did anyone have a C64?  I know i did, and what fun!  I have yet to have 
the cheap thrills i did on that machine, and in retrospect, it really
was quite amazing.  You can't type a note with 64k of ram today, yet
the c64 did it all....and did it very well.
Introduced in 1982 (i beleive), the Commadore 64 was the follow up of the
(no laughing now, it was cool too) the Vic 20.  Primarilly, and originally
intended for the ultimate family computer, it was another year before we
saw the 1481, the first disk drive for the system.  A tape drive failed 
miserably (stick the color computer users with that one), but the disk 
drive succeded greatly, considering that originally it costs more than the
computer itself.
So what made this machine great?  Well, there is no denying it, and this
would plauge Commadore in the future, the GAMES!
I remember the highest pirated disk in history.  It wasa double sided disk
with 10 commercial games on each side, and teh whole thing took less that 360k
I still get this thing out.  Amazing versions of Pole Position, Pitfall,
Donkey Kong, Pac Man, SPY!, etc.  And all done with less that 64k of ram.
Some games (test drive) rivaled those of the original Famicom (Nintendo)
and the Sega Master System.  And it jsut killed IBM's first attempts at
color, and many people didn't get from CGA until 86'.  
IT really was an amazingly inexpensive, underpowered, wondermachine.  It
will ive in my heart as a favorite computing xperiance (i just can't wait
to look upon my 486 dx 2 like this in 10 years, ha!)

17 responses total.

 It's good for packet radio.

        I got into BBSing in 1985, using a friend's VIC-20.  He was
developing a BBS program for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.  Inside of a
year, in Houghton, MI (population 7500 plus Michigan Tech, also about
7500) there were *20* BBSes in Houghton, most of them running 10 p.m. to
7 a.m., 15 of them using my friend's BBS program.  There were about 30
regular BBSers in the area.
        The program was called "Vortex".  It was exclusively a message
system.  Since the author was never satisfied with the amount of service
provided by his program, he continually added features, some of them very
interesting.  It was the first BBS I saw that allowed you to upload the
text of a message using Xmodem, directly into the message base, for
example.
        It was buggy; I dubbed it "Vorpal Vortex", and parodied "Jabberwocky"
to document the times it deleted the entire message base ("Quoth the
Vortex -- Nevermore!").  But it was a well loved program.
        Eventually the author became more and more to be recognized as
insane; he made death threats against former friends, for example, and
also claimed to have implemented Commodore 64 multitasking features, for a
very different example.  For a few years, though, he and his BBS program
shone as a star in the Houghton BBSing community and brought much
popularity to the Commodore 64.

Insanity seems to be a side effect of running a BBS...guess I'll have
to start one up sometime to give myself an excuse...

I love nostalgia items.  ;-)

Got my Vic 20 in '82 and was thoroughly impressed.  I could run
a program and not have to wait a week to get the output!  I
don't even remember what programs I ran on it.  Anything I wrote
for it was simple.

Then in about September of '83 I got what I considered a true
computer.  The C=64.  I got the programmer's referrence manual
and started writing in machine language.  The manual explained
the sound chips, input and output, screen updating, and the
sprites.  I'm sure that the video and sound chips were what
allowed so much to be done with so little memory.

I still remember the simple database programs I used to write
and how disappointed I was when someone showed me a commercial
database that could do everything that I was trying to do.  It
felt like a new era was dawning when people wouldn't have to
know programming in order to use a computer.

My Commodore experience predates the C64, I'm afraid...CBM 4032 or
whatever it was...  All I recall is that PET-ASCII, which had
some nifty characters.  Did the C64 retain that feature?

Yes, I believe the C=64 also used PET-ASCII.  I remember some program
or other that I had (a term program maybe?) had a translate ASCII-PET-ASCII
function.

Yes, the C64 and Vic20 used PETASCII.  the main difference in the lower
128 characters between PETASCII and ASCII was the swapping of the upper
and lowercase characters.  Chr(65) is "A" in ASCII, "a" in PETASCII.

Did anyone own Atari 8-bits?

I've got an Atari 800 XL up in the attic somewhere.  It was given to me
when I was in sixth grade by my next door neighbor, and I had lots of fun
with it playing games and teaching myself Basic.  I don't think I ever
used it to its full potential, and I don't think I've even looked at it
since the day my dad gave me his old IBM 8088 (which then joined the Atari
in the attic a few months later when I got my 386sx, and is now in a
middle school in Detroit).

Well, nowadays the C64 is still running ok 100%
There are still lots of people buying it in India and in east Europe:)
And still lots of people producing software (60% demos)
TOne of the latest demos I saw has REALTIME TEXTURE-MAPPING!!!!
Its called World Of Code 3/Byterapers Inc. and if you wanna have a look at it
try to find it in nic.funet.fi/pub/cbm/c64/demos/byterapers :)

Anyway I still get dozens of PD and shareware oprgrams every day so if you
should need nething you know whom to ask 4... :)

how is it possible that they are still selling anywhere considering that 
Commodore is no more, and that they haven't made them in a while anyway?  Of
course Escom that just bought Commodore has big ideas about selling these
babies in Chin, but I'm not so sure...

I just found a Commodore printer interface among all my Atari machines.
Anybody interested?

My Vic 20's circuit board got corroded by my cat's marking habbits.  :(  I
really loved some of those games.

A little soap and water may restore your favored Vic 20. ;)

Nope.  It was corroded enough to lift the traces off the board.  It was a
terrible mess.  :(

Must have been a potent cat.  (;>

Next time you want to etch a PC board, keep that in mind ;-)

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss