Bought a refurbished Atari 600XL at a clearance store for less than $90 around 1984. Borrowed a tape drive from my older friend Richard in exchange for making h

Bought a refurbished Atari 600XL at a clearance store for less than $90 around 1984. Borrowed a tape drive from my older friend Richard in exchange for making him a video titling program for his fledgling wedding video business. All 16k of RAM was glorious, I already knew BASIC from the stack of Apple IIs in the library computer lab. Wrote some rudimentary generative art and music types of programs and was just starting to PEEK and POKE my way into machine code. Unfortunately my mother's mental health condition (now treated, thankfully) viewed the noisy machine as a threat and she disassembled and destroyed it. I found my way back to computing via electronics and an EE tech degree. DOS on the 8086 just wasn't quite the same a few years later. The nostalgia factor is powerful and getting something like this is tempting, although I've fired up emulators and dabbled a bit in the past and realize that I'm still looking to the future, not the past.