Atari 800 computer

Link: Atari 800 computer. Around 1983 or 1984, my wife surprised me with an Atari 800 computer for my birthday. It was my first computer, and, frankly, I didn't know what a computer was then. To me, it was a game machine; a sophisticated version of the Pong arcade games so popular back then. It had been around for several years, and cost around $800. It had 8k of internal memory. That is 8 thousand characters, not bytes (which are 8 characters long). I discovered early on that, by attaching a dot matrix printer, and using a program cartridge with a rudimentary word processor in ROM, I could generate a typed page, without going anywhere near a typewriter! Believe it or not, this was amazing technology back then, and I generated my first usable legal document several years later, when a standard carriage dot-matrix printer came out. Not court quality, but good enough for a demand letter. What is the first computer generated legal document you ever produced? Anybody beat 1985? Ah, the fun of talking about the old days.

Comments

[reaganlaw]

I started in private practice in 1981, with two other attorneys. We were all just out of law school, with no money. We borrowed enough money to buy a TRS-80 Model II and a daisy-wheel printer. For the first three months of our practice, we had no secretary, took turns answering the phones, and cranked out a heck of a lot of legal docs on the Model II and the daisy-wheel. Those were the days!