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Commodore 64 Still Beloved After All These Years
techsoldaten writes "CNN is running a story about the Commodore 64 and how people are still devoted to it after all these years. "Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people's hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.'"
Sadly, my father still uses his original C64 to do his business books for tax time once a year....
:)
One of these years I have to set him up with an emulator rather than watch him suffer, swapping disks back and forth.
The computer that will never die....
I had several nerd parties where we hooked up the C=64 to the TV and fired up SIDPlayer. There were a lot of cool game tracks and techno mixes, but we really loved the pop songs with lyrics that we would sing along with (badly). "I bless the ray--yains down in Af--ri--ca . . . " "The Band" would play in the corner of the screen while graphical depiction of the music scrolled by. Good times.
Music Construction Set on C=64 got me interested in writing music of my own (also badly).
I am not a crackpot.
I had a c64 as my first computer - with the carts it took. I still remember playing various Carmen Sandiago games on it.
Then I got an Amiga 1000; this is the computer that changed my life. 16-bit sound, great graphics, and an OS that loaded from 2 floppies (DS/DD) into 512k of RAM. If you take off the cover, you can see in the mold where all the people that went into building the 1000 had their signatures etched on the underside. All those cinemaware games: defender of the crown, SDI, Rocket Ranger, Lords of the Rising Sun, the 3 stooges. Those were games. Brilliant games. It has always seemed to me that something was lost between now and then. All the games today feel the same, where those older titles each were unique unto themselves.
I also connected to my first BBS on that 1000 with its 1200-baud modem. I still remember being to tell through the speaker what speed I would end up getting when the connection finished. The local store that sold amiga's was the Slipped Disk. Being an 8-yr old kid going through their cases of Public Domain software for hours on end. They also had auctions - real-live auctions every few months where the store would be packed with people bidding on all sorts of peripherals. Joysticks, steering wheels, light guns, various versions of Deluxe Paint and the oh-so-cool Video Toaster.
I can't help but think my reflections on the Amiga are nostalgia because I'm getting older, while a part of me wants to believe that things were really better back then, and that we lost something along the way...
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The early models had a two prong 9VAC power supply. The "box" outside the computer was simply a metal case with a transformer that stepped down the voltage from the wall outlet.
The solid state components, including the rectifier, was inside the VIC-20 case, mounted onto a heatsink metal plate which was (of all places) on the top edge of the expansion slot. This meant that expansion cartridges tend to get hot from the mounting plate. And if you reached inside the expansion slot when it didn't have a cartridge installed, it nearly burnt your skin. The connector is shown here
I was an Apple kid myself, but recently I was touring a company that makes high end guitars that's run by a guy who's got a hackerly technical bent, and they've got CNC machines that they rigged up back in the early '80s with C64s that are still running on those same C64s.
That was the most awesome testament I've seen to what computing used to be, I'm not sure I'd even trust a modern microcontroller to run reliably for 25 years in an industrial environment.
I miss the fun hacks such as possibly the world's goofiest self-modifying code. Say that memory location 0x10 contained the number of keypresses in the keyboard input buffer, and those actual values were stored in 0x11 and up.
Here's what it did:
You kids and your fancy hashtables and databases and eval statements. Well, we wrote our own half-assed eval statements and we liked it that way. Get off my lawn!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It's true; I think that, either due to my young age or the complete "newness" of the whole computing scene, the times back then had a truly "exciting" feel to them. I would go home from school and spend HOURS on BBS systems (though by the time I was using them I had replaced my C64 with a 486 20mhz and 2400BAUD modem :)). Dialing one, looking around to see what files they had, then moving to another. I'd play a few basic text games ("Legend of the Red Dragon" is one that sticks out quite a bit), and just tinker about. I made a point of getting a dirt simple terminal/comms program (S_Term is was called, I think) that had no built in transfer protocols, and then proceeded to setup external versions of Xmodem, Ymodem, Zmodem, Kermit, and HS/Link (some had special features, like for images being able to see the contents as it transfered across - a single decent resolution picture was a 10-15 minute download back then :)). One very cool bulletin board even setup email addresses for all it's users, since they apparently had an internet connection from somewhere. You couldn't browse the web, but it was neat having email access without the Internet.
:). Oh well. I think that's why Linux still manages to hold my attention these now. It's about the closest thing left to the feeling of the "old days" :).
Everything seemed like you had to get really involved to make it work right. There were these obscure little programs that were tremendously helpful, but there was no Internet (at least not available to me for any reasonable cost), so tracking down new programs was largely a matter of "BBS Surfing", looking for the new versions (or a version at all).
Heck, even prior to the BBS surfing, I remember buying shareware programs from mail order catalogs and paying "by the disk", which ranged from $1.99 to $3.99 per diskette.
These days, computers don't have that special feel. They do all sorts of stuff out of the box. Good for casual users, bad for tinkerers
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
My main box was the TI-99/4A. We stayed TI-99 people *way* longer than was reasonable (until I could afford junker DOS PCs from my own money some time around '93.) My father was kicking out desktop publishing (of a sort) and doing finances on the old beast until '95 or so.
Fascinating community. I'd suggest that the Atari and TI communities were even more like the Open Source world. Commodores and Apple ][s were being made, and commercial software for them was developed through the early 1990s. Lots of Apple ][ people kept using Appleworks and Oregon Trail and Print Shop (and the culture of copying those programs, along with the escalation copy-protection and cracks lingers today). The TI was abandoned much earlier (1983), and the commercial world dried up soon thereafter. But, there were thousands of shareware programs still being written, distributed through floppies and user groups. Very few people ever expected to make a penny writing TI software, but they wrote a lot anyway.
Don't forget the birth of online services. Like Quantum Link. I wonder what ever happened to them . .
They morphed into another well known online service called AOL. Seriously.
I was a moderator with Quantum Link and for every hour I was online helping people I received two hours of free online time. It was a cool gig. Then I was told they are switching to AOL and I was asked if I wanted to be a moderator and declined. It took a lot of time and I had other things to work on. Oh and the hours I saved couldn't be transfered to AOL for some bizzare reason. Oh well..
Those were the days.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com