When I was a kid there was an ad in the back of Popular Mechanics for a $99.95 Computer Kit. I was intimidated by the kit.

Later it came out as a turnkey for the same price and I saved up and bought it at a local drugstore in the Santa Monica Mall.

Bitter sweet Z80 ness. For those who didn't live through this PC, it was designed to hook to your TV and a cassette tape player for storage. Programs were available on tape. For many users the tape was a way to save programs. It never worked for me. It did cause me to have a good mental skill of remembering. Every time the computer crashed I had to type my work back in. That was every few hours. At its height I had a dedicated 5 inch black and white TV as a monitor and a big case to cary it all.

My Atari journey was 2 fold. The local electronics store had a display with the Atari 800 & 400. We would go and play video games for hours it seemed. Probably a 1/2 hour in reality.

The second side of this story was a guy that asked for help with a stack of 4 Atari 800's this was probably 3 or 4 years later. I had been taught to use a pencil eraser to clean card edge contacts. I had never been inside an Atari but they were all non working so I could do no wrong. I pulled all the cards and cleaned them reseated them. I ended up with 4 woking Ataris. He gave me one of them as payment for fixing them. This was awesome but I had no power supply or cartridges. This means I had a cool notepad if I bought a power supply. At the time I didn't have the cash to make it a use full computer.

When I turned 16 my grandparents had an insurance policy on me that matured. They gave me the money and I used it to buy a 800XL and 1050 combo deal at Fedco. I think I had to save up for a box of floppies a month later.

My ultimate Atari rig back in the day was ICD MIO with a 130XE, with a Sparta DOS X, R Time 8 cart, and a XEP80.

I had built a computer consulting business and saved to build up my 8 bit Atari. Then things took a turn. I had worked on IBM PCs, these were still DOS days for the PC. A friend introduced me to a client that was going to buy a PC for $9,000. He had a printing business and needed an application to fill out forms. I sold him an Atari ST, industrial dot matrix printer and a hard drive for less than half that. I wrote an application to fill out the forms. He was able to use a paint program to sketch for his clients and in the end became an advocate for the Atari.

What I got out of my first Atari ST sale was enough money left over to buy a 2nd Atari 520 ST and used parts to make a system for my self. I sold a new 520 ST upgraded to a 1040 equivalent 1MB . The trick to making that was I had to do a stacked ram upgrade by soldering and wiring the chips in a brand new 520 voiding its warranty.

It ran for years with no issue until the business was sold.

Later I worked for the Federated Group in the computer department ( my store is featured in the movie Ruthless People ). I was able to score a Mega 4 ST and Atari Laser Printer for 60% discount .

A few years back my father had passed away and I received his Atari computers from my family. I setup his 130XE and bought a SDrive Max plunging me into the 8 bit world once again.

I also got out my original Atari 800XL with a Transkey from back in the day. I started looking at my combined collections.

I decided to get a XEGS and had a UMB1 and Sophia (rev C) installed in it.

This drove me deep into a hunt for code I had worked on with a friend when we were teenagers. I was able to find it and patch it together with a new loader and eventually got it to run on an emulator and on my. hardware.

At the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic I was searching for a way to get my Mega 2 ST or some variant of a Mega ST running. The Mega is not working so I went in search of a way to get a 4 meg machine of any type running. I found a 1040 STE with a new PSU made for the US, a semi rare find. I upgraded it to 4 Megs and stared pulling all my ST disks out of storage.

Then a Mega STE w/ 4 megs /40 HD and lots of Midi software came up on Ebay. It included a flat screen LG monitor and mouse and a few other accessories. It was a developers PC at Hybrid Arts. I saw it as the Holly Grail of ST computers for me. Falcons come and go, but I never had one and it would be a learning curve. I would love to test a TT out, but this was attainable.

Back in 8 Bit land I had ordered a custom built 1088XLD. At that moment the peek of what I saw as new old school hardware with all the bells and whistles.

This was a newly hand built Atari PC running the original chips. It is one of the nicest Atari computers I own.

There was one Atari I could not find from my old days. I could not find my original 600XL. The Hunt was on! At that particular time finding one on Ebay was like hens teeth and sold as is. I found a guy that was restoring them with a 64 meg upgrade and selling them far below Ebay prices with a 90 day warranty.

Of the Atari line, as FlashJazzCat says, the 600xl is a joy to work with due to how small and compact it is. I never appreciated it back in the day. But now days the amount of stuff you can get under the hood is staggering.

There was one more Modern Atari to come the NUC576+, at a fraction of the cost and pint sized next to the 1088XLD. It is one the most awesome builds ever and lends itself to being portable.

In just a 4.5 x 4.5 inch format it is wonderfully space saving.

The latest acquirement is the XEP80 - II a board the same size as the and the NUC576+ that adds HDMI an 80 column output.

I just picked up a tested 520ST to be a terminal to my Z80 PC with a VT100 cart. I have a SF354 3.5 inch floppy drive coming in. The adventure continues.