> When my family went to the local mall I'd make a beeline for the Radio Shack and play w/ the various computers there until my parents pried me away.
Sounds like my childhood. Remember the Tandy TRS-80 CoCo? I do. :)
The 8-Bit Guy develops and distributes games for vintage computer platforms, and you can download Quarx for the Tandy CoCo 1, 2, 3: https://www.the8bitguy.com/25753/petscii-robot-shareware-ava...
The complete version is also available there for purchase.
Absolutely! There would inevitably be a CoCo on display and that's the machine I'd play with.
A common BASIC program I'd write on new-to-me computers was a FOR/NEXT loop to print all the characters in the character set. I remember discovering the color semigraphics characters in the CoCo character set and being weirded-out. I'd never seen anything like that on any of the other machines I'd ever used.
I snared a CoCo2 a few years ago so I could re-live a few of those memories (and explore the machine with actual documentation).