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I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

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Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#81

Post by aa-jv »

bruce511 wrote: post #7

There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation". When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC a…

Those of us who grew up with computers are truly a special breed, since we had to know how things work in order to do anything at all with the things.

These days kids are served eyeball-bleeding chaos on the supercomputers in their pocket, which they need permission to do anything else with .. and its kind of sad.

Learn what a byte is, kids. Learn where it fits into a register and why. Learn a few opcodes, some peripheral I/O heuristics. Break out that raspberry Pi and go full bare metal for a month.

I sure wish our mobile phones had compilers onboard. This is the one thing that is ruining computing for kids these days, imho. They need corporation-controlled permission, for fucks sake.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#82

Post by aa-jv »

eggy wrote: post #61

I picked up a book around 1977 on the PDP-11 processor and worked my way through it with pencil and paper to understand the architecture when I was around 13. I saves up my summer job money and bought a used Commodore PET 2001 for ~$700 with cassette drive and 8kb and a green phosphor screen. I later bought an expansion for it that gave me 32kb. The PET's 6502 was simpler, but that DEC handbook and working out regist…

Kindred spirits, you and me. That PDP-11 put you on the right path, for sure.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#83

Post by themadturk »

jhbadger wrote: post #60
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…

>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.

I (a youngish adult, in the US) had a 1541 drive that broke. I was in love with the "Silent Service" submarine game, and found an ad in one of the computer magazines for a cassette version of the game that I ordered from England. It arrived in a couple weeks, and I had my favorite game again! Thank heavens the lower tech Brits!

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#84

Post by themadturk »

sombragris wrote: post #28
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?

A C-64 was my second computer. The first one, which didn't last too much, was a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (a clone of Sinclair ZX81). The Commodore gave a lasting impact for various reasons. It had color, graphics at good resolutions, fantastic sound, a decent keyboard and a good form factor, great peripherals, and excellent expandability. Moreover, the games were incredible. The peripherals were also noteworthy in the sen…

Hah! This was me, as well...first a Timex, then a C=64.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#85

Post by aa-jv »

sungjwoo wrote: post #75
kleiba2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btw, completely OT but something I found puzzling when reading your blog post: how did your aunt communicate with the Austrian guy who didn't speak English?!

Ah, the answer is incredibly simple: my aunt speaks fluent German! She moved to Austria as a young woman and picked up the language, and picked up a husband. :) She speaks Korean, of course, so that's how we all are able to communicate with her. Recently we were at a family gathering, and one of my extended relations is married to a German fellow (who speaks both German and English fluently), and it was utterly cool…

Great! Did you ever visit Austria? Maybe you can take some of the early impressions of German-language speaking with you ..

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#86

Post by aa-jv »

commandlinefan wrote: post #46
kleiba2 wrote: post #13

I could probably write a blog post with the opposite title, sth. like "My life got ruined by the Commodore C64". Equally hyperbolic, the narrative would go something like this: I was the exact same child/teen as the guy from the other blog, but the problem from 2026 me is that I got lured into IT through games and BASIC, and now I so wish I had chosen a different career. Alas, it's all I know how to do, and at this p…

It still remains to be seen, but the C64 may have ruined my son's life as well. I have a similar story to yours and OP's: born in the mid 70's, got a C64 in the mid 80's, convinced myself that I was a genius because I could get it to do anything I wanted (I even learned 6510 assembler back then) and parlayed those skills into joining the internet boom of the mid-90's. My own son was born in 2003 and he sort of picked…

The C64 didn't ruin anything.

Apple removing the compiler from the supercomputer in everyones pocket did, however.

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#87

Post by II2II »

bruce511 wrote: post #7

There was this era in the late 70's and early 80's where this story is ubiquitous. And while we are all in our 50s or later now, it's interesting that we were essentially the "first generation". When I went to work in the early 90s we were already the "old guys". Out in the real world everyone[1] who could use a computer at all was under 30. And we'd all cut our teeth on Apple 2's and Spectrum and Commodore and BBC a…

> yes there were folks from before that saw a PDP or whatever but they were rare, and usually either deep in academia or IBM etc.

Was it a case of being rare, or of computers being something they used at work (and only work) so they simply didn't talk about computers outside of that context?

Judging from stories of the early days of personal computers, those people mostly fell into two camps: those who were excited about getting their hands on a computer of their own, and those who dismissed personal computers as useless toys. The latter would make the number of people exposed to computers seem artificially small.

I bring this up because I have encountered people who used minis and mainframes over the years. They were a fixture in major corporations and even medium sized businesses by the late 1970's (which is when personal computers started getting the attention of the public).

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#88

Post by RetroTechie »

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?

> If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98.

Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.

It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:

  10 PRINT "RetroTechie was here    ";
  20 GOTO 10
And the store's machine would show your name scrolling until the next kid came along. Color, sound, games & machine code were next.

For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).

I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.

Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...

Re: I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

#90

Post by hobonation »

RetroTechie wrote: post #78
sungjwoo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the answer is incredibly simple: my aunt speaks fluent German! She moved to Austria as a young woman and picked up the language, and picked up a husband. :) She speaks Korean, of course, so that's how we all are able to communicate with her. Recently we were at a family gathering, and one of my extended relations is married to a German fellow (who speaks both German and English fluently), and it was utterly cool…

"Luft" in German = "air". So English title would be "99 air balloons" or just "99 balloons". (Excellent choice btw, among German-language songs it's an all-time classic)

The English version by the same musician chose to add "Red" to presumably maintain the song's cadence.
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