[NTLK] (OT) on the mention of Atari...

[Tim]

Other Atari users? Wow!
When I was @8-9 I got to my dad's for weekend visitation and he had this Atari 800 waiting for me. His buddy was a programmer at Atari and sent him his old machine, it had some weird looking RAM carts in it, I suspect it was a developer model. It came with 2 stacks of floppies with games, and this system lasted me many years of fun. I still have it. A stranger that was ordering Magic cards from me in the mid90s sent me 2 new floppy drives and some other goods for free, just for talking to him (I reciprocated with a package of awesome cards for his green deck). The POKEY went out and into storage it went. I bought a spare for $5 at a pawn shop in 2000 and that's in storage too.
Flash forward to last Monday, I get to work (Record store). And at my desk is an old ThinkPad and a Macintosh Portable bag. Boss is like "Rodney dropped those off for you, a present". I was like "oh great, I have to recell a Portable 6v battery, great..". 6 hours later I finally unzip the bag and discover it wasn't an Apple inside, but an Atari STacy II. I'd never even heard of it! It boots, but I am unfamiliar with GEM, so I haven't done much with this. Rodney was a big name in the 80s Chicago House Music scene and there are early versions of Cubase installed and something that I suspect is a external programmer for Roland drum machines.
I'm 37 now.