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The Real Story of Hacking Together the Commodore C128

Posted by samzenpus on from the back-in-the-day dept.

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."

1 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mistake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Want to do a crazy program you can't write on modern computers?

    Simply loop through a sequence of poking two random numbers, and incrementing a number that you print.

    Every time, the system will do different things.

    If you did this on a modern computer, eventually it'd corrupt system files and the thing wouldn't boot.

    It makes you wonder why modern OSes aren't hardened with the theory: No matter what the user does, allow the computer to boot up safely next time.