Right out of college I worked for a consumer electronic manufacturer’s representative organization, Continental Merchandisers, Inc. (CMI) in St. Paul, and one of our biggest lines was Atari. My boss, Mike Kronstedt, made bushelfuls of money off of this explosive gaming system but some upstart named Apple had made computers and Atari wanted in on that action.
Above you’ll see the Atari 400 & 800 which were basically game machines. I did, however, do serious work on the 800 since it was the first machine that I ever played a genre known as “adventure games” as well as using “business applications” which were a text editor and a “budgeting program”. This experience with CMI, however, opened new doors for me as my next job was with the Apple Computer rep firm in Eden Prairie and set the course for my career in high tech.
Even I can’t believe how these were nothing but glorified calculators or slightly more elaborate gaming machines and is similar to how a high school kid today might feel using a rotary dial telephone.
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