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.'"

Comments

Amiga

[teknopurge]

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...

Re:The most atrocious program ever.

[Just Some Guy]

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.

10 CLS
20 PRINT "20 GOTO 150"
30 PRINT
40 PRINT "RUN"
50 PRINT
60 POKE 16, 7
70 POKE 17, [value of "up arrow" key]
80 POKE 18, [value of "up arrow" key]
90 POKE 19, [value of "up arrow" key]
100 POKE 20, [value of "up arrow" key]
110 POKE 21, [value of "up arrow" key]
120 POKE 22, [value of "enter" key]
130 POKE 23, [value of "enter" key]
140 STOP
150 PRINT "HOW DID I GET HERE?"

Here's what it did:

1. 10 cleared the screen.
2. 20-50 just printed those statements, which look a lot like BASIC statements. After hitting line 150 later, the contents of the screen look like:

   20 GOTO 150
   
   RUN
   
   STOP
   [cursor here]

3. 60 says "the user pressed seven keys since the last time you checked"
4. 70-130 emulate the user navigating to the top of the screen.
5. 140 stops program execution. Now the computer is in "interactive command line mode" and interprets all of those key presses we buffered.
6. The "up arrow" keys move the cursor up to the top of the screen.
7. The first "enter" causes the BASIC interpreter to say "hey, new contents of line 20! replace what's already there with this." Then it prints "OK" and moves the cursor down again: to the first character of the "RUN" line.
8. The second "enter" causes the "RUN" line to be executed, which again clears the screen and executes the new line 20, which skips to the final PRINT statement.

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!

Re:C64 - 3rd PC - Most loved.

[u-235-sentinel]

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.