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The Good Old Days.....

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the up-up-down-down dept.

gr8fulnded writes: "How many of you remember seeing some of these old computer ads?" I'm not sure whether to file this under humor or technology. I can imagine looking at a G4 Cube ad 20 years from now, and comparing it with the then-current generation. "Gee Grandpa, did your computers really have wires?"

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  1. 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE. by Admiral+Burrito · · Score: 5

    A complete, state of the art home PC for under $600. (Commodore 64, graet little machine.) Gee, we're having a hard time getting that NOW, 20 years later, even with inflation.

    With the C64 it was common convention to prefix hexadecimal numbers with a $ instead of the now more common "0x". So $600 was decimal 1536. A location which, if you (POKE|ST[AXY])'ed it, you could make a character appear at a certain place on the text screen. That's because $0400-$07E7 (inclusive) was by default used to store the 40x25 text screen. The colour information was stored elsewhere though, at $D800-$DBE7. After the screen memory was a few bytes related to the eight graphic sprites (but you had to poke at the video chip registers in the $D000 range to actually make the sprites appear). And right after that came $0800, which was the start of BASIC program memory space, which extended all the way up to $A000 (which was the start of the BASIC interpreter ROM unless you fiddled with $0001 to unmask the RAM that was there). That's 38912 bytes, which when you exclude the zero byte at $0800 gives you the "38911" in the "38911 BASIC BYTES FREE." message that appeared when you turned the computer on.

    Just a little arcane knowledge I thought I would share.