from the 8-bits-is-more-than-anyone-will-ever-need dept.
Commodore C64: The Most Popular Home Computer Ever Turns 40:
This year marks the anniversary of the most popular selling home computer ever, the Commodore 64, which made its debut in 1982. Note that I am saying "home computer" and not personal computer (PC) because back then the term PC was not yet in use for home computer users.
Some of you have probably not heard of Commodore, which is kind of sad, though there is a simple reason why — Commodore is no longer around to maintain its legacy. If one were to watch a documentary about the 1980s they may see a picture of an Apple computer or its founders but most likely would not see a picture of a Commodore computer in spite of selling tens of millions of units.
It is a nice history lesson on the most popular home computer ever sold. For those less inclined to reading and scrolling, his presentation is also a YouTube video.
How many of you started with the 6502 CPU or even the Commodore 64 itself?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @10:52PM (23 children)
Commodore sold their computers at K-Marts, at a fifth of price to Apple II's. I suppose Apple could maintain their price level for two things:
1. Apple used educational discount program to infiltrate schools.
2. Visicalc made it a more "serious" machine than Commodore, Atari, RadioShack, etc.
I suppose Atari made comparable products at comparable prices, but due to their root in computer games, they never escaped the "game machine" stereotype.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by liar on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:48PM (6 children)
And at Sears, that's where I bought mine. Kept tricking it out: Jiffy Dos in both the base and disk drives, fast load cartridge in the extender/ multiport module, daisy wheel printer, 19.9 boca modemand... the 512 meg RAM pack. Also pulled and upgraded the regulators on the disk drive (oh so long ago). 1541. 1571 and 1581 disk drives.
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @12:01AM
Funny thing is, K-mart/Sears not only sold the products, but also the manuals and magazines.
Well, maybe not so funny but obvious.
Quite a contrast with Apple that are only sold by its authorized dealers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday April 24 2022, @01:23AM
I still have a wide carriage daisy wheel printer (somewhere) that I'm pretty sure says "Commodore" on it. IIRC it had an IEEE-488 (GPIB / HPIB) interface (that's from raw memory, haven't thought about that in 20 years!). I very quickly figured out the printer interface was basically a PC parallel port with an adapter to convert to IEEE-488, and I simply removed the little board, made an adapter cable, and it worked very well as a clean document printer. I remember always being on the lookout for more daisy wheels.
By any chance do you still have your DWP?
(Score: 5, Touché) by krishnoid on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:22AM (3 children)
512MB RAM pack? Username checks out.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @04:12AM (1 child)
Obviously 512MB is a mistake, but there was a 512kB memory expansion for the Commodore 128, which people adapted for the C64. This was an I/O port based memory bank (i.e. it worked more like a serial port than directly addressable RAM). These were uncommon and reportedly not very reliable.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VanessaE on Sunday April 24 2022, @12:10PM
Oh, I dunno... REUs were pretty reliable in my experience, as long as you had a good power supply, and you weren't prone to knocking the damn thing out of the cartridge port 😛. I always thought they were useful, Commodore just didn't market them nearly as heavily as they should have (sadly, they were expensive, thanks in no small part to the price of RAM back then).
The memory access was DMA-based, incidentally. You set your addresses, size, and a few mode flags via standard registers provided by the REU's REC chip, then trigger a transfer, and the REC chip would then suspend the CPU, and copy the entire requested chunk at 1 byte per clock cycle (so ~1 MB/sec). At those speeds, it may as well have been directly addressable, you just had to be creative.
Also, while 512MB is certainly an error, they DO exist in sizes larger than 512kB -- CMD made a compact 2MB clone back in the mid 90's, I made a very small run of clones in 1 MB size sometime later, and the more modern 1541Ultimate and Chameleon have a 16 MB version built into their firmwares. I'm sure there are other clones as well.
(Score: 2, Informative) by liar on Sunday April 24 2022, @06:01PM
That's what I get for typing while distracted... 512 *k* is of course correct.
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 24 2022, @12:21AM (10 children)
Yes, and the local K-mart had a dimwitted policy that minors were not allowed to touch the Commodore 64 that they had on display. I ignored that, got in trouble, and matters escalated to the point my mother was arguing with a store manager. On another visit to that same K-mart, I came across a Rubik's cube that had been torn apart. I put it back together, but some pieces were missing. I asked a nearby K-mart employee if I could just have it, and she angrily tore the cube apart again. I have never willingly gone into a K-mart since.
Also remember that the Apple was the first to market, by several years. Its high resolution graphics was the best, until the Commodore 64. Yes, the earlier VIC-20 (which still came out later than the Apple II) arguably had better graphics, but you could hardly use them as the thing was severely limited by a lack of RAM. Only 5K. So the Apple, at 48K, remained the better computer. The Commodore 64 decisively fixed that problem. The "64" in the name was an acknowledgment that 5K hadn't been enough, and the loudest way they could advertise that they were now serious about having enough memory. Even then, the Apple II was still superior in one respect: the floppy drive. The C64's floppy drive was infamous for how incredibly slow it was.
(Score: 3, Funny) by gawdonblue on Sunday April 24 2022, @01:42AM (1 child)
But the "20" in VIC-20 referred to the 20k of ROM it had, which should have been enough for anybody ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @06:32AM
I bought 3 of them, along with two brown C64s from a Mormon guy in Sac who was moving to Utah to be closer to his kids. He'd done software development on them back in the 80s. He said the assumption they had 20k because of the naming was wrong and they actually had 4k by default, requiring a 16k backpack in the expansion port (which I have, but haven't gotten around to replacing the caps to make sure it doesn't blow up when I power it on.)
Long story short the C64 was a huge step up, far more than most people realize for the difference in cost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @01:55AM (6 children)
The 1541 was the slowest floppy drive ever made, but that wasn't the drive's fault. It was entirely due to the crappy serial port, which was what eventually killed off the platform.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @04:35AM (5 children)
Not quite. The actual serial port was fine. The I/O controller for the serial port was the problem.
Commodore used two VIA 6522 I/O controllers in the 1541. This was a design decision to maintain backward compatibility for the C64 with the 1540, which also had two VIA 6522 I/O controllers. The VIA shift register had a hardware bug that could occasionally result in bits being lost.
The C64 replaced the two VIA 6522 I/O controllers that the VIC-20 had with two CIA 6526 chips that did not have the hardware bug. If the 1541 had used a CIAs instead of VIAs, data transfer rates could have been much faster at the expense of 1540 compatibility. The workaround was to bypass the shift register altogether and implement the process in software in the KERNAL, which was the C64's ROM-based operating system. The bit-banging workaround was also unnecessarily slow. Fast loaders were written that provided an alternative to the particularly slow routine in the KERNAL and many would also send two bits at a time, one on the data line and one on the clock line. Using the clock line presented its own issues, and fast loaders that did so would need to disable interrupts and blank the screen to avoid timing issues. Speeds roughly five times faster than the typical 300-baud rate were possible.
Maintaining 1540 compatibility was a strange design decision. The timing issues I talked about were also a problem for 1540-c64 data transfers, so screen blanking was also required to make this work.
Had Commodore dropped 1540 compatibility, used CIA 6526 I/O controllers on the 1541, and used the properly functioning shift registers instead of bit-banging, data transfers would have been much faster. The actual serial ports were fine. The issues were using the VIA 6522 and its broken shift register instead of the CIA 6526 in the 1541, then implementing the transfers in software in an unnecessarily slow way.
The 1541 also had some serious reliability issues. In many early 1541s, a major reliability issue was caused by ramming the head against the head stop when disk errors were encountered. Doing this often enough knocked the drive heads out of alignment. This could be fixed but wasn't really something casual users would want to do.
Both the reliability and transfer speed issues were fixed with the 1571 drive, which is really how the 1541 should have been designed.
Let's see if I get spam modded for posting this, like four other posts I made that shouldn't have been spam modded. I swear, this is accurate information.
Melissa
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 24 2022, @06:44AM (3 children)
Another weirdness about the 1541 was that it had its own power supply. Made the drive 3x the size of the Apple II floppy drive.
Interesting, thanks for the info. I did not know the specifics of why the 1541 was slow. And all for backwards compatibility with buggy hardware, jeez. As to the aftermarket speedups, we tried one, and found it often did not work. I guess that it wasn't compatible with the copy protection schemes in use.
Early computing had a lot of low hanging fruit. The official Apple DOS 3.3 was far slower than it could have and should have been, because of another boneheaded design decision that was so easily avoided. The machine could not quite process a sector in time to begin reading the next sector before it rotated past the drive head. So, to read one track took 15 revolutions of the disk. Simply interleaving the sectors reduced that to 2 revolutions. Optimizing the code, while more work, got that to the best possible, 1 revolution.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @11:15AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Monday April 25 2022, @01:54AM
Started on Z80 (Sinclair), but got a 6502 (Apple II+) soon later. I once wrote an accelerated RWTS (the not-quite fast enough low-level sector read routine) that would cache a full 4K track in a single spin and then serve requests from the cache. The code was inspired by the similarly fast Apple Pascal disk routines. The code and cache buffer might have been hidden in a bank of the Saturn 128K card I had later on. I think we tried it out on an adventure game (possibly "Lucifer's Realm"), and that became blazingly fast. Unfortunately, there was no way to detect when disks had changed, and because the II had no timers, it also couldn't time out, so it wasn't an universally useful exercise. It did land me a firmware job though, later, when a company developed a II compatible floppy drive that connected to more modern gear (I think it was some unixy box) over a serial port. That was used to import weaving patterns into textile machines which had earlier been controlled by IIs, and all the valuable patterns were stored on DOS 3.3 disks. I helped the hardware guys from the company in re-creating an Apple II subset as controller, which included a reverse-engineered Woz-Machine at the slot 6 address and a 6551 ACIA at "slot 2". A friend wrote the filing routines as shell commands on the host system. (But I think I've told this story here before, maybe not in full...) Those were the days. :)
In retrospect one has to say that the simplicity and efficiency of the Disk II got Apple big, because they were making insane profits on it (they got the drives for under $100 and still sold them for $500) and could use that money to get the Mac started. Commodore with their "smart" floppy had to effectively ship a second computer with the power of the primary, which gave them a massive business disadvantage, not even considering the return on all the hardware input was pitiful. Things might have looked a bit different if they had a Disk II like floppy - and an 80 column solution from the start. The SID was out of this world for the time (so much, Bob Yannes' 5503 ended up in the IIgs, but strangely nothing really exciting ever came of that).
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 25 2022, @11:06AM
They did remove the PSU, or move it outside of the floppy, on some later third-party drives. But then I don't really know if that made it any better. It was just external. But yes it was quite large and heavy. But then the thing about the 1541 is that it was basically it's own computer. In one aspect it was one of the fun things as you could basically program the drive. That if you had just sent things over to the drive the computer was done, unless it was getting things back to obviously and mostly you wanted that.
One other post here mentioned playing music on the drive, I recall a few demos of the mid-late 80's that did that. It wasn't great for the drive. But it worked, I recall some adaptations of Born in the USA and such things. I think I could make it out of hear it when I sort of knew what it was supposed to be.
The slowness of the drive was fixed tho by almost everyone that was serious about their machines. You just swapped an eprom in the drive and one in the computer and done. All fine. JiffyDOS was probably one of the more common replacements, but there was a bunch of others. But they more or less did the same things as I recall it. I don't recall Jiffy giving a lot of issues with loading things but a lot of the various software fastloaders or fastloading cartridges introduced some issues with various copy protection schemes.
(Score: 5, Funny) by FatPhil on Sunday April 24 2022, @10:51AM
There's a technical term for this type of device: a shit register.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:12AM
> the thing was severely limited by a lack of RAM. Only 5K.
Someone learning BASIC from the beginning would've taken at least 9 months before applying a VIC in a way to exceed that. The 'friendly computer guide' had a dozen or so games that were 1-2kB (Tank vs. UFO..) had show the level possible with a small programs. Tim Hartnel and others also showed that books with 50 1kB program listings sold better (and were more popular) than one or two program of 50kB...
(...and add another 12 months to the lifespan if you got into machine code..)
During the VIC's timespan, machine-code arcade games were also in the 8kB range, which its cartridge slot handled. And RAM expansions up to 16kB.
The 'severely limiting' thing for mainstream serious use was the screen size...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @12:39AM (3 children)
> 1. Apple used educational discount program to infiltrate schools.
> 2. Visicalc made it a more "serious" machine than Commodore, Atari, RadioShack, etc.
3. Adding the Microsoft 8088 card to an Apple ][ allowed it to also boot CP/M for business software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @12:40AM (2 children)
Whoops, senior moment, the Microsoft card used a Z-80.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday April 24 2022, @01:29AM (1 child)
Perhaps not such a senior moment. I remember, and almost bought, in the 90s there existed daughter cards for Apple computers, daughter cards that ran Windows. I used to use one a lot but now I forget where... had to be somewhere I did work. Anyway, hardware precursor to Parallels.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:00AM
This is the one I had, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard [wikipedia.org]
In the late 1990s, I met one of the designers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Konzen [wikipedia.org] and also mentioned here, http://www.museodelcomputer.org/info/allan/eBook06.pdf [museodelcomputer.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jb on Sunday April 24 2022, @04:59AM
Add to that list the availability of an 80 column card for the Apple (C64 had nothing equivalent until far too late) -- which probably did more than [1] and at least as much as [2] to make the Apple considered more "serious" than the C64.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:18PM (5 children)
I lusted after an Amiga, but by then I was locked into PC compatibility. Not only because of the market, but because my company used 8085 and 8086 chips, and I was working at home writing assembly on my PC clone.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:27PM (1 child)
8086? 16-bit bus? A big shot, weren't you, when us peasants could barely afford 8088 - the crippled/cheapened 8086.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday April 24 2022, @01:36AM
Ha! You and your bus multiplexing and wait states!
I was lucky enough to have an aunt who worked for AT&T and gave me an AT&T 6300 for Christmas (or birthday) around 1990. Made by Olivetti, Italy. I believe it had 640K RAM, 20 Meg HD, color monitor / graphics which IIRC were on par with EGA resolution? Been too long. I quickly discovered the NEC "V30" upgrade chip.
(Score: 5, Informative) by stretch611 on Sunday April 24 2022, @03:43AM (2 children)
Commodore created the Amiga... but it was so badly damaged as a company at that point that it was unable to support it.
I'm probably missing a few computers...
But the Pet was one of commodore's first successes; and had 4k and 8k options but was all monochrome iirc.
The vic-20 was next and was advertised as a wonderful "color" computer. I owned one as well as a 16k memory cartridge. While my parents bought it at the time I think the memory cartridge retailed around the same price as the computer at $300 initially.
Though someone was asleep at the wheel... The 16k memory cartridge changed where various RAM was allocated when inserted... Many games/programs actually did not work properly with the 16k cartridge because things like the screen memory was allocated at a different memory address with the 16k cartridge. With out the extra memory, a vic-20 of 5k had a message when starting of 3583 bytes free. The rest of the 5k RAM was allocated to the keyboard buffer, screen memory and various other temp storage space needed by the OS.
The screen size of the Vic-20 was 22 characters across by 25 vertically, each containing 8x8 pixels.
The commodore 64 was next. It had more resolution than the Vic-20 with a 40x25 character screen (also 8x8 pixels.) Its big graphical improvement at the time was the addition of 8 "sprites". A graphic object with collision detection that was handled outside of screen memory. As already mentioned it also had more RAM. Though I think is was only 44k as the 64k memory included the 20k ROM. (I could be wrong about this, but, again iirc, when the computer started it display a message of around 38,000 bytes free (after buffers, screen memory and other uses.)
I personally never had a 64... but I ended up getting a commodore 128 to replace my Vic-20.
The commodore 128 had 3 operation modes... A commodore 128 mode with the 128k of RAM and a whopping 2mHz micropocessor. It also had a Commodore 64 compatible mode where the processor was forced down to 1mHz and the extra RAM was inaccessible, (Despite the shortcomings 64 compatible mode is where I was 99.9% of the time due to the available software.) It also had a special CP/M mode with a blazing fast (at the time) 4mHz Z80 microprocessor that was not available in the other modes.
The next generation of Commodore computers was the plus-4 line. I think they had 3 or 4 different computers of varying capability. They did not sell well as they were only a bridge until the Commodore Amiga which was quite remarkable at the time. The Amiga was comparable to the Apple Macintosh at the time and likely exceeded it. (Some people did swear by the Amiga for years.) However Commodore was going through loits of leadership issues at the time. As for me, I was in college being indoctrinated into the world of IBM and compatibles and that is what replaced my commodore 128.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @04:22AM (1 child)
It was really 64K, bank switching was used to select the specific memory areas that were assigned to RAM and ROM. Most of the more advanced 6502 based systems used this technique.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @03:15PM
The highest address possible with 16 address lines is 64KB.
You're going to do some bank switching to address over 64KB.
The Intel 8086 processor used in the early PCs was a 16 bit CPU, but had 20 address lines, so you could address 1MB directly.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:18PM
lick and suck
suck and lick
they work either way!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:40PM (4 children)
I loved it, although the Commodore certainly had advantages, especially price.
I think in retrospect it's easy to lose track of how the race between Apple and Commodore played out. The first generation was the original Apple ][ vs. the PET, and it somewhat set the stage. The Apple had real color bitmap graphics (though few of the first generation had the memory to take advantage) while the PET only had graphic characters.
Later the competition was between the Apple ][+ which was really just a fully kitted out ][, vs. the VIC-20. The VIC had much better sound and started to develop the tile based graphics (redefining the character bitmaps) that would continue to be the basis of the C64 graphics. But it had only 20-something character wide display, very little RAM and mostly used cartridges and tape, while the ][+ had 64K and mostly used disk drives. Although the VIC had some good games, it was not very useful as a real home computer. At this point in time there wasn't a clear vision of whether home computers would look more like consoles or PCs and the VIC was basically in the middle ground. But basically the VIC wasn't competition for the ][+ and this was how Apple got their big inroads into education and serious home computing.
The third generation was the //e (or //c) against the C64 and this is what people remember. The C64 had vastly superior sound and continued to develop the character based graphics, adding bitmapped sprites, while the //e split the difference between a "home" computer and a "real" computer. With 128k of RAM and an 80-column display it was viable against the PC for business while still being competitive with the C64 for gaming. And with its all-bitmapped display, now with 16 colors and the limitations on adjacent colors removed, it could do some things that the C64 couldn't, even though the C64's sprites gave it smoother animation. And while the C64 finally had disk drives commonly available, the Apple's was much better, and most of them had two. The Apple also had multiple expansion card slots, so it could in principle be expanded to just about anything (I had a SCSI card and a mouse, and you could even get a Z80 CPU on a card if you wanted!)
The //e was also the start of Apple trying to kill their own best selling product, artificially limiting it to 128k of RAM even though it was capable of 1MB - more than PCs of the era. This would continue with the //gs, with its CPU gimped to 2.6mhz instead of the 8mhz it should have had. (Aftermarket upgrades eliminated both restrictions, but since software developers couldn't count on users having the upgrades, only a few programs took advantage of them).
What it all came down to is that even though the Apple was more expensive, you could always just do more with it.
Apple's dumb decision to try to kill the Apple ][ should have destroyed the company, but they got incredibly lucky. First, Atari got wiped out in the video game crash, and Commodore self destructed, leaving only Apple and PC clones in the computer business. Then Microsoft needed to prop them up to provide themselves with an anti-trust fig leaf.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Sunday April 24 2022, @07:58AM (3 children)
Later the competition was between the Apple ][+ which was really just a fully kitted out ][, vs. [...]
Not quite fully kitted out. The default hardware configuration on the II and II+ provided for typing uppercase letters only. In order to have both uppercase and lowercase, you had to cut some traces and/or solder some jumper(s).
However, the best part about the Apple II, II+, and IIe were that they came with source code and schematics, if I recall correctly. Among the analogues today are the Raspberry Pi series which uses almost entirely FOSS software and publishes the schematics [raspberrypi.com] and other related diagrams [raspberrypi.com]. So you go from absolute pre-beginner novice stage with Scratch2 through Python and all the way up to the language(s) of your choice and beyond for professional work with the software, as with the hardware. No wonder M$ is so angry about it and doing what they can to undermine it, even infiltrating the board and working organizations.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @11:05AM (2 children)
The Pi doesn't come with real schematics, it's basically just a pinout of the IO ports, of which only the Pi header port is actually helpful. The software is as open source as they can make it, but it's still about as proprietary as a PC. Some of the hobbyist boards are real open source hardware, but the RPi is not.
The // series was far more open, with real schematics and the source code of the ROM all available for a hobbyist accessible price. The //s gradually became more proprietary, with the //e and //c including some custom ASICs (the original ][ was all 7400 and other commodity parts) and the //gs including a bunch of custom chips, having soldered chips instead of socketed and a closed source operating system. But the schematics were still real.
The farther away Apple got from Woz, the less hacker friendly it became.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:26PM (1 child)
That's interesting - because my Pis actually have a full circuit diagram, although it is spread over 5 pages of a PDF in early versions of the Pi and several more pages for the more recent versions. Perhaps some retailers simply don't bother to send them out. I don't suppose that many people actually use or need them but just use the Pi as it is.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @10:27PM
Sure, but look closely at it. It doesn't tell you anything. It's a block diagram drawn to look like a schematic. An actual schematic will tell you exactly what is connected to what, pin for pin, and the specific components used (all of them). That's what you would get with the Apple-published technical documentation for the // series.
This might not even be the fault of the RPi foundation. They are probably under NDA from Broadcom. Their goal was to make a really cheap and accessible product, and given that, to make it as open as possible.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by nostyle on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:51PM (1 child)
In 1984 I typed the initial drafts of my master's thesis on a C-64. I also prepared all the graphics that wound up in the final copy. To do this I had to write a custom printer driver in 6502 assembly that would fit in the 80 bytes of memory reserved for the printer character buffer. This driver would read the display buffer and transmit the information dot-matrix-like to printer which came configured only to print text. I wrote an article and submitted it to a trade magazine describing how this worked. They declined to publish it, but their next issue featured an article describing an equivalent way to to it.
Ah... the olde days of PEEKs and POKEs and GOSUBs. It was a great improvement over the cartons of punch card my dad had to use when doing his dissertation.
--
"You've really made the grade - And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear" -David Bowie, Space Oddity
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @12:00AM
OBTW, don't trust this old man's memory. The print buffer may have been more like 180 or 200 bytes. The details of it escape me now. All I know is in the end, I had eight bytes to spare, but I thought it was pretty cool to jump a running program into some code I had just poked into the print buffer and have it do something useful.
-nostyle
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Saturday April 23 2022, @11:54PM
I had a CoCo 2 (then later a 3), which used the 6809. 6809 assembly language was a beautiful thing, and with an instruction set very similar to the 6502. I would have been right at home.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:00AM (2 children)
The wizard of Frobozz.
Summer games 1 &2 and winter games (Epyx).
The Bard's Tale
300 baud cartridge modem
a second external 5.25" floppy drive.
Good times, good times.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by liar on Sunday April 24 2022, @08:38PM (1 child)
Pool of Radiance, released in 1988. This was followed by Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), Secret of the Silver Blades (1990).
Wizardry.
Wrath of Denethor
In Search of the Most Amazing Thing
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Monday April 25 2022, @04:22AM
Adventure(land). We just called it adventure.
The one that started it all.
'What the hell do I do with this lamp?'
'Rub it.'
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:00AM (1 child)
Switches & Lights (thanks Dad!) -> Radio Shack ICs & LEDS -> Commodore KIM-1 -> Commodore PET -> Commodore VIC -> Commodore C64
But, somewhere roughly in between the KIM-1 and the VIC I also learned BASIC by playing with TRS-80s in Radio Shack stores and using their "Users Manual for Level I" guide (which I could afford to buy if not the computer itself) and writing down answers to the exercises.
https://archive.org/details/Level_1_Users_Manual_1977_David_Lien [archive.org]
Our High School also had timeshared access to a regional PDP-10 running TOPS-10 where I could use BASIC (mainly by typing in programs from Basic Computer Games).
https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomputer_Edition_1978_Creative_Computing [archive.org]
Along with some other languages I did not experiment with, that PDP-10 system also LISP -- but I never figured out back then that I could write QUOTE when the ' character in all the examples I had did not work. I might have become a serious LISP programmer instead of going down the Assembler->BASIC->C route if I had just discovered that one thing (or someone has shown it to me).
I had a subscription for many years to BYTE Magazine back then and read it cover to cover (usually starting with the ads).
Then I went from one C64 to using an IBM 3081 at Princeton running CMS and, better, VMUTS (Unix) to connect two C64s and a VIC. As a somewhat incidental part of my undergraduate Senior Thesis "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model", I used the VIC and the C64s as remote terminals to dial into the college mainframe. I used the VIC via an interface box I built to control a Radio Shack Z-707 Battle Iron Claw Robot (moving around blocks). I used one C64 to process black-and-white data from a cheap vision system by Micron Technologies (essentially just a 256 x 256 one-bit-deep memory chip with a lens in front of it) using a simple segmentation program I wrote in assembler. I used another C64 as a graphical control terminal to display what the camera saw and to give directions to the robot. The mainframe connecting all that ran a multi-process VM I wrote (under Unix) that supported pseudo-assembly code connected to a triplestore I wrote called Pointrel (for "Pointers and Relationships"). My hope was all that could be a step towards a control system for a self-replicating space habitat that could duplicate itself from sunlight and asteroidal ore.
That work indirectly helped inspire WordNet which was started as I was graduating by me undergrad advisor (George A. Miller) who said essentially he was making WordNet in part to show me and others that a semantic concept net by itself was not enough for AI. WordNet was all George's own work and design, but my senior project was one of undoubtedly several nudges. WordNet was used by Simpli to make tech then bought by Google to build Ad Words by Google (plus other things). So in a way I and Commodore C64s are are so on are partly to blame for the sad state of the ad-driven privacy-invading outrage-stoking web of today. :-) Or really: :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpli [wikipedia.org]
Even though that was not my intention, as I preferred Theodore Sturgeon's vision in "The Skills of Xanadu", James P. Hogan's vision in his books including "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and "Voyage from Yesteryear", Gerry O'Neill's "The High Frontier", Alan Kay's Smalltalk vision, Ted Nelson's ComputerLib/DreamMachines vision, and ultimately Steve Job's (derived?) vision of "a bicycle for the mind" like Bill Atkinson's HyperCard exemplified.
"The skills of Xanadu"
https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 [archive.org]
https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n03_1956-07/page/n117/mode/2up [archive.org]
Still hoping we can someday realize and emphasize those other visions again for a humane communication system and related design tools and sensemaking tools and archiving tools brings out a lot of the healthy best in all of us much more than a lot of the dysfunctional worst. See also this reading list I put together in hopes it helps with building (back?) such a better world: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations-Reading-List [github.com]
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:04AM
typo: s/me undergrad/my undergrad/
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CheesyMoo on Sunday April 24 2022, @02:46AM
My parents bought a Commodore 64 at a garage sale in the early 90s. We got a monitor, the keyboard/brain, floppy drive and a bunch of disks and books.
I learned BASIC on it and enjoyed the various games and programs on the floppys, many of them homemade.
I was not alive during the heyday of Commodore, but from what I can tell, the culture of computing was completely different. The books we had described how to use a home computer, how to program and make it do what you want. Examples like: "Heres how Billy can make his own game", "mom can organize her digital doile database", "dad can do the taxes or ..."
now? well, theres an app for that...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by KritonK on Sunday April 24 2022, @06:58AM
My first computer was a Model B BBC Micro [wikipedia.org], which had a 2 MHz 6502 CPU and a whopping 32K of RAM. It was programmed mostly in BASIC, which was pretty fast on that machine, compared to other BASICs of the time, but I also wrote a couple of programs in 6502 assembly, the most used of which was a terminal emulator, which I wrote so that I could work from home, instead of having to go to the university, decades before remote working was a thing, at the blindingly fast speed of 1200 baud ("almost civilized", as one of my professors put it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 24 2022, @03:17PM
Maybe someone else remembers the details.
It was pretty fantastic but doing it too much could knock the head out of alignment.
Copy protection was a thing that cropped up a lot, leading to aftermarket hex readout displays.
Or for some simpler methods you had to duplicate the physical hole in the floppy.
Ah man, these posts make me so maudlin.
The 80s - you can forget to ever see an era like that again.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zafiro17 on Monday April 25 2022, @01:46AM
Happy memories of my own C64. I'd learned BASIC programming on a PET a year earlier, through a school program. Computers seemed the most interesting and amazing thing ever, and I wanted to know more. 40+ years later that glimpse of a future I saw still shines brightly. Let's just say the 'future' we're living in - ubiquitous cellphone connections, tracking, adware, data brokers selling your browsing habits etc. - differs significantly from what we glimpsed back then.
I'm only sorry I didn't get more experience at the time with the Minicomputers (PDP, VAX etc.) currently running the world. I think the world I was exposed to - terminals and big iron - explain my fascination with thin clients and remote computing to this day.
Meanwhile, I played endless games of Karateka and DigDug and wrote software that helped generate DND character sheets for role playing games, and learned a lot and had one hell of a good time.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday April 25 2022, @01:38PM (1 child)
It was my first computer. Cousins had Apples, but we couldn't afford those. Later I upgraded to a Laser 128 with amber monitor that I bought with my own money.
It's funny to think of it now, but it was my grandparents that got us kids started in technology. My grandmother bought herself an IBM 5155, the first computer in the extended family, and taught herself how to code. They bought us kids Pong and then Atari, and encouraged us to learn about computers, knowing how pivotal they'd be.
Wonder what we should be teaching our kids now.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @03:19PM
Programming is scut work now. Just trying to reverse engineer non or under documented libraries/frameworks and slapping them together to do the job. I wish it were about writing code, but for the majority of cases, we are mostly beyond that now. Too bad the tools we use are beta quality, not finished quality.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 25 2022, @01:58PM
We had some old IBM clunker with no HDD, a 3.5" and 5 1/4" drive. It also had an orange monochrome screen. The next upgrade we got was a Windows 98 computer. Skipped I don't know how many generations of computers there.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"