I told my college girlfriend she could use it whenever she wanted, but she just didn't like the poor Atari. I remember trying to get her interested in the drawing program, but still nothing.

I still have a nice memory of me demonstrating the abilities of the drawing program though. I was fooling around and drew male and female anatomy on the screen. She said, “You’re getting me horny. Turn that box off!” I was astonished on a few levels. I never heard her say anything remotely sexual, and I like it. I remember breaking up with her after we graduated, and I never found anyone even close to her on a lot of levels. I mistakenly thought the grass was greener.

I had this irrational fear one teacher might question the dot matrix print, but no one questioned anything.

My girlfriend at the time thought I was crazy for spending so much money on a computer.

I hated writing papers, but the computer saved me a lot of hassles.

I wish now I explored other aspects of computing back then, but in all honestly, I felt like sitting in front of a screen for anything other than writing, or making money, was waste of my 20’s.

I even got to the point where I didn’t like computers. I still have a love hate relationship with a lot of tech.

I remember looking at the case, and the monitor a few years after graduation, and tossing it all away. At the time, I wished they didn’t use that beige for the case/monitor though.

Now—-I wish I kept it. That word processor was everything I needed to write.

IIRC the ST was running DRAMs a few tens of nanoseconds (ten to fifteen percent) faster than they were rated. Not sure exactly why, but I think the ST was running cheap parts faster than they were supposed to go, and it largely got away with it.

Wonder if they played the same games with the refreshed 6502-based systems.

As for the XE, from reading the forums it sounds like they just used a bad batch of 4164 DRAMs, something to do with them being American made and not Japanese. I seem to remember this was the era of crazy fluctations in memory prices.

512K for about $240, IIRC. My first major purchase at Fry's, which had recently bifurcated a supermarket into a "chips" side (with dip) and a "chips" side (with sockets).