Thanks for the Donkey Kong memories! It brought me back to my childhood when I first played the original Donkey Kong on an Atari 800. Back then we used cassette tapes to load the games onto our computers and it literally took an hour (when there wasn't an error during loading where you'd have to start over).
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Wow! No idea it took that long. I was born in 87 in Mexico, at that time most of the technology arrived late, I remember some of the first games I played were in MS-DOS: Pacman, Flintstones and one where you played das a cat that jumped on above trash cans, I don't remember the name. My older cousin had an Atari, but it was a newer version than the one you mention.
It was a torturous process loading up games on the tape drive but it almost made the game even more of a treat to play because you had to go through such an ordeal just to get it to work! After the 8-bit Atari 400/800s of the early 80s they released the Atari ST that was 16/32 bit and also the Atari 130xe (which was also 8-bit but had more memory). Better yet they released disk drives! Although the 5 1/4" floppies didn't hold that much data back then, it was a massive step up from the cassette drive. You'd get between 2 and 8 floppies when you bought the game (depending on how big it was) and you'd have to switch them out as you went from board to board or into different areas.
Good times!
Wow! It's very interesting to read this, I believe that only a small group of people were into games, right? I've heard that it was not very common back then. Thank you for sharing this!
Computer gaming (and home computer use in general) was way less popular back then for sure. Colecovision and Atari 2600 were the consoles of the early 80s and they were much more popular. There was a certain appeal to the plug and play aspect of the cartridges on the consoles, where you could load up and instantly play (the Atari 800 also supported cartridges although not the same ones and they were much more limited in availability).
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