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Greed, Zealotry, and the Commodore 64
jira writes "On the occasion of the Commodore 64's rebirth as an Atom-equipped nettop, the Guardian's Jon Blyth remembers what the original Commodore 64 taught him. Among other things: 'But look at it, all brown, ugly and lovely. It taught me so much. The Commodore 64 taught me about zealotry. After upgrading from the inferior ZX Spectrum, I would try to convince the Sinclair loyalists to follow me. I would invite them to my house, and let them see that with just eight colors and a monophonic sound chip, their lives lacked true depth. My evangelism quickly faded into impatience. So, I can now see why American Baptists get so miffy about atheists — it's horrible dealing with people who don't realize how much better you are.'"
Was your beloved C64 designed by a KNIGHT?
So there. Is it any wonder no-one followed you for a mere monophonic sound chip?
there is no ZX spectrum with a "monophonic sound chip"
the original 16 and 48k machines have no sound chip, the sound is software driven by toggling an I/O bit.
the 128k machines use the AY which is 3 channel
so there! :p
So, I can now see why American Baptists get so miffy about atheists -- it's horrible dealing with people who don't realize how much better you are.
That's funny... that's the same reason I, an atheist, get so miffy about Christians, especially Baptists, especially young-earth Creationists.
Hopefully this is a whoosh and there's some sarcasm I'm missing or something...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
10 SYS 49152
"So, I can now see why American Baptists get so miffy about atheists — it's horrible dealing with people who don't realize how much better you are."
Now I understand why all the Windows users at work hate me.
Because they're stupid and have retarded logic. I gotcha!
Isn't this the third or fourth vaporware company to claim that it somewhere scooped up the rights to flay Commodore's carcass and smear the mutilated skin of the brand onto some boring x86 whitebox?
In these days of emulators and cheap FPGAs, it just seems tasteless to throw a plastic skin around the winning architecture and call it a C64(even more tasteless to claim to do that, then not follow through, of course...) If you want to bring the past into the present, take advantage of the fact that modern tech should be able to reproduce old gear for considerably less, even in small quantities. If you want to hearken back to the days of the architecture wars, when numerous competing systems existed, featuring a variety of exotic design choices, perhaps one of the hobby projects in creating something exotic, for its own sake, is a more appropriate homage...
I guess it was okay for its day, but even an Atari 800 or Apple II would have been better.
The Atari sound chip was not as good as the C64 sound chip, but the Atari had more colors (128) for superior still images (cough - nudie pics). If I didn't have a Commodore, I would sooner have an 8-bit Atari or Apple instead, not a Sinclair. I just don't get the fierce loyalty people have for that machine - it was a bit like owning a Jaguar video console when everyone else had the superior PS1 or N64 models.
BTW my C64 is white. Also it's actually a C128 (twice the speed and memory) and has S-video output for a clean image. Remaking the color scheme was a smart decision by Commodore.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I found the article interesting until it turned into an attack on religion.
and tomato soup, a grilled cheese, and a weak cup of tea is the best lunch in my book.
I still often see local cable companies running Amigas to handle typewritten on screen broadcasts as well as weather.
Obviously you never owned a Sinclair QL!
Watching militant atheists and "No science please we're fundies" Christians argue is like watching 2 identical groups of monkeys flinging shit at each other, that is to say it is very entertaining.
It's easy to develop mental blind-spots when you are receiving your primary programming. Try teaching belief systems to someone who has been raised without myths and given reason and critical thinking skills. In that fully formed individual, they usually tear the mythos to shreds and do not accept it. When you are a child you do not have the thinking skills to reject fantastical ideas. Those basic thinking patterns are then used to "hang" your later learning off of. I'd be ashamed to handicap my children with such outmoded ideas. Religion fulfills a societal function only which is diminishing rapidly, at least in first-world nations.
Shh.
CommodoreUSA seems to be the first company since the original Commodore's fall that has a plan to do something that both is associated with the original, and still is plausable. They actually have a case. A simple case with a Atom based motherboard is a realistic goal. As a retro gaming fan, I find the idea of having a PC in a C64 looking case really attractive, and if I get board of it, I can just use it as a standard PC. That takes all of the risk out of buying some specialty hardware, and the work out of trying to gut a real C64 and fit in a PC.
~ethana2, Team Contact, Ubuntu NE LoCo
For a second there, I got temporarily nostalgic for the times when one could lay down a few hundred currency units for a home microcomputer which had built in keyboard, media drives and ports all over which way for every little thing.
And then I looked down and saw I was typing on a laptop. How about that.
You sound like an Esperantist. I suppose you randomly invite people to sleep on your couch too, just so they can learn Esperanto.
This is a terrible representation without the ASCII art blobs on the keys!
I never had a commodore64, the first computer I had was a 8086 PC with some kind of DOS on it. But the model in the article looks like a laptop only without a monitor. Make it flatter and cheap and I would buy it for the office/at home. Should be as flat as a laptop but way cheaper, like under 200$.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
From the summary: "But look at it, all brown, ugly and lovely..."
I can't hear you over my awesome hard drive in my IBM PC 5160.
Ok, I'm going to settle the issue for now! ;)
;)
The proper position to take is igtheism. Basically being an igtheist means saying we can't talk about the existence or non-existence of God without defining better what God is. Right now, Physics is not complete. This means that until we have a full understanding of Physics (if ever, see Godel's incompleteness theorem) then the existence of God must remain undecided. God may very well be hiding behind the last theorem. Beware!
Now, the argument for "God," exists but it is absolutely not anything that is given in a traditional teaching. It is meta-physical. Consider the most fundamental unit in our Universe, the Quanta. Anything that requires exactly more than a single quanta to represent is abstract. This means that the definition of the thing relies on having a relationship across multiple real things versus just being a singular real thing. Only Quanta are "real," everything else is abstract. The reality we experience through our senses is not real, it is spread over countless quanta and is far removed from the base, real, Universe which is just the quanta without relationships. There are abstract layers of reality on all scales and any relationships between them qualifies for a "name." One of these names is "God," and in a pantheistic viewpoint it can be the sum of all relationships in the totality of our Universe. God's thought on you is you. With any relationship qualifying as an entity in itself then any computation or action that causes another action is just as "real" as the reality you and I perceive. GOD can be thought of as existing within the network of actions in how we treat each other. If I am a right Christian and I treat you well, that tenet of how you treat others spread across many like-minded individuals has a measurable affect. The nebulous web of actions, or computations, has a reality that is equal in "realness" to what you and I experience through our senses.
So, God is undecided for now but of all the levels of reality there are plenty God could fit into. Just not a traditional definition of "God."
Shh.
I also spread the evangelism of C64 and subseqently Amiga to all those poor souls with Ataris, including those poor lads with rubber Speccys. Golden times...!
Did the OP actually use American Baptists as an example of thinking you're better than everyone else (but being wrong)? Heh.
...The poster just proved he is a d-bag by exhaustion.
Good grief. Sure, it's outdated, but the Commie 64 was more than just another computer. It was a hobby. It was a pastime. It was a learning tool. It was an EXPERIENCE. If you had the ability and knowledge, you could add new features and functionality to the machine by cutting traces and soldering wires to the leads on chips, to your extension circuitry. I added all kinds of extras to mine, including a BASIC extension, MicroMon Assembler, a cartridge "bypass" switch, etc. Can't do those kinds of things with modern PC's.
My first word processor was "Speedscript". I typed it in from COMPUTE! Magazine over several days. That program did, in six kilobytes, what WORD was doing in hundreds, back in the early 90's! I used it more than any other software on that Ol' 64!
Now, want to talk about emulators? How about this one:
http://www.mymorninglight.org.nyud.net/C64/J64.htm
Now THAT is a COOL C= 64 emulator, if I do say so myself! :)
Willie...
I am not sure that the C64 was a significantly better unit than a Spectrum 128, and I doubt it was better than the American version I had, the Timex Sinclair 2068. The Spectrums had a Z80 processor with a 3.5X higher clock rate than the 6510 of the C64, but the 6510 could do things in about 1/3 of the clock cycles, leaving the Spectrum with only a slight speed advantage. The 2068 had a polyphonic sound chip that I really liked, and the 128 apparently had a polyphonic one, too. As a kid with poor typing skills, I really liked the pre-tokenized BASIC of the ZX/TS units--you press a shifted character, and get a whole keyword, which is stored and edited as a single token (if you backspace after that, you delete the whole keyword). My feeling as a kid with a TS 2068 was that there were way more cool C64 games, but mostly I programmed things myself, so that wasn't a big deal.
Be careful how you use the term "American Baptists". The American Baptist Churches of the USA are a fairly liberal and ecumenical bunch that believe in religious freedom (and humility) better than Richard Stallman believes in software freedom (and humility).
There are other baptists sects in America that are considered stricter groups and might be more likely to fit your stereotype, so beware how you capitalize "American".
Sure we believe in God, and I won't deny there are some zealots among our ranks, but as a denomination, we believe in autonomy, and the members certainly cannot be categorized the way it's being used here.
www.abc-usa.org ...if you're interested.
Lionesses can HAS pray!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Lionesses can HAS prey!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My Atari-400 is more than 30 years old and it still works! The reason is it does not have a rotating disk or any fans. Every computer I have bought since then only lasts like 3 to 5 years. Does this machine have any moving parts?
Jesus does call himself "Son of Man", a term that was a little baffling to people, contemporary with Jesus and even today. I had seen one Bible translation render that as "the one who is human" -- what little I understand about Semitic languages is that their grammer lacks an objective case. An example of this is where Jesus calls Zebedee's sons, James and John, "Sons of thunder" -- it probably was an Aramaic grammatical rendering of "Thundering one's" or "those guys who thunder."
The closest Jesus comes to identifying with the Father is in the Gospel of John (please excuse the paraphrase) where Jesus uses language to the effect of "The Father and I are one" or "To know me is to know the Father." Yeah, there is an actor who gives a performance of the memorized recitation of the Gospel of John, and no offense intended to you and others dealing with major mental illness, but the interpretation given to those lines is a little bit of the crazy you are alluding to.
The other thing you have to know about the Gospel of John is that it is not one of the "synoptic Gospels" but rather it is explaining to the Greek churches about who Jesus is -- "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God" -- the whole rest of John is a series of variations on that opening profession of belief.
But I am not following your remark about "no mental illness in Jesus time." Not to get into a theological discussion about such things, but the accounts of persons from whom Jesus cast out demons sounds a whole lot like the symptomology of major mental illness. And a lot of Jesus' reputation was on healing physical illness -- leprosy, paralysis, hemorrhage -- so to the extent that he was healing people based on their faith, and that gets into the question of mental influence on physical health, perhaps Jesus was healing the mentally ill, only they called it something else.
Again, if you read the Gospels carefully, Jesus is measured in his words regarding what he calls himself, so to assign to Jesus a diagnosis of a delusional mental illness state is a stretch. On the other hand, Jesus does not disabuse people who believe him to what people of faith believe Jesus to be -- Pilate asks Jesus "are you King of the Jews" and the reply is something to the effect, "if that is what you say that I am." Back in the day as in our day, who Jesus is is who we say Jesus is -- it is a matter of personal belief in response to the signs and the prophetic narrative.
I have perhaps a tiny window into what you have experienced in the form of the altered state of consciousness brought on by the high fever I had with the mumps. Whoever a person says that Jesus is becomes a matter of personal belief, but I don't think there is a basis to diagnose mental illness based on the Gospel accounts.
I remember looking at the Macintosh GX. I salivated over and loved that computer. I finally got my parents to agree with buying me a new computer at 14. At the time I was writing music and wanted the extra "voices" of the GX. I watched the black-and-white monitor of the GX with hopeful glee. Then, I saw the Commodore Amiga 500 in a store front and lost all my shit. The Amiga was not only awesome as a potential productivity computer at the time (don't laugh, ok go ahead), but it had full color and speech synthesis!
Yes, I'm an old Amiga lover, but I don't at all feel embarassed to speak of the Amiga as a God. That little 68000 powerhouse never failed to entertain and give me awesome music building skills.
C64 games were pure shit. ZX games fucking ruled. So who give a crap about your 8 colors.
SYS 64738
LolCats can has pray in yur congregation?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Mac GX? I don't believe there was ever such a thing. Do you mean Mac IIfx? Or maybe the Mac IIcx? Both of those were around when the Amiga was popular. The IIfx was a killer machine at the time.
In the end, it was (as is often the case) really bad management that killed Commodore.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
KICKED zx spectrums but
I remember from having to choose back then... the C64 at launch was several times more expensive than the Spectrum. I personally didn't really have a choice.
Plus, let's face it, Microdrives were so much better than the C64's disk unit. Even only by ear you could tell they were much faster. They literally ripped along !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Sir Clive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub7FH0c2vO4
Atheists simply know better then to simply follow blind beliefs
it was apparently modded down, and then up. why was it modded down ? dont answer. the question is rhetorical, and posed to the moron who has modded it down.
Read radical news here
the missing argument in your above post, is ?
Read radical news here
I was in the ZX Spectrum camp (started with a ZX81, even). I think the comparison with religion is closer than the author suspects. What I liked about the Spectrum was that it was completely understandable. I even had an annotated ROM disassembly. Everything was understandable "from first principles". Yet Every time I pointed out some weirdness in the C64's design, there would be an answer with "Oh but there's a special chip for that". The Amiga was even worse.
C64 is for games only, ZX-Spectrum is for real programmers only ;)
Privacy is terrorism.
Mac GX? I don't believe there was ever such a thing. Do you mean Mac IIfx? Or maybe the Mac IIcx?
The Apple II GS seems more likely, as it was the only apple computer ever sold with a good sound synthesizer chip.
It was theoretically affordable for a 14 year old when the A500 hit storefronts. For those who could afford an Amiga, at least.
The GS/OS GUI and design of the case actually make it easy to confuse with a Mac, the only contradiction being that it actually had colour graphics.
Maybe he considered the IIe-IIgs upgrade?
Whatever. The Amiga was so much more enjoyable than that machine, it wasn't even funny. Fond memories.
Just like all the religious folks are doing. Oh wait...
Humility is exactly what scientists are practising: If you don't know the answer to some question, ask "why?" rather than pointing to some empty "explanation" that doesn't actually explain anything (i.e. "god").
Besides, to paraphrase somebody: Solopsism can be fun, but it's hard to keep it up as a serious occupation.
HAND.
You're quite right we all assume the reliability of our memories, as well as that of our senses. (In fact, we may be wrong about these things. People with Alzheimer's disease may have unreliable memories, and people dreaming have unreliable senses.) And yes, we also assume that there was a past, and will be a future.
We start with these beliefs built-in, and a good thing because we couldn't do anything (including build further beliefs) without them. Some of us are also indoctrinated with religious beliefs as children. As adults, we can (hopefully) analyse our beliefs and question them. Nihilists notice none of our beliefs have any ultimate foundation, and therefore doubt them all. But this leads us nowhere. What if nothing exists, or at least nothing can be known? Then there is nothing to think about. We must make a few basic assumptions so we can admit anything as being worth thinking about.
But why make more assumptions than we need to? In particular, why make some specific religious assumptions rather than others? And although we can't hope for any ultimate foundation for our beliefs, we can aim for self-consistency, and Christianity doesn't seem very self-consistent to me.
If the Christian god exists, and is all powerful, then helping out those who most need and deserve it (like children about to be raped and murdered for instance) would consume an infinitesimal fraction of his effort. If he is all loving, then he surely wouldn't begrudge us that.
...I think it is the place where you can find the highest concentration of zealotry, quite denser than among linux addicted nerds.
People have got 8 channels out of the Spectrum's beeper. The 3.5MHz Z80 is fast enough to do pulse density modulation for this many channels (essentially the beeper circuit contains a low pass filter, which acts as a DAC, just like SA-CD works except it's not as refined).
Some of the Speccy beeper music demos are pretty astonishing.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
How could anything with that inferior breed of chip be better than a Z80 based machine? Actually, the truth is that the C64 was a rich kids computer. It was rather more expensive than the Spectrum (never mind the ZX81) - if your parents were reluctant to shell out for a little box they probably didn't understand why would they prepared to spend the same amount again - and some more - to get another one? That said I used to love the Commodore PET machines we had in school (high school).
That I canceled my charter subscription to BYTE when they kept dissing my PDP-8 machines in favor of that little 8 bit piece of crap.
Which is now wider and still a piece of crap, just a fast one. Other machines can actually be fun to program in assembler. Ever tried on an intel box?
Sigh.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
In the US it wasn't a question of Spectrum vs. C64 really - as the Spectrum really wasn't even available here. It was more Apple vs. Atari vs. Timex etc.
C64 price was under $500 or under $600 - which as I recall was pretty incredible especially for what you got. The Apple 2 was more than twice that as I recall.
C64 to me though was the first machine I used that had real capability. Before that I had a Timex/Sinclair 1000 (ZX-80 I think) that was a computer, but with 1 kilobyte of ram and a 20k expander that was super sensitive to any shock (even think about bumping it - all your work was lost).
That's not the same thing... not even close. It's cool, but still very different. You can't just "PEEK" and "POKE" (or LDA and STA) to an address to read/write data to/from this device. You need to install drivers. You need to know how to "call" those drivers, etc. Plus, little "toys" like this can get expensive!
Wiring expansions into the 8-bit CPU systems of yesteryear was so easy, and inexpensive. Usually, you only needed a handful of chips that cost less than $1 each. You could just solder wires onto the pins of the existing IC's in the computer to connect to your projects. (The closest we come to that now, is PICs.)
"Talking" to your new devices was easy, also. I built lightshow controllers, speech boards, and several other devices for the Commodore. The command/control interface was as simple as "PEEK" and "POKE" from Basic, or LDA and STA in assembly. No drivers. No DLL's. No college level courses required to learn these newfangled languages like "C" or Perl, etc. , no IDE's to learn, either.
Now you have to load a pile of DLL's, know how to set them up, pass parameters to/from them, etc.
Don't get me wrong... I am thankful for the high tech that we have now! It's just not as "hands-on" for more casual tinkerers, like it used to be.
Willie...
Wow... now THAT I didn't expect to see happen! The link on my page for the HDD64 has apparently been Slashdotted! :(
I should have CORALized that link, as well. My apologies! I didn't think there would have been THAT much interest! (Either that, or his Host has ridiculously LOW usage limits!)
Here is the Google Cache of the site. I hope it helps!
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.64hdd.com%2F64hdd.html
Willie...
There was a plug-in Z80 cartridge and a version of CP/M available for the C64. I had one, back in the early 1980s. It gets a mention in Wikipedia
I can't say that I found any kind of religious (or lack thereof) outlook through my old Commodore 64. I was more interested in Coconotes, floppy disks I'd use for diaries which my younger brother hacked, sneaking peeks at my older brother playing Samantha Fox's strip-poker game and going onto old BBS forums, run by this perv in the next town over who'd give you an hour for 50 cents while hitting on teenage girls.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
your religious analogy needs some work as a ZX Spectrum I always saw the C64 with a mix of envy and skepticism: true that it did represent the superiority of America's technological power over good-old Europe (and the sprites were really cool), but the ingenuity it took Sinclair and the ZX programmers to squeeze so much in so little and for something a kid could afford made it the true believer's choice (while C64 was for the rich hollywood stars who needed to distinguish themselves from the crowds).
GX isn't a model. I think there were the Mac C/S/F lines, with an "i" for something, and an "X" meaning it had a cd-rom player...
Too lazy to look it up, just one old guy's recollection.
I'm 41 and my first computer was a Vic20 followed by a C64. I don't recall any of these flame wars. Perhaps I'm not nerdy enough. The only comparison I had for my C64 was my friend's Atari 400/800? and the C64 was better in all aspects unanimously amongst all my friends.
Now, that last statement could be absolutely 100% wrong, but how were we to know back then, and who actually cared? The C64 was for mainstream interests...I'm sure there were tons of "better" machines.
In the end, nothing has changed. Many people still choose "cheaper" over "better", even when price isn't an issue (not me though). I think it must be part of the nerd persona.