To think, those seafood prices were considered expensive then. I had a combo from In N Out that cost that much a couple of days ago.
At the time, setups like this represented the cutting edge of technology. The Atari 800, first released in 1979, was considered a powerful 8-bit machine, commonly used for programming, education, and early computer literacy. Each station here includes an Atari 810 disk drive and a CRT television monitor standard for the era before dedicated computer monitors became widespread.
What’s fascinating is how communal computing still was in the mid-1980s. Access to computers often meant entering a dedicated lab like this, where students physically learned the foundations of digital technology together.
Today, a smartphone surpasses the power of every machine in this room combined but spaces like these helped shape the first generation raised alongside computers.