And it looked cheap. The case was two sheets of vacuum-formed white plastic held together with plastic rivets. It was much smaller than I expected, about 7 by 9 inches and a little over an inch thick, with a flat membrane keyboard. But when I saw an ad for the Sinclair ZX80, which sold for only $199 (plus $5 shipping), I’d found a less expensive way in. A basic Apple II setup cost over $2,000 (over $6,000 in 2020 dollars). I wasn’t all that interested until I read Ted Nelson’s self-published, Whole Earth Catalog-style book Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1980. In the late ’70s, microcomputers like the Apple II and Commodore Pet were getting a lot of attention.

As I’ve been going through all this stuff, it occurred to me that people might be interested to learn about what I was doing with my Atari back in the early ’80s (and since then), and how I started using computers in the first place. I’ve been down an Atari rabbit hole lately, organizing and documenting my old Atari files and programs, which I originally transferred to my Mac back in the ’90s.

In the early ’80s, before I had a Mac, and before I was making fonts, I was an Atari home computer user.

Atari xe emulator mac