I can still remember the day that I walked into our local movie theater and saw Atari Pong next to all the pinball machines. Soon it was joined by Breakout, Space Invaders, asteroids, and the video game race was on. We got an Atari 2600, and I got hooked on Adventure, Combat, Surround, and a boxful of other 4K wonders.

My dad got an Atari 800 and I got hooked on Star Raiders and Asteroids. My brother and I even got to play Space Invaders (loaded from cassette of course) for hours and hours. He, being the younger, got to control the fire button while I moved left and right. Believe it or not, it was exciting.

After what seemed like years of begging, my family spent what was at the time a ton of money and bought us a computer. It was a beautiful, sleek Apple //c and a 9" green screen with the hot new productivity package known as AppleWorks. Fortunately, I had a stack of cool games on 5 1/4" floppy from my high school's computer club (What can I say--I was young and had a very broad definition of "Free Software"). We got to fight over what we would program next in AppleBASIC, but we spent a huge chunk of time at the beginning playing some excellent video games. Some of our favorites were:

• Lode Runner
• Robot Factory
• Mask of the Sun
• Montezuma's Revenge
• The Institute
• Pacman
• Cave (Colossal Cave Adventure from the PDP-10)
• Swashbuckler
• Conan the Barbarian
• Dung Beetles (We gotcha!)

Eventually, we acquired a copy of The Newsroom and got our first taste of Desktop Publishing. We made family newsletters with The Newsroom and our own pictures with ApplePaint. We spent countless hours pecking away at that tiny little keyboard creating and conquering various worlds. I still have the whole setup back in New Orleans, and it still boots!