I suspect the world would be better if that percentage were even greater.
Christmas 1980
While i was home visiting my mom, we spent some time going through my mom’s collection of old photographs. We ran across this old Polaroid of myself (left) and my brother Kevin in Christmas of 1980. I was sixteen years old, and had saved for the better part of a year to get about three hundred dollars to buy this computer, and my mom kicked in the last of the money as a Christmas present. This little gem had 16K of memory, and I couldn’t afford any storage device (not even tape at the time), but I think I see the box for the Atari Basic cartridge in the foreground, so I must have sprung for that. I also see in the little shelf above my desk what appear to be prescription bottles, but are in fact small bottles of paints (I used to paint miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons). I also remember the Moosehead beer shirt that I am wearing: Kevin gave that to me, and I wore it alot, most of the way through my undergraduate years at college.
Just thought I’d share this blast from the past. Oh, and here’s a bigger scan showing more details.
Comment from Juan Buhler
Time 1/5/2006 at 1:20 pm
Is that part of an Apple logo in the lower left of the picture? Did the Atari come in an Apple box? 🙂
Editor’s note: Good eye, Juan. It was indeed an apple sticker. I believe it was probably stuck on the side of a small television set that I had. We were programming Apple II computers in our physics labs before then (I can remember writing a simple driving game in assembler for the Apple II) and I must have picked one up from somewhere.  A cool flash from the past.