Atari 1200 XL. WITH the cassette tape drive and joystick, thank you. All the programs were on essentially game cartridges, and the tape drive was to save very rudimentary word processing and spreadsheet pages. It was the computer equivalent of the human appendix. Useless. Graduated to the XT clone after that. That’s about the time I went full Victor Frankenstein and started splicing mismatched body parts together to make my First Creation. Once I went uptown and got a real 486, I set The Monster up in my late dad’s den for he and Mom to use. I still have an ancient e-mail from him saved in my old Yahoo account somewhere. Dated about 1998, I think. He passed away the following year, but he at least got his first hands-on with this little thing called computers and the Internet. He could tie up the phone line with that thing. It was like the Encyclopedia Britannica and The National Archives had arrived at his door, gift wrapped.
Yeah, I remember the 486 (DX2, that many said it was worthless if you weren’t running a server; which is the same thing most said when x64 came out too)..
Going back to the TRS80 and the cassettes, I remember getting a weekly magazine (PC weekly?!) and trying out all of the BASIC programs that were interesting (remember that one with the gorillas on the building chunking bananas at each other?).. about 2 hours to type it all in, then another 30 minutes or hour to save it on a cassette >,<