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For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

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Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#71

Post by dekhn »

We had both an Apple II+ and a Commodore 64 at school when I was about 10 and I just couldn't get into the C64- the slow disk drive (IIRC it's the bus that's the bottleneck) meant minutes of waiting for programs to start. While the Apple II+ would usually load things very quickly. In many ways the Apple was inferior (see the comparison chart in the linked article) but everything about it just felt "right" to me.

I had a similar experience when I got to college and my roommate and I compared our computers- I had a PC and he had an Amiga, and when he explained what it could do it was clearly superior, but it just didn't "feel right" to me.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#72

Post by leptons »

juancn wrote: post #30
brudgers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. They are computers…for example the C64’s floppy drive had its own CPU. This was also typical for printers…in fact it still is.

The disk drive uses a serial protocol and it actually has 8k of RAM and a 6502 CPU. There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers. Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.

>Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should

If that were true then carts like Fastload wouldn't work using the same hardware and same cabling, to load programs many times faster than the stock C64 code.

The C64 ROM code worked, but slowly. This was also true for the built-in serial routines. When I got a 2400bps modem for my C64, the computer couldn't keep up, there was garbage coming through,I couldn't upload or download, and it was caused by the slow ROM serial code. I hacked my favorite terminal program with my own assembly language bit-banged serial driver, and then the 2400bps modem worked flawlessly. The same is true for the slow disk drive serial code. To my knowledge, that wasn't caused by any flaw in the hardware, it was just slow driver code.

Everyone I knew had a Fastload cartridge, but I was in "the scene", so maybe not the average user back then.

https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=58317

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#73

Post by masto »

suzzer99 wrote: post #63

Trying to teach myself BASIC on the C64 in high school frustrated me so much it kept me from becoming a programmer until I was 29.

Teaching myself BASIC on a Commodore 64 in elementary school made me a programmer and set the direction for the next 40 years. Different strokes I guess.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#74

Post by antihipocrat »

thedailymail wrote: post #41
antihipocrat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted the copy initially as justifying the product being twice the price of the competition. My eyes are used to much more concise copy nowadays though so maybe it landed properly back then? Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.

I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)

Yeah I realised once I read the comparison chart in the ad.

It's also possible that the ambiguity was intentional.. Ad copy is an art and it did compel me to read all of it to unpack the meaning. Though thinking this through I would assume that everyone interested in computers at the time would know what the prices of other products were so the $595 would immediately be understood as very cheap in comparison

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#75

Post by leptons »

bartread wrote: post #64
suzzer99 wrote: post #63

Trying to teach myself BASIC on the C64 in high school frustrated me so much it kept me from becoming a programmer until I was 29.

Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful. No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on. Just dreadful. I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways…

I thought C64 BASIC was just as good as any other BASIC at the time. BASIC is, well... "basic", and even with POKEs and everything else, we still did quite a bit with C64 BASIC.

I started on Atari BASIC and that BASIC was pretty bad, too, but even so I made use of it and did all kinds of graphics stuff, and wrote games, etc.

I did all kinds of stuff in BASIC on the C64 between 1986 and into the 90's. But, after a few months of learning all about BASIC, I went right into Assembly language. The C64 manual taught BASIC, but it also had the memory map and documentation about all the 6510 opcodes, registers, custom chips, and even a schematic of the computer in the back. It was incredible compared to all other computers at the time, because it was made for DIY, you could go as deeply as you wanted with it.

https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...

I created so many cool things with the C64, got into the Demoscene, and made crack intros, etc. I even wrote some code to do 3D vector rotations in C64 BASIC and displayed the data with an assembly language line drawing routine.

I don't know you, but if you couldn't do amazing things with the C64, that says more (to me) about you than it does the C64. And like all machines, the system is what it is, you either make use of it or you don't.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#76

Post by j-a-a-p »

dekhn wrote: post #71

We had both an Apple II+ and a Commodore 64 at school when I was about 10 and I just couldn't get into the C64- the slow disk drive (IIRC it's the bus that's the bottleneck) meant minutes of waiting for programs to start. While the Apple II+ would usually load things very quickly. In many ways the Apple was inferior (see the comparison chart in the linked article) but everything about it just felt "right" to me. I ha…

I had a university friend with an Amiga and another with a similar setup with the Commodore. They had stacks of floppy disks with one game more beautiful than the other. Both spend most of their time gaming and one ended up 8 and the other 9 years before finishing their masters.

I just had a Tandon 286 PC with a 287 coprocessor (yes, probably twice the price compared to an Amiga). But it did run Matlab pretty well, as well as WordPerfect - all I needed for my study.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#77

Post by leptons »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #59
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #32

My first computer was a VIC-20 (1982 or so). 3KB of RAM. So little room, I needed to write most of my apps in Machine Code. That was OK. At school, I had an STD Bus-Based 6800, with 256B. Was a very good learning experience.

Same here, but never heard of assembly until college. How did you learn it? I don't think anything but a Basic manual came in the box.

My C64 Programmers Reference Guide taught BASIC, and had a memory map of the computer, documentation for all the custom chip registers, all the opcodes for the 6510 CPU, chip timing diagrams, I/O port pinouts, and a full schematic of the C64 in the back of the manual. I'm sure not all C64s came with that, this was the old-school 2-inch-thick C64 manual that came with early computers, at least mine had it. From this manual I learned assembly language in about a week in 1986 while I was still in junior high school. It was pretty amazing. It definitely ignited my passion for programming, and I still code assembly today on embedded MCUs.

https://archive.org/details/Commodore_64_Programmers_Referen...

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#78

Post by leptons »

neuroelectron wrote: post #9

I always wondered what it would be like if Commodore had serious co processors, but the base Commodore is really too slow for anything like that. Could you imagine a Voodoo 2? I think the SNES was only about 10mhz as well and used the FX math co-processor for 3d.

>had serious co processors

What decade do you think this computer is from?

"Serious co processors" in 1982 wasn't a thing.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#79

Post by z0r »

hobbitstan wrote: post #2

I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling. This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in…

I visited a relative last summer and tried on their Meta Quest 3 headset, the first time I ever tried a modern VR headset. I was blown away by the interface overlaying my vision. I tried a VR minigolf game (Walkabout mini golf? I'm not certain) and was amazed by how immersive it was.

Your comment has prompted my response because it reminded me that I thought Shazam was great too, and it made me think of what more recent incredible technological experiences I've had. I don't know if you've tried on a VR (or more accurately AR) headset recently but the engineering is really something.

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