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Oh wow... um... this was over 40 years ago so I don't really remember how Centipede ran.  I just remember it was on a cartridge that plugged into the... back?  of the unit.  Around the same time, another neighbour of mine had an old console plugged into their t.v.  Now to see if I can remember what it was called...  No I don't remember.  I just remember that the gamepads had a round joystick and a keypad of buttons.  Each game came with a plastic template that you slipped into the gamepad that showed you what buttons did what for that game.

I passed the half-century mark a couple years ago and it is mind boggling to know that I was around and playing with computers and game consoles before the internet existed (in its public form).  People still had BBS's set up that you could contact and play games or whatever on.  I was part of the whole private website/blogging craze that dominated the internet in the mid 90s (before corporations figured out that it was an absolute goldmine).  I remember the Grey Day movement.  It was an attempt by artists that made webpage assets (such as graphical buttons, background tiling images etc... even entire sets) to stop bandwidth theft (direct linking to their artwork on their webpage so that when a page was called, it would load images from the artist's site ramping up the amount of bandwidth used and they were charged for it by hosts and/or ISPs).  Those early days were quite something.  I learned HTML (and CSS when it came out) followed by PHP server side scripting as time went on.  

But I digress.. by a lot. LOL.  I don't program anymore (I stopped programming in BASIC after Visual Basic was released by MS as the Visual Studio package they charged a mint for.  Now you can get the entire thing for free).  The last thing I programmed was a personal spellbook for my AD&D (2nd ed) character a few years ago in C#.

LOL, yes cleaning and dusting.  Mice were the most annoying as grime would get into the wheels and you'd have to pop out the ball and clean them.  Computer maintenance was basically trial and error most of the time.  Speaking of, the first time my friend got an Intel... Pentium? chip... I think it was the Pentium.  Anyway, you used to be able to pop in a processor and fire up the computer without worrying too much about the fan.  You still needed one, of course, but it wasn't urgent... until the Pentium.  LOL.  My friend ordered all the parts but the fan was shipped separately for some reason so it hadn't arrived yet.  We figured it should be alright to set it up at least, so we did.  Figured we'd turn it on just to make sure everything was working, then shut it down and wait for the fan.  The chip fried pretty much instantly.  When he sent the chip and MB back to get replacements, the guy wanted to know if the computer was hit by lightning based on the damage to the chip. LOL  To this day we don't really know what happened exactly whether it was a faulty chip, a power surge (most likely) or a sudden overheating (since the chip did get damned hot in a hurry).  Not funny at the time but it is now.