it to play CDs in the bathroom while I had a bath. Fell apart eventually.
Sounds like my first PC clone. Had 16 colors on mine. Woot!
ReplyDeleteOooh - SIXTEEN COLOURS - "luxury" (said in best Monty Python lanashire accent)
ReplyDelete