Welcome to our Atari page!
My Atari adventure started in early 1986 when I picked up my first computer at a clearance sale at Zellers. It was a brand new Atari 800 XL, and only $50! I took it back home and hooked it up to the TV set and started banging away. I typed in the few small programs and read everything included with the system. Alas, it was just a console so as soon as I turned it off all my work was gone. A day or so later I ran down to the city again and picked up a tape drive at Consumers Distributing for I think about $35. My adventure with waiting for it to load programs was almost as tedious as typing them in. Time for a disk drive! $250 later... a 1050 single sided drive. I was on my way.
By 1988 I had picked up a few more items for the Atari, as well as a new Atari 130XE with 256k memory implant, a large monster tower (about the size of a baby-AT case) that had 2 floppy 5.25-inch drives and I daisy chained the 1050 into that. Later that year I added a board called a "Black Box" made by Bob Puff's company that allowed me to add a massive full-height 5.25-inch 5 megabyte MFM hard disk. A short while later I picked up a speedy (for it's time) 300bps Supra modem. The Spirit Bulletin Board System (BBS) was born!
About a year later I upgraded to 1200 baud modem and found the BBS still quite slow customer-wise. So I did the next great thing, I put on a 2400 baud Supra modem and founded the Ottawa Valley Atari Users Group. A few months later we became the Arnprior Computer User Group and a few more BBS's shot up in the area. Membership in the group started out with three members and in two years we had over thirty members, monthly meetings and probably about twice a week we had "coffee claches" at a few of the local coffee shops. Coffee and computers DO mix!
This page is still under construction, please bookmark it and check in once in a while to see more as I add it.
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Last Updated: 18/Oct/2004