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Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

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Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

#3

Post by georgemcbay »

Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages.

Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first.

Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got into BBSes (warez, chat sites like old diversi-dial systems, etc), figured out (out of necessity and long before you could 'google it') how to manually realign my 1541 disk drive because of early game protection systems, eventually moved up to an Amiga 500, pirated a copy of SAS/C (then later used Matt Dillon's DICE), got into hacking (the other, less legal kind) at first via wardialing and eventually found my way into X.25 and the early pre-web internet (bitnet relay, early irc, usenet, etc).

Eventually became a legitimate software developer which I've been doing professionally since the mid 1990s (bounced back and forth between various forms of unix and win32 for years mostly using C/C++, then a lot of Go/Java/Kotlin/mobile/embedded) and still do it now as we're all slowly being replaced by large multidimensional arrays of floating point numbers.

Long, strange trip.

Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

#4

Post by christkv »

georgemcbay wrote: post #3

Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages. Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first. Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got int…

Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.

Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

#5

Post by georgemcbay »

christkv wrote: post #4
georgemcbay wrote: post #3

Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages. Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first. Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got int…

Disk drive luxury, all I had was the tape deck. On the upside I got a lot of reading done while waiting for game to load.

Yeah, I was lucky enough to miss the "Datasette" days.

I had the luxury of a disk drive, and even eventually had an Epyx Fast Load cartridge to speed (some) things up even further! Practically zooming for the time!

Re: Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

#7

Post by nurettin »

georgemcbay wrote: post #3

Blog poster's early computing history is remarkably similar to mine in terms of years/ages. Got a C64 (with a 1541 disk drive) around late 1983 (when I was 10). Hooked up to a 13 inch CRT TV at first. Got into games, computer magazines, magazine game listings (like the ones from old Compute!'s Gazette), taught myself MS BASIC and 6502/6510 assembly language, got into cracking games, got a 300 baud 1650 modem, got int…

That very similar history is shared by us dinosaurs. I especially remember tuning the 1530 datasette to play differently recorded tapes, then moving to DOS and discovering how much faster it was to run something compiled by turbo pascal. Then discovering "infinite memory" since you could create a pointer pointing at a place in memory which had... another pointer!!! (I was a very happy kid after discovering that)
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