Slashdot Mirror
C-64 Diehards Relive History
Sunfish writes "The Daily Herald has a short article about a Commodore Exposition held this past weekend in the Chicago area. 'This is probably the geekiest of the geekiest,' admitted conference organizer Dave Ross. How has the C-64 influenced computing in today's world? I'd like to know how many Slashdotters 'used' to own and code for one of these relics, and was it more fun than C++ or VB?" I hope 2003's event will get a wrap-up the way 2002 does on the Expo home page.
I remember spending hours typing in programs from Compute! magazine. On some machines the code was in BASIC. On the C64 it was often in HEX code. That's right. Someone would create assembly language games then publish then as HEX in the magazine. You'd spend hours typing and verifying long strings of HEX that was entered via a BASIC converter. At one point the magazine developed a checksumming feature to verify that your lines were entered properly, but before that it was a pain.
The C64 was one of the first machines I'd ever used to go online. The Atari/C=64 wars were pretty amusing (I had both though!). There were also hundreds of little demos that you could load. Almost all of them took advantage of quirks of the hardware -- songs, digitized voices, animations. One of my favorites was a graphing application that drew 3D functions on the screen. They took sometimes hours to draw stuff that would be real-time today, but I'd spend hours just waiting for them to finish.