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I had the Atari 410 tape drive. Boy I wish I had my old programs from back then - all lost in the black hole where stray cassette tapes got sucked into 
I remember rendering images by changing formulas in a loop to generate colored pixels... basically was experimenting with fractals in the early 80's as a kid. Had no idea what they were nor their potential. I just liked the beautiful patterns. Looking back I was more nerdy than I would have thought at the time. 
Atari 8-bit computer peripherals - Wikipedia[^]
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Did you have an Atari 400 or an 800?
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Actually I started with the 400 then got the 800 and finally the 1200XL (and also the 2600 gaming console). I was such an Atari-stack guy!
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I still have a 400, two 600XL and a 800XL plus 1050 disk drive and boxes full of disks in the shelf.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Then by any measure in my book you are a wealthy man my friend! 
Those were good days for me. These days its hard to recapture the *actual* thrill felt back then of exploring algorithms for the first time. It probably has something to do with the utter lack of worldly responsibilities I enjoyed as a kid. Everything comes with such weight attached to it now in middle age... deadlines, boss or peer review, balancing home and family life, managing debt, mortgages, etc.
I should probably add staving off alcoholism to that list cuz I feel the strong need for a drink right now. 
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I had a tape drive for an Atari -- it would buzz once if it wanted you to press Play, and twice if it also wanted you to press Record. It was about as reliable as predicting a sunny day in England. Later, I got an Epson HX-20 and it had a cassette drive which took the type of tapes you put into a dictation machine. It could wind to a specific position *under software control* -- luxury! It was almost - but not quite - entirely unlike having proper random access to the backing store. That computer also had a little printer which printed on cash register paper. If (with a bit of machine code) you disabled the safeties which powered the thing down if it ever went nuts, then told the printer to stick out its (single) pin and keep it there, it would burn out after a couple of minutes and smoke would come out of the printer. Very satisfying. A friend of mine used to go to Dixon's (which was an electronics retailer in the UK) and burn out their HX-20 display models...
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Never had one of those but do remember, in about 1981 or so being given a sample "hobbit drive" which was a small digital cassette drive with a view to possibly using it in a project. It had a hinged door like a hi-fi style cassette unit, but took tapes about as small as the ones that fit in pocket dictaphones. Never did get around to evaluating it.
EDIT - found some details. The company I was then working at sold a machine which was based on the Nascom so that would fit.
Link to hobbit drive info
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I remember the Exatron drive, but never had one. Like several on the list, my history started with Atari 800 and a 410 recorder; migrated to 810 then 1050 disk drives (remember 88K/floppy?). After the N key quit on my 800, I got an Atari 1200, a design I still think was one of the most elegant ever. Then bought an Amiga 1000 because, as one person wrote, it was designed by the Atari guys (Jay Miner et al): nice machine that never lived up to its potential through extreme corporate mismanagement.
Eventually, I was reluctantly dragged into the Microsoft Windows world when I bought a DEC PC (having used PDP-11's at college and my first job). Bought a Gateway and a Dell along the way, too. Finally, made the escape to Apple about 2010.
For those who want to relive that past, there are some excellent emulators with a lot of the old software out there. I am getting great joy out of Atari800MacX with a couple of USB Atari-style joysticks these days. Today's games using fancy controllers with more than one joystick and a button are too complicated for me!
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Oh yes I remember them. Back in the 80's I even got qualified to repair them  . Usually the belt fell off or the magnetic head that read the tape got dirty.
Oh well, I seem to be fond of getting skilled in backwater technology. Anyone want a low level back-end programmer with optimized C programming skills? 
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I have a core dump sitting on my desk. A physical one. Taken from an old PDP. If my count is right, it is 1152 bits large. It is a pity that I don't have the facility to read its contents.
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If the data has not degraded and been corrupted, but then again that kind of little miracle does happen.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Company heading for Monaco on quest for percentage (10)
modified 27-Oct-16 4:58am.
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That used to be Ferrari.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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Commission???
cheers,
Super
------------------------------------------
Too much of good is bad,mix some evil in it
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And we have a winner (or would do if there was some kind of prize on offer).
Company = Co.
Heading for Monaco = 'M'
Quest = mission
Percentage = commission
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now I have to think of new one then for tomorrow 
cheers,
Super
------------------------------------------
Too much of good is bad,mix some evil in it
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That's even worse than no prize at all!
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The prize is the respect of your peers, and the honour of posting again!
I'd prefer cash, but ... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: The prize is mockery from the respect of your peers, and having the pain the honour of posting again!
FTFY
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Hah!
You also get:
* Enough rep points to sink a battleship!1
* Up to 10,000 rep points!2
* A free holiday!3
* A new car!4
1 - A digital battleship: ___________ there is mine, and as you can see, it has indeed been sunk.
2 - Average: zero.
3 - No-expenses-paid, no time off arranged with your employer, all transportation and accommodation costs are not included.
4 - This is in fact a lie.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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this is most weird.
it's now the second time this has happened to me, but it happened from the other side now. the first time was 4 or 5 years ago where i copied some text to paste it somewhere and my manager did a copy and paste on his laptop, but he pasted my text. both of us windows 7 and on a work domain.
now, 5 minutes ago, the same thing happened to me again. i took a screenshot of some code in visual studio, pasted it in mspaint, dragged a block around a function and copied that to paste in an email. when i ctrl-v'd in the new email, it pasted a shortened youtube like to a "nissan 200sx" video (i have very little interest in watching anything other than food videos on youtube). this time, i'm on windows10 and not on the work domain (ain't nobody got time fo' that!). i also have no idea who this link came from and how it infiltrated my clipboard.
so far my leading theories are:
- crazy-ass windows
- is aliens
- barry allen ran in, looked for a youtube video, copied the link, emailed it off and forgot to copy my previous item before he left
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You can be glad it wasn't my clipboard... 
And so can I
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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That's what you get for buying second-hand computers.
From the NSA.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Or from me!
... such stuff as dreams are made on
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This is seriously disturbing.
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