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A Twitter Client For the Commodore 64
An anonymous reader writes "Johan Van den Brande has developed a Twitter client for the Commodore 64, allowing 140-character messages to be posted directly from this TV-connected 1982 home computer. This YouTube video shows how the Twitter client is — slowly! — loaded from a 5.25" floppy disk, how the latest Twitter messages are downloaded and shown on the TV screen, and how this tweet is posted. All that is needed is a C64, a TV, and a C64 Ethernet card. The Twitter client is implemented with the Contiki operating system, which otherwise is used for connecting tiny embedded systems to the Internet."
First "Why"
Friend at Intel corp said once - that software we are running will be really impressive once they catch up to the hardware. I think the Commodore 64 really goes to show what can be done on a really minimal environment.
By releasing a client in the past Twitter will have become an integral part of our lives in the future. The only solution is to send a robot back in time to kill Jack Dorsey before he is born.
But will it run on LUnix
Are you telling me this works without an internet connection?!
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1268047&cid=28324013
I'm sick of hearing about twitter. When will it end?
"Nerds that never get laid"
You mean like "Desert that never gets wet" or "Rock that never gets hungry"
And the documentary series that followed: "Things that should never have been done"
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
The ethernet card is not original C64 equipment. He should be bit banging an rs232 link to a 300 baud modem in order to get a net connection.
The hardest parts of doing this will be the TCP/IP stack and drivers to connect to the internet.
The messages are not long/require lots of screen realestate or memory.
It certainly scores *cool* points for making exceptionally OLD hardware do very new things, but it doesn't score points for difficulty or complexity.
But if someone finds it useful, then it wasn't a waste of time.
The tweets are generated algorithmically inside the C64. As good as the real thing. ;)
No, serious, why do you ask that? Even without reading the article it should be obvious (especially to a slashdotter) that in order to read what's on twitter you have to get it from there.
There is a Commodore IEEE-bus floppy drive that works great with a C64 with the right adapter. It takes 1.2 Mb floppies and it makes a 1541 look really sad. It was radically expensive at the time and I remember how annoyed my boss was when I told him the price.
We actually had it pretty good even back then. We had a Kontron 6510 ICE so we could go in and figure out exactly what was going on with that weird video hardware, and it was great for finding those odd bugs.
I still cannot believe how badly those 1541 floppy drives sucked. They are the most miserable pieces of computer gear I have ever encountered. It is just beyond belief that someone has managed to keep one working after all these years!
I liked the Atari 800 much better. The video hardware had a much cleaner design and it was a lot easier to code for.
"Nerds that never get laid"
At least we know there'll never be a Nerds that Never get Laid TNG.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
We heard you the first time. No need to repeat yourself.
Before anyone asks why someone bothered to do this, I'll answer it - because they can. Simple as that.
It has no practical use, that's for sure, but not everyone needs to be done to have a practical use. Some stuff is just cool. That's why we have these things called hobbies. I certainly wouldn't have invested my time into getting something like this to work, but I can't disparage anyone who does. It's a hobby. I would even argue that it does not reflect one way or another on a person's ability to get laid. :)
The first, and obvious, salvo into the Speccy camp: your rubbery toy didn't have a decent keyboard, a decent GPU, sound processor or disk drive, and now... you guys miss out on the 21st century, too ;o)
Slug away, have at it!
(P.S. this is all tongue-in-cheek. I actually wish I had a Speccy - there was a ton of great software for that little beast)
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This is great news for Dell, who have moved into the Twitter marketing area. Hordes of upgrade-hungry Commodore 64 users now have access to all the Dell special offers!
So Juno can now also finally start twittering?
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Hey now, every COOL C64 user ran f-15 strike eagle or arctic fox. Now GEOS just made me scratch my head until we got an actual PC. I jsut wish I'd had a modem and used the BBSs back then.
Any success in developing resource-efficient software is to be celebrated, IMHO. There is far too much of a trend these days of writing bloated, horribly inefficient crap, simply because in hardware terms we can get away with it.
The Windows refugees desperately need to stop being listened to. All they care about is superficial usability. They don't care about design quality, code quality, robustness, security, or resource (RAM/cpu/power) efficiency. The only important thing is that whatever they want to do is, "easy," and also, preferably, that it includes pretty lights.
We need software that is resource efficient, and well designed. We need it because we're not always in scenarios where we've got access to a 4 Ghz processor, 32 odd GB of ram, and a terrabyte hard drive. Such machines tend to be expensive, and also to require a lot of power.
If the world underwent some sort of disaster next week which included a loss of mains power, the 4 Ghz desktops with KDE wouldn't be what people would be running, if they were using a computer at all; because they wouldn't have the electricity to be able to waste it on such hardware. It'd be iPods or other power-efficient ARM-based machines running NetBSD or minimalist Linux configurations, with something like Blackbox as a window manager.
There's a reason why I have Ratpoison as a window manager for daily use, despite having a gigabyte of ram at my disposal. It's because I've used a C64 with a tape drive, and a portable IBM XT with a 2400 baud modem, and I'm thus able to recognise a graphical user interface for exactly what it really is.
A convenience. Not a necessity. There's a very big difference.
I want to know where the twitter client is for my VIC-20.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Did he just type his username and password in plaintext? Now be good everyone...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Will.
Never.
Get.
Laid.
Cool and all, but is he prepared for The End?
http://www.twitpocalypse.com/
VPS-like shared hosting, on under-crowded servers.
You are on Slashdot and you need explanation to see that implementing a Twitter client on a C64 is totally cool?
I think the question isn't "Why are they implementing a Twitter client on a C64?". I think it's the same question I had: Why are they loading this from 5.25" floppies?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Thats cheating, really its not a C64, its an embedded machine that happens to have composite video output.
Running an embedded OS on an 8 bit processor is common place. REAL common place.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In schemes like this, the Commodore itself is just a thin layer of the user interface. There is definitely a more powerful processor than the 6502 on the Ethernet Card. Most of the processor intensive networking layers are 'contained' on the Ethernet Card, just as is/was the case with primitive processors like the 8088 communicating via Ethernet.
Almost any 'expansion' of the Commodore involves adding a 'peripheral' containing a co-processor at least, and sometimes significantly more powerful than the 6502 in the Commodore. The 1541 disk drive has a 6502 processor in it. A Commodore 'Hard Drive' has a processor more powerful than the C64 it attaches to. So, really, this is no different than attaching a dumb terminal to a proprietary PC and claiming it's 'A Twitter Client for a Dumb Terminal.'
Heck, I could attach a largish 44780-based LCD display and a P2/2 keyboard to one of the smaller PIC controllers and hang it off a linux box as a terminal and do about the same thing. Or, better yet, just attach a TDD terminal to the linux box. Wow! A Twitter Client for the TDD! Maybe I can get funding for 'facilitating' something to aid the handicapped!
Damn it to hell. I don't have a disk drive, you insensitive clod developer
person you.
I do have a Vic-20 with cassette tape though.
Can I get a copy on cassette tape? Or perhaps at the least the sheet music
so I can peek and poke the code in via keyboard?
Then I could hook up the old Vic-20 Commodore to my 46 inch Samsung big screen TeeVee
and leave my Twitter up 24/7.
Oh, this Twitter client better fit on 8k RAM. I got the big RAM expansion doohickey cartridge thing plugged in the back.
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
Jocks think that, but luckily they know very little about the absence of correlation between genetic material and nerdery.
Try writing a useful program on one of those bit-slice efforts, though, and you would quickly run into a brick wall. Very limited microcode, no assembly language, no developer tools of any kind. The point about the 6502, the Z80, and even the 8088, was that you could write general purpose programs to run on them, execute them and debug them.
By the time general purpose CPUs were powerful enough to run the floppy, control the display and handle the I/O devices at the same time, it no longer made sense to do so because it was more cost effective (in terms of performance) to hand off the functions to dedicated peripherals even in microcomputers.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Thank god.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
The poster seems a little enthralled that a TV is used, mentioning it three times.
It doesn't have to be a TV. Early home computers simply used a video output that worked with the available CRTs of the time. My 1986 Amiga 1080 monitor works with the C64, and the 1080 can display the output from a VCR or PS2 etc, though it is not a TV. It's just that the video signal of the time is compatible with televisions. Nothing special is going on there. By the late 80s computers had moved on to higher definition specialized displays, and 'television' output required a special card.
Guess I've got to go chase some kids out of my yard now.
It just looks like a 5.25" floppy, but it's something slightly different (and not compatable). I found a c64 in my friend's attic, and the floppy drive was the reason that we were unable to get it working.
Until they get the Ronco Clonomatic 5000 with accelerated aging.
Today the basement, tomorrow the world!
Once again i am gob smacked what can be done with 64k of memory on a 8bit 1mhz cpu built over 20 years ago.
Been interested in this little machine since finding out what a c64 is and discovering one on the internet www.c64web.com running a web site with online c64 games.
I am luck to get 4 years out of a computer hats off to guys getting 25+ years out of theirs and still writing new software for it.
Eh?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Doesn't that make you the fag for wanting your dick sucked by a guy?
You forgot http://www.c64web.com/ a web site run from a unmodified 1982 commodore 64 using contiki.