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The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128
szczys writes "Bil Herd was the designer and hardware lead for the Commodore C128. He reminisces about the herculean effort his team took on in order to bring the hardware to market in just five months. At the time the company had the resources to roll their own silicon (that's right, custom chips!) but this also meant that for three of those five months they didn't actually have the integrated circuits the computer was based on."
My first experience with programming started on this computer. For some reason, knowing that it was possible to create your own stuff (next to running somebody else's stuff) fascinated me. A cousin of mine (who already had some programming experience on the Commodore) showed me the basics. Moreover, I also owned several C= programming books (given to me by some relatives) which I used as a reference, although I was not always able to understand all these concepts as a kid.
The first C128 BASIC program I ever wrote looked basically like this:
10 INPUT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME";A$
20 PRINT "HELLO ";A$;"!"
It was just a very simple program which asked the user to type his name and responded by sending a friendly greeting to the user. Of course, these two lines were a little boring, so usually I added two lines in the beginning which cleared the screen, changed the color of the text and I used some POKE'ing to change to colors of the main screen and screen border to make the program look a little prettier.
Hehehe!
-GiTP =)
My first program was:
10 PRINT "FUCK YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
I lovingly entered it into every department store demo that I ever walked past.