I never owned a C64, but they have a special place in my heart. In HS we won our local computernerd match with one. The year was 1986, and most of the serious teams had IBM-clones, usually Tandys. Anyway, they mocked our Commodore - TV combo. Actually, we WERE the commodores (school mascot). Hey, Joe, Rico, any of you guys out there?
The C64 freakin' rocked for the contest, though, since (1) it was stable as anything, (2) you could copy massive amounts of code quickly by the old line number, re-enter bit, and (3) it was small, so we could push the keyboard around and take turns coding the problems.
The best was when something freaked out in the graphics hardware, though, and each character's foreground/background color started to change randomly, one at a time. It started out slowly and then accelerated. We didn't want to turn it off since we were afraid it might not come back. People were snickering at us, and our faculty advisor just shook his head (not allowed to come over and help). It made the winning that much sweeter.
We took two C64s to the state contest, just in case, since the graphic thing was a little annoying. Alas, we couldn't bother to practice and were crushed.
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The researchers are at LLNL, a Department of Energy lab. They probably do have funding from DOD, but don't work there.
I never owned a C64, but they have a special place in my heart. In HS we won our local computernerd match with one. The year was 1986, and most of the serious teams had IBM-clones, usually Tandys. Anyway, they mocked our Commodore - TV combo. Actually, we WERE the commodores (school mascot). Hey, Joe, Rico, any of you guys out there? The C64 freakin' rocked for the contest, though, since (1) it was stable as anything, (2) you could copy massive amounts of code quickly by the old line number, re-enter bit, and (3) it was small, so we could push the keyboard around and take turns coding the problems. The best was when something freaked out in the graphics hardware, though, and each character's foreground/background color started to change randomly, one at a time. It started out slowly and then accelerated. We didn't want to turn it off since we were afraid it might not come back. People were snickering at us, and our faculty advisor just shook his head (not allowed to come over and help). It made the winning that much sweeter. We took two C64s to the state contest, just in case, since the graphic thing was a little annoying. Alas, we couldn't bother to practice and were crushed.