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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."
Maybe a Commodore 64's 800 baud modem can handle the size of a single tweet transmission if you strip out the HTML.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Why not?
Im sending this to my dad in the hopes he will revive the ole 64 back home.
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?!
"Nerds that never get laid"
You mean like "Desert that never gets wet" or "Rock that never gets hungry"
To enable you to Tweet in between games of Attack of the Mutant Camels.
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.
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)
You are on Slashdot and you need explanation to see that implementing a Twitter client on a C64 is totally cool?
Sir, you are requested to leave this room please.
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.
How can anything to do with Twitter be cool?
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.
Is this a new fucking meme? Are all these guys asking "why" kidding or what? It's been a hacker/geek tradition since the very first days after the world has been created to pull off amazingly weird hacks just for the sake of the fun involved. What's wrong with /., god damn!
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)
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!
It's barely a hack. Each of the pieces is pretty much being used for its intended purpose (the C64 is being used as a general computing device, the network card is being used as a network card, there is some software, etc.).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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 ----
"Attack of the Mutant Camels" refers to completely different games (both by Jeff Minter, mind) in Europe and America.
In Europe, "Attack of the Mutant Camels" was a little bit like defender (with giant radioactive space camels). In America, the game released as "Attack of the Mutant Camels" was what the Europeans call "Gridrunner".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Mutant_Camels
C64 AMC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhKf3DcPk08
C64 Gridrunner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRq6e1f85KY
Jeff's "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" was completely insane...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Mutant_Camels
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymVvsPczrwk
The More You Know...
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!
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.
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."
Why, so that kids in Afghanistan can use Twitter, of course! (Can't believe I'm the first to mention this. Has Jon Katz really been scrubbed from the collective-Slashdot memory?)
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Yes, you can overclock it, in a fashion. Check out the SuperCPU http://www.cmdweb.de/scpu.htm It is a replacement CPU for the stock and also allows adding memory to the system.