The years between my graduation in 1983 and my marriage in 1987 were marked by the death of my father three months before my graduation, and the shock of loss of income and general malaise and economic hangover from the Carter years and the early Reagan administration.  I was working between 30 and 40 hours a week at $3.15 (minimum wage) without many prospects.  I applied for factory jobs but without connections you couldn't get an interview.  I explored selling life insurance, working at Home Depot and Steven's grocery chain in Nashville (a relocation I couldn't afford).  And I smoked a lot of pot.

Video arcades imploded, but I did get a couple of chances to play with computers.  During a weeklong stay with my uncle in Nashville, I was exposed to his TRS-80 Color Computer II.  Among other things, I wrote a stock-market trading game that was destined to remain undiscovered by the public on his tape drive.  Remember, this was before the era of bulletin boards even.

Also, when the Atari 130XE came out around '85, a friend who was passionately into Atari bought one and loaned me his 800XL.  It had no storage medium, so my 20-year-old self would stay up all night in my room writing games (mostly stock market trading games) only to shut the power off around 4AM and lose all my work, starting over again the next night.  My monitor of choce:  a very small GE black-and-white television, on which I also watched shows on the brand-new HBO and MTV channels.

Broke, spending all my $110/week paycheck on pot ($25/quarter), beer ($3/6pack), and cigarettes ($6/carton) and gas ($1/gallon), I virtually abandoned computers and videogames for the next couple of years, spending what little disposable income I had on guns like this one:

  Then, in 1987, I got married.