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."

Comments

Re:FW

[VanessaE]

That "800" baud comment shows that you don't know that much about technology, especially as it relates to the C64. Aside from there not being any modems of that speed for any platform, the C64 is capable of much higher speeds anyway. Speeds up to about 460 kbps are possible via RS232 adaptors, with 115kbps being most common and practical. A properly designed application and hardware interface can pass data in and out of a stock C64 at up to around 40 kB/sec through PIO device. Add DMA to that, and the C64 passes data back and forth at about 1 MB/sec. Depending on the application, data can be processed at around 30 kB/sec.

Not to mention that, as stated in the summary, this program uses an Ethernet device. I don't own one myself, so I can't be sure of the maximum practical speed, but based on my own hacking and programming on the C64 with PIO and DMA devices, I would guess data moves around at 20-30 kB/sec including TCP/IP and Twitter protocol processing overhead, on an otherwise stock machine.

Although this particular application doesn't need anything beyond an Ethernet device, solutions also exist to counter any CPU, storage, or RAM constraints that a C64 user might run up against.