Electronic Entertainment

I can still remember when we got our Atari 2600. It came with the Pac-Man game, the game that would eventually bring this company down. We thought it was awesome. The favorites around our house were Frogger (my dad flipped this game), Defender, Spider Fighter, Pit Fall, and I had a Spider-Man game. We had a game called DragonFire. If you beat the last dragon you were supposed to take a picture of the screen and the score and you would get a free poster. The only problem is that it was next to impossible to get a shot of the screen with the cameras of the time. So we were left with a fuzzy picture and no poster.

This was the first computer at our house. Roughly the size of a large calculator and about the same amount of power. About the only thing I remember my Dad being able to do with this machine is programming a bowling game that was pretty pathetic. Of course it took weeks to program the game.

This was our second computer. It was pretty popular at the time. We had the tape drive for it and Dad used to get the Games magazines that had programs in the back that you could punch in and create a game. They had page after page of numeric codes that had to be punched in and when you got to the end you would get an error on line such and such. Then it was back to the program to find the mistake.

This one came after the Vic 20. My Uncle Jim owned a store that sold Commodores and their different programs so we got one for Christmas. I remember playing a few games on it but nothing all that great. It was hard to use and took a long time to boot up. But, I do remember being introduced to what I consider the early internet with the Commodore 64. If you had the modem and plugged in the phone line you could log on to bulletin boards. They were kind of like websites.