Beyond Nostalgia

10 REM --- MY FIRST PROGRAM --- 20 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?" 30 INPUT N$ 40 PRINT "HELLO "; N$ 50 GOTO 40 RUN When I was 10 years old, I got my first computer, an Atari 800XL. It was the early 80s, and the consensus among the kids in my class was that the Atari and the Commodore 64 were the best systems to have. The ZX Spectrum was not considered as good, but it had a larger games library. These machines were fairly common in homes in the 80s. They all used 8-bit architecture, which severely limited their memory capacities, and had BASIC built in, serving as both a programming language and an operating system interface. I remember waiting for what felt like hours for games to load from a chirping cassette drive, arguing with my parents about using the living room television to which my Atari was connected, and spending days writing and debugging a simple text adventure game in BASIC. These machines often functioned as game consoles in practice, but the required technical tweaking to…