Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

goto10retro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 107 posts

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#51

Post by ergonaught »

Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.

Loved the ads. Such memories.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#52

Post by inigyou »

inigyou wrote: post #20
kuerbel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. IT is a bit different in that regard. As a doctor, even if the system is shit, you still help people directly. As an engineer, you build something tangible that can make people's lives easier. And so on. In IT, though, the impact often feels much more indirect. Most of the time you're optimizing processes or helping businesses become more efficient, rather than improving people's lives in a direct way.…

Find an IT-related problem facing the whole world right now and fix it. For example phone enshittification. Make your own phone that isn't shit.

As other people said everyone goes through this at a certain life stage. You go from exploring the world and developing your own skills, to figuring out what impact you want to have made on the world after you're gone.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#54

Post by ryandrake »

bitwize wrote: post #35
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk LOAD "*",8,1 The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have…

There's another thing about the Commodore computers that is really special. The binaries for disk and tape games consisted of the machine code for the game, along with a stub BASIC program to jump into it (typically one line with a SYS command). Meaning that the entire computer, and all its capabilities and speed, was available from within BASIC. This was true of many home computers of the era, and even of the IBM PC…

Booting directly into a programming language REPL (in ~2 seconds, I might add) was a great signal that the C64 was ultimately for programming, even if all you do with it is games.

I kind of wish for a modern PC that booted in 2 seconds, directly into Python or something.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#55

Post by jhbadger »

tanseydavid wrote: post #37

I wanted an Apple II so badly and thought I was getting the short-end-of-the-stick with a C64 but I am so happy (to this day) that my first machine at home was C64. I still have my tattered C64 Programmer's Reference Guide on my shelf (as well as Programming the 6502 by Rodnay Zaks).

If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#56

Post by jhbadger »

tanseydavid wrote: post #48

I am curious how many of you other C64 greybeards got exposed to a language called COMAL (not a typo) on the C64 back in the day?

It wasn't only on the C64, although probably was most successful there. Adding structured programming to a BASIC-like language was a good idea -- so much so that most BASIC dialects in the 1990s adopted it, dooming COMAL.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#57

Post by jhbadger »

jdw64 wrote: post #2

I'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?

8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved using APIs. When you programmed on a 8-bit machine you dealt with the hardware itself. Today, the only place you program like that is on microcontrollers.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#58

Post by nobodyandproud »

exitb wrote: post #18
tzot wrote: post #11

Commodore 64 was quite popular in Europe too, but I believe more successful was the Sinclair Spectrum (and some copycats behind the iron curtain). In my case, too, it was the Speccy and later the Sinclair QL, when it got really affordable; I owe my life to the QL :)

And in eastern Europe, due to economical reasons, its popularity extended well into the 90s. There's a whole group of people that grew up with the Commodore that are a decade younger than their western peers.

Still counts! Poor, eager, young, and a bit geeky: C64 was made for those that fell into this category.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#59

Post by stevenwoo »

jdw64 wrote: post #2

I'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?

In addition to other comments, Windows 95 came more than a decade after the Commodore 64. The IBM PC at that time cost roughly three -four times as much in my memory, Apple II was almost as much. The Commodore quickly got a large game library , better than competitors. It was a golden age for smaller scale games not requiring the massive teams of the modern AAA photorealistic or open world games - this was during maybe the height of the arcade video game craze when some kids like me would spend oodles of quarters at convenience stores and video arcades. Eventually many of us would switch to Windows 3.1/95/98 for work.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#60

Post by jhbadger »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #5
jdw64 wrote: post #2

I'm curious about something. A lot of older programmers, like Terry Davis who was fairly well known in Korea back in the day, seem to really love the Commodore 64. Is there a reason for that? I'm not from that generation myself. If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98. So I wonder, what kind of memories does the Commodore hold for the generation of programmers older than me?

The C64 had a good game library. While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. The C64 does not auto-boot disks, so when you turn on the power switch, you are immediately met with a BASIC "Ready." prompt. You have to type in a magic incantation to start the program on the disk LOAD "*",8,1 The curious will wonder what else can be done in BASIC? Or what if you don't have…

>While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks.

In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the 8-bit era and even most commercial software was sold on tape.

Post reply on HN