Commodore 64 turns 30

will_die writes "The Commodore 64 came out 30 years ago and to celebrate this the BBC went and got two groups of kids to try out an old system, complete with tape drive. It's sure to bring a few grins to people who had one of these old systems. From the article: 'The Commodore's ability to display 16 colours, smoothly scroll graphics and play back music through its superior SID (sound interface device) chip - even while loading programs off tape - helped win over fans, but it did not become the market leader until the late 1980s.'" Last spring a modern version of the C64 was released.

Comments

Remarkable

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow it was easier for me to write assembly code on that machine to do animations than anything I have access to now. (I don't know Java.) What's up with that?

Re:Remarkable

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you were young back then. Your brain and body were at their peak. You could have learned Cantor's infinities at the same time as coding demos on the C64. You're probably middle-aged now, you're lucky if you're able to remember what you had for breakfast.

Re:Remarkable

[rve]

I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.

You know, I don't think we need to feel sorry for them, they probably feel sorry for us, the way we used to feel sorry for our senior colleagues for having had to cut punch cards when they were our age.

We have an intern, about the age I was when I was learning to turn a screen black by writing a number to a memory address, or trying to eliminate a clock cycle from a line drawing routine. That was fun stuff, don't take me wrong, but it wasn't useful, and only cool and impressive to a very tiny subset of the human population. This intern is making a mobile app that interfaces with our server application via web services, paid work immediately useful to our customers. God knows what a 20 yr old geek will be doing when he's in his late 30s, probably not fucking web services, heh.

Re:Remarkable

[ozmanjusri]

I shudder to think what would be involved trying to do it in C++ under Windows with MFC.

That's 'cos you chose the wrong colour.

On Windows, blue is the new black.

Are you keeping up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you!

Not Really Hiding Anything

[Crypto Gnome]

The Commodore-64 Came Out 30 Years Ago

Yup, with that Rainbow Logo the Commodore-64 was Out And Proud from day one.

Re:Its just basic!

[emptinessitself]

Admit it, you were one of those guys in the department store, running endless loops printing obscene text on the screens to the annoyance of the salesmen...

10 PRINT "KARSTADT IST SCHEISSE!"
20 GOTO 10

Re:LOAD "*",8,1

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

What's weird is when I was between the ages of 4 and 5 it took me next to no time to memorize the command to play the games. I entered it hundreds of times without fail. But, man, put me in front of a command line these days and big question marks appear over my head even after I've used the command thousands of times over my lifetime.

I miss having my five year old sponge brain.

Re:Its just basic!

[Johann Lau]

?SYNTAX ERROR

Cinnamon

[eddy]

My power brick had a slight discoloration from when I used it to thaw a frozen cinnamon bun.