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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."
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.
To enable you to Tweet in between games of Attack of the Mutant Camels.
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)
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. :)
How can anything to do with Twitter be cool?
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)
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.
"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...
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.