Where were we?  Oh yes, I moved to a new town, got married and rented a very small but cozy house in the middle of nowhere.  We planted a vegetable garden, put up a clothesline, and I sold the pistol I had bought for $150 for nearly $300:

With that $300, I ordered this:

and this:

So at least now, I could save my work.  Along with those, I bought and borrowed from my Atari-loving friend a number of issues of Antic! (type in 8 pages of hex codes to play some cheesy little game) and some pretty amazing games.  This period likely established me as a hardcore PC gamer for life:

And at the end, I scored a 300baud modem, joined Atari BBS's, and uploaded as Public Domain software some games I had created, most memorable of which was Nuker!  Inspired by the movie The China Syndrome and the real-world events of Three Mile Island, Nuker! required the player to maintain the delicate balance of systems to operate a nuclear reactor safely while incorporating an economic model in which the player strove to make money.  Nuker! was written in Turbo Basic for Atari 8-bit and represented the culmination of my programming abilities on that platform.

Unfortunately, nothing remains to this date of the Nuker! source code or the game itself.