3 ms·

You had tape? I had to retype all my programs any time I power cycled my computer :-)

• GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Well in effect that same thing happened to me.. Atari's tape drives were horribly unreliable. It was a tense time listening to the screeching during read operations. You could usually hear it go wrong, and some error would appear, having to start all over again (and the position counters were cheap and unreliable too). My 1010 tape drive also had really really thin plastic stems under the buttons, which pressed on quite heavy mechanical tape controls.. Obviously they didn't last much longer than the warranty period :X I removed the front panel and pushed the metal parts by hand for a while until the whole thing just gave out. The new-style XE tape drive I got after that was better but still had the poor reliability. There was also a disk drive option but it cost more than the computer itself (and in fact it was almost another computer as it was powered by a similar CPU, just with less RAM). So being a schoolboy I never owned one.
• jkestner 6y ago
  You had a keyboard? I had to reenter the sequences of toggle switches every time I turned on my MIPS.