Saturday, April 30, 2022

Alan Alda and ATARI- just a fun blast from the past!*

 


Ah, the late-70s, when Alan Alda could sell home arcade systems (I'm pretty sure "gaming" wasn't in the vocabulary back then) as "the perfect gift for the college student" while showing us a kid typing away on a blue screen with a white font (that wasn't anyone wanted to do then, any more than it's something anyone wants to do now.)  

This Atari system has "spell check"- as long as the user notices the spelling error first, and tells the program to fix it.  At least it isn't Magic Desk, that cartridge I used as my first "Word Processing Program" in my Commodore 64 during my freshman year of college- that thing held a total of 1000 pages of text, each of which had to be saved individually and filed into one of the four drawers of a cartoon file cabinet.  Definitely more useful than an electronic typewriter, which doesn't "make all the copies you want as long as you can find ink for the printer somewhere" like Mr. Alda's meal ticket. 

*I'm still recovering from my bout with That Illness That Shall Not Be Named.  I'm tired.  This was easy.  Sue me. :>)


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