I had an Atari 800XL after the 1983 video game crash made everything cheaper, got it for like $100 if memory serves. It's still in a box in the basement and worked the last time I hooked it up...in 1999. I wonder if the floppy drive still works? I thought about getting it out a few years ago but discovered I don't have an old enough TV in the house for the hookup thingy in the back. My favorite games were Racing Destruction Set (an early EA Sports game on floppy disk!) and the Donkey Kong cartridge was very good, a little better than the ColecoVision version even.
I knew a family back in the early '80s who had the membrane keyboard Atari computer with the cassette drive. That's the 400, right? Got to play with it once during a visit.
The very first computer I remember seeing was an early TRS-80 using an actual reel to reel tape drive for its I/O device! 1980, on a wheeled cart, brought into my 2nd grade classroom. It barely worked. I remember the teachers having a very hard time getting a simple math facts program going. It probably cost the school district a fortune. We're talking rural northern Indiana here, not a big city school by any stretch. Around 1 in 8 students were Amish there and left after 8th grade to start working.
This laptop I'm using now is quite a jump from that 1980 machine...