MULE, 7 Cities, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Skyfox, Adventure Construction Set, Music Construction Set, Racing Destruction Set, Heart Of Africa and Bards Tale were all... relatively mind-blowing (although my mind was only... 12-13 at the time!).

They seemed to be capable of both pushing the computer past its limits and expanding the idea of what was possible in game (or just... with the 'construction sets'... what was possible).

One of the things I remember most about the Atari 8 bit family was the superior graphics and sound as compared to the early generation of dos-based PCs that came years later. The haunting melody from the splash screen of 7 Cities of Gold was classic. And it still blows me away to see what the Atari 8-bit was capable of with games like Alternate Reality: The City!

The Apple was a tank, fast workstation. (Assuming one boosted the 1Mhz CPU.) I had 4Mhz at one point then.

My //e can run at 16Mhz. Crazy fast. Makes it useful today.

Atari machines can get a high Mhz upgrade, and if one wants to do it, a 6809!

Today I have one. It has one purpose: run "Star Raiders."

I love that game. And the 400 looks seriously cool. Never fails to get some attention running that game.

Then people experience the feel of that cool looking keyboard... oh well. It is fine for the game.

I had the Atari 400 then 800. After losing days of work to unreliable cassette storage, getting a disk drive (the Trak) was momentous. Being able to NAME files was a bonus on merely being able to read and write them reliably.

I still have the whole system, and my Commodore 1702. That thing needs to be re-capped.