[protomyth]

Yep, we traded in our Atari VCS (2600) with 23 cartridges for an Atari 400 and two game cartridges (Missile Command and Pac-Man). He spent money that was in short supply to buy a 410 (tape recorder) and the BASIC cartridge. We learned to program and that made all of the difference years on.

There was a small slice of time where consumer, programmable computers were affordable to a large audience in the 80's and very early 90's. Adding to that era was the magazines that provided amazing content such as programs and news. Antic, Byte, Creative Computing, and Dr. Dobbs were the building blocks.

[biztos]

What I really loved about those magazines, living in a small town, was how they simultaneously showed you the variety of what was out there, mostly through the small ads, and the speculative future of the technology through the articles, while also giving a kid the ability to grow their skills Right Now in the form of printed-out programs.

[protomyth]

Computer Shopper was the last time I welcomed the ads. You learned so much from those ads.

[bombcar]

Before the widespread pricing on the internet I remember following computer parts via the ads in the local weekly computer paper.

DRAM was $32 a meg for soooooo long

[TacticalCoder]

Lucky you! I had the BASIC cartdrige for the... Atari 2600. It'd come with a joystick in two split halves which, if I remember correctly, you had to plug in the joystick ports (so one in each port). My memory may be failing me for it was a very long time ago. I still fondly remember the first lines I drew, in colors, using BASIC. One of my very first program.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I had BASIC for the Atari 2600 (called Atari VCS at the time). It came with two controllers that had membrane keyboards. There were not enough keys for the alphabet so you had to use key modifiers to type the full A-Z and 0-9 character set. It was immensely tedious and really a bummer to use. I’m surprised you got far enough to do graphics with it. I dont recall being able to do anything except every simple text-based things like:

10 print “hello”

20 goto 10

[robocat]

Good images of the manual and the keyboard overlays: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-basic-programm...

64 bytes of basic tokens - so program size was limited to about 10 short lines.

https://atariprojects.org/2019/12/24/try-basic-programming-o... with video of a program running: https://atariprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BASIC-V...

[TacticalCoder]

Yup I wrongly wrote "joystick" split in two halves but I meant a keyboard split in two halves. It's the same as you describe. I don't remember much: maybe I'm mistaken my memories of the 2600 for those of the 600 XL.

[flomo]

IIRC it didn't even have strings, but it did have drawing commands.

[IMSAI8080]

BBC Micro for me round these parts but same idea. The 80s were a golden age for bedroom coders and the various 8-bit machines round the world launched thousands of careers. The fact that the machines came with a programming language (and even booted straight into it) gave many cause to experiment. It faded out in the 90s when the concept of what a home computer was changed.