In moving my grandparents' stuff today, we had to make a decision on what to do with the old Atari 800XL.

This classic machine is what I first learned to write code on. I can't say that I am any better today. Now it only gets used for playing games like Jumpman Junior, Star Raiders, Donkey Kong and Serpentine. It also worked with the Atari 1010 which is a glorified cassette tape player. Some applications shipped on cassette tape where in order to boot them, you had to put in the DOS 3 disk in the Atari 1050 5.25" disk drive, start the cassette tape at the beginning and type "CLOAD" to load the tape. When the "READY" prompt appeared, you then type "RUN" to run it. Never usually that simple in practice, though.

Anyway, my cousin Steve and I, who are the only two people that care about this anymore, decided I would take it home for a bit, sort out the stuff that works and doesn't work, and then return the working applications, games and peripherals to my grandparents' new house when they are more moved in.

I started to get things set up, and noticed that my aunt Laura packed an essential "Monitor" cable in a different box that ended up in a storage unit today. So now I have two boxes of this stuff and no way of testing anything.