Who am I? - Harvey Kong Tin - Atari 800 owner/user from Dec 1982

Prior to my interest in home computers - I was into drawing/art and 35mm still photography.
Got into photography in a big way in my last 2 years at High School. My two best subjects at High School was Art and Mathematics.
Worked a couple of years at a local department store as a window dresser/display assistant - then got into a local Colour Film Processing Laboratory - as a laboratory assistant. Didn't get along with the management there, and left - working at a couple of local factories. After about 4 years of that - I went onto a Polytechnic course on Data Processing - having a go with BASIC and COBOL programming - that I wasn't good at.

I already decided go on a 1? year OE (Overseas Experience) that a lot of kiwis go on - at some time in their lives. This was in December 1982 - that I stopped off for a couple of days in LA - where I got to see the Vectrex running, and Tempest running - and it was at Hammersmith, London that I purchased my Atari 800 48k computer with 410 cassette recorder, Star Raiders and Pacman carts with Shamus, Baja Buggies, Race in Space and Matchracer on cassette. I lived in Hull, northern England for 10 months before heading home. I had my Atari 800 converted from Pal A to Pal B before leaving for home - to Dunedin, New Zealand. I did purchase a 810 disk drive a few months before leaving.
I was very much into the gaming side - being very keen on coin-op videogames, especially those with the amazing graphics at that time. Galaga and Zaxxon being keen favourites - then Xevious. I would not say that I was that good at playing them - because I tend not to pump a lot of money into playing them - but enough to sample what the game is like playing. Very few games I persevered with, like Super Zaxxon because it's one tough game and Zaxxon was a favourite of mine.

I met Andrew Bradfield in early 1984 - he was into his Atari 400 16K computer and bought various cartridge games for it. I had a whole load of games because of my contact with a friend in the UK (a retired Bus driver - whom I met, while living in Hull). And so, I would transfer what 16K games I had, he could run. He had special short length tapes - so that he could record one game per side on them. He was still at High School at this time - did a milk run after school - how he paid for his Atari 400, and those game cartridges he had purchased. He moved onto an Atari 800 as soon as he could - and a 1050 disk drive. I recall that he wanted to test that the 1050 could load the copied games off disk - while still in the store. This cheesed off the retailer who was there, watching.
About a year or so later Andrew started on learning assembly language programming - I think he did work on a game/progam in BASIC? But I never saw it running. Maybe he lost it because of it being on tape? I have my doubts now that he would ever finish/complete a game/program in BASIC - because he wasn't really into a high level language - such as BASIC.

Around this time I got into producing two Atari zines as such. In late 85' Go Atari was produced, which was 32 pages, and Go Atari News was 12 pages produced in early 1986. They contained the usual kind of stuff most User Group magazines have in their content. I'll include a few pages here as samples.




Saving - this is a WIP