I don’t have an exact date on when my family purchased an Atari 400, other than it was the early 80s. It included 16k of RAM, which was an upgrade from the standard 8k. We had BASIC and PILOT to program with. The original games were Pac-Man, Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Star Raiders. We later got Q-Bert and Fraction Fever. We also had a 410 Cassette Drive, which could load and save programs to audio cassettes.

Star Raiders was unique in that one person controlled the joystick while another used the keyboard, pretending to be on the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise.

Missile Command was pretty cool. My brother was grounded once, and somehow he convinced our parents to let him play. The rule was that he could only play one game. The only trouble was, they didn’t realize how good he was. 15 minutes later, Dad comes into the room, upset that he’s still playing. Once he realized it was the first game with the high score, we sat there for what must have been an hour watching him play. The screen turned all sorts of colors, making it hard to see both the missiles and explosions.

Pac-Man was Pac-Man.

Cassette Drive

The cassette drive took what seemed to be hours to load games. You would hear this awful ringing sound every once in a while. If you saved over an audio cassette with music, you might also hear muffled music fading in and out in the background as it loaded. On Cassette tapes, we had Frogger, Salmon Run, and Spanish software, with about 8 tapes that actually spoke.

Restoration

Many years later, I restored the computer once I understood electronics and vintage computers better. It still runs.