It is a little-known fact that using a Heath/Zenith H-89 in Hawaii would get you a hot babe, however, this required purchasing the HERO-1 Robot option.

The Heathkit was my first computer, bought by my parents for me in 1979, and I still have fond memories of it today. Occasionally my reminiscing will lead to all sorts of crazy outbursts.

I miss that little machine.

It ran at a blistering 2 MHz, in "Turbo" mode, or 1MHz if that was just too much raw speed for you to handle.

That wasn't actually that slow for the time. The H-90 terminal that was connected to the processing board (the terminal looked just like the computer, it's just that the computer had an extra motherboard in it) ran at (I think) 9600 baud, and you could actually (using assembly language) get the computer to push stuff to the screen faster than the terminal could handle. This happened whenever I was playing Space Invaders and got past about level 12... suddenly the screen would start jerking and random characters (and beeps) would just throw up all over the place.

I figured out a technique to exploit a bug in the game where if you killed off all the invaders except the top-most, right-most baddie, the extra spaces would form a kind of invisible buffer that halted the invader's progress to the left of the screen each time. That would let you sit on the left-hand side, safe from attack, and shoot mystery ships until the invader got too close. Then you could rack up the score at each level until the level 12 meltdown.

My top score was 21,000. It's weird that I still remember that. I remember having epic contests with my dad who would yell out "Oh no!" whenever his tank was destroyed. He learned about my trick, and got pretty close to my top score--I think it was about 19,000 or so--but could never quite beat my awesome Space Invaders skill.

I miss my dad, too.